The ferocious opening track is a particularly effective example of Jeff Miley's comprehensive writing and guitar playing. Dedicated and clearly indebted to Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, Deep Purple), "Switchback" is an imaginative and progressive effort that weaves sundry guitar parts with darting bass excursions from a fiery, through controlled Doug Shreeve, one of the hippest young bassists in Los Angeles.

The band's signature tune, "Code 3," is Shreeve's composition and clearly evokes its meaning in police/fire department terminology: an emergency that requires vehicles, sirens on, to run every red light en route to an accident, fire, or crime scene. Shreeve's fondness for angularity, long dissonant inversions, and fragmented rhythms across bar lines sets up a sense of immediacy that drummer Eric Wells captures with off-center rhythmical shifts and oblique accentuations, adding drama and exhilaration to an already high level of energy.

"Avatar" is a slowly evolving, meditative vamp that ranges from a contemplative sound-collage to a hectic, swirling guitar-bass assault set against synthesizer tracks employed as a discreet musical canvas over which Eric Wells delivers a powerful and polyrhtymic solo. "Space Creeper" flaunts Shreeve's sequenced samples as well as distinctive touches of color from Miley's arsenal of guitar effects.

It is a two-part mysteriously intertwining tune that gives a "tip-of-the-hat" to Scott Henderson and Gary Willis (Tribal Tech). "Torn" features Shreeve, a player with a burgeoning reputation, whose relentless solo is totally devoid of superfluous embellishment or sentiment as he turns ideas inside out and upside down over many choruses with expressive slurring, double stops, and gorgeous harmonics. The playing is both muscular and flawless.

The collective playing on the shuffle "Firefly" shows how far removed the band's uncompromising ensemble sound is from a fusion formula.

Though Miley is not immune to influence--there are strong elements of John Scofield in his playing--he does encompass a superb technique and an idiosyncratic feel for lyrical flight, both allied to an immediately recognizable sound and a strong melodic sensibility. Shreeve's bass lines, for all their apparent simplicity, follow the subtle and supple twists and turns of Miley's guitar work, and Wells is rhythmically perfect, whether adding intricate stick work or underpinning the pent up energy of the multi-tracked "Secret Thoughts," an unrelenting tune in the Hungarian minor mode on which Shreeve plays 5, 7, and 8-string basses. The tune is an ideal channel for Miley's broad musical vocabulary; he is utterly at home both on his instrument and in this style. His usual impeccable control and good taste are well in evidence.

These days as jazz prodigies are spilling out of music schools, when technique and resourcefulness are taken for granted, there is about Code 3 a poise, a sense of relaxed power that few groups can quite command. Though many of these tunes were multi-tracked, one has the sense that a tight-knit group of like-minded souls recorded the disc live in the studio. Marked by taut as well as dexterous melodies moving through interesting chord patterns, this release may not break new musical ground, but it is an original demonstration of the breath of expression possible in an absurdly maligned genre called fusion.

Popping this disc into the car's CD player is the perfect way to pass an hour on the open road. Your spirits will unfailingly lift off.