Free improvisation is, thank you very much, in a healthy enough state without four Johnny-come-lately classical boffins claiming their first album of improvised music “points a very positive direction for contemporary music in the next decade”. To be fair, some of this music isn’t bad, and surely the Mercury Quartet themselves weren’t responsible for the hard-sell tone of this Nonclassical press release that I’m about to scrunch up and use as a cat toy. But I listened with niggling doubts. This quartet, who came together in 2007 to perform Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – have they paid proper dues to the heritage and ideas of European improvised music?

That’s not an unreasonable question to ask. Imagine writing serial music without hearing Schoenberg, or minimalism without Reich. Improvisation is deep mystery: listening to Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford et al, and pondering their radically different perspectives on improvisation, is where you learn how to generate material.

I like the second track, “Eastern Promise”, with its keening folksy melodies morphing between instruments, but the next piece, “Hammercan”, shows the group’s limitations. It sets up such obvious psychological collisions – “innocent” toy glockenspiel-like chimes are placed in opposition to aggressive outbursts, a hackneyed cello ostinato is put against serrated string scratches – it might as well have been written out for added clarity. And as the final track leans towards sentimental harmonies, the distinction between improvisation which is essentially the impulsive reordering of pre-learnt instincts as opposed to discovering primary sound sources during play becomes clear. The vanguard of improvisation is concerned with the latter; the Mercury Quartet must still acquire that feeder improviser gene.