" data-original-title="" title="">Robert Sabin's new album, may summon images of a Mel Brooks parody (Part I must have slipped past us), the music itself is decidedly serious. In the liner notes, wherein he references Albert Camus, Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter, Ingmar Bergman, Maurice Ravel and Dario Argento, Sabin makes it quite clear that he and his tentet are scanning a road map that traverses musical pathways visibly (and audibly) removed from customary ports of call.

Morricone wrote the theme on which the album is based (for Carpenter's film "The Thing"), Sabin everything else. As a rule, the music is circuitous and cerebral, paying earnest homage to unsmiling film music while veering occasionally into the realms of avant-garde and even canonical jazz. To perform it, Sabin has enlisted the services of some of the New York area's more accomplished sidemen, several of whom are given leave to improvise. Tenor