THE GERMAN saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock was born in Stadtlohn in 1970 and went against the grain by listening intently to free jazz from an early age. She moved to Berlin after leaving school and then crossed to London, busking with her alto horn on the underground, where she found her first audiences.

She took her first formal lessons from the ex-Jazz Messengers tenorist, Jean Toussaint, before returning to Germany and finding another teacher in the Brooklyn-born ex-Miles Davis sideman Dave Liebman.
Then, with such inspired tutelage behind her, she came back to London and studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she was strongly influenced by Brazilian musicians.

In 1997 she cut her first album, Who Is It on the Candid label, and also joined the F-IRE Collective which caused her to broaden her sonic palette and embrace west African music.

By 2007 he had changed to the Swiss-based Intakt label and had recorded the album “Sleepthief” with the English pianist Liam Noble and Californian drummer Tom Rainey, after first meeting him at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

The bass in the trio is Rainey’s bass drum which is prominent, for example, in the opener Zugunruhe, but as a counterpoint to the chomping keys and Laubrock’s filigreed and wondering horn.

She is breathy, almost adenoidal at the beginning of the title tune and Rainey’s drums, from the quietly menacing, morph to a ghostly rustle. As for the track called Oofy Twerp, Laubrock’s saxophone chirps like a nesting bird.

The powerful dissonance of Noble’s piano is at the centre of Environmental Stud, where Laubrock’s terse notes sometimes have the sound of Steve Lacy, and Noble’s bell-like intro to The Ears Have It provokes a quasi-choking solo by the reedwoman. Amelie, all Noble with Rainey’s distant bass drum, closes an album brim-full of keen-edged timbral exploration.

Laubrock goes from three to five in her 2010 New York album, “Anti-House.” Rainey is with her again plus bassist John Hebert — of cajun ancestry from Louisiana, the Boston guitarist Mary Halvorson and as a guest, the Vancouver-born pianist Kris Davis of whom her fellow keyboard virtuoso Jason Moran said: “She lives in every note that she plays.”

And this diverse group of men and women play like a dream. In fact, Laubrock says in the sleeve notes: “I wanted the album to be almost like a dream, where anything can happen, but instead of waking up it just keeps going.”

Hear Laubrock’s searing soprano saxophone and Halvorson’s piercing guitar on Slowfish Glowfish, Halvorson’s clanking strings on the brief Flowery Prison Cell or Hebert’s pulsing drive on Messy Minimum. Laubrock’s tenor snarls through Quick Draw yet pours out a lyrical sadness on Tex And Clementine with Rainey’s scuttling drums.

Davis’s stop-time piano becomes an essential asset to the amalgam on the title tune, and chimes eerily through Big Crunch.

Rainey plays glockenspiel on Tom Can’t Sleep and Laubrock’s solo is full of expressive beauty, sidling into his drums while Halvorson reverberates and Hebert casts his southern twang.

Altogether, this is an album of many creative delights.

The reverie-like qualities are intensified even more in the Laubrock Octet’s 2011 concert in Zurich. Perhaps her days and nights in the London Underground are recalled in the hallucinatory sound of the album opener Glasses, or in the spectral accordion of Ted Reichman in Novemberdoodle.

Halverson’s agitated guitar is a tour de force in Chant and Laubrock’s gasping tenor makes a worrying palaver in Matrix with Tom Arthur’s chuntering trumpet.

But dream constantly transmutes to reality, as in Nightbus where a city’s loneliness and sense of desolation is given a disturbing soundscape in Laubrock’s perturbed solo and the disquieting ensembles into which her saxophone meshes.

These are now times in which sonic commentaries from musicians use and mould dreams to recreate the world around us.