SHEFFIELD is a steel city of jazz and sonic innovation. What about guitarist Derek Bailey, drummer Tony Oxley and the rampant free beauty of Mick Beck’s bassoon?

Another eternally searching Sheffield composer and saxophonist is Martin Archer, who has been creating new and revolutionary sounds for decades.

His new double album, Anthropology Band, is packed with rich, inventive music twice over.

The first disc plays composed themes with a septet, the second has the same compositions with an 11-piece brass and wind ensemble.

I ask him about his musical life and history. He tells me: “Home wasn’t at all musical, although my aunt was a church organist.

“Dad was an advertising sales rep and Mum a book-keeper. But I was a ’70s teenager and music exploded.”

He says he liked everything from Soft Machine, Henry Cow, Grateful Dead and Joni Mitchell: “Great music came out every week in unstoppable torrents.”

Then there was the wonderful Sheffield bookshop and record store Rare and Racy.

“It was a portal direct to the heart of the black American avant-garde. Essential!”

He bought his first saxophone at 15. “No lessons!” he recalls, “I could just play it immediately.”

Within a year he was leading groups and writing while simultaneously discovering Miles, Mingus, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and free improvisation.

“I was certainly aware that jazz improvisation and free improvisation were different paths, even though there was plenty of cross-traffic between them.”

And electronics added an “extra texture, all a part of the sonic weave, making it possible to paint a bigger canvas.”

On the Anthropology album he sees all the compositions as simple. He wrote the basslines first along with “a handful of melodies. I just wanted simply written music that could be played immediately.”

What does he think of the north/south divide in musical opportunities?

“All us northerners are curmudgeonly fuckers, so maybe that perversity of spirit coupled with not enough jazz gigs is the answer.”

The Anthropology Band itself is an amalgam of veterans like Archer, pianist and electronics ace Pat Thomas and drummer Peter Fairclough, with younger heads like trumpeter Charlotte Keeffe, vibist Corey Mwamba and guitarist Chris Sharkey.

“It emphasises the continuity of the musical line and gives real opportunities to learn. Adam Fairclough took over drums from his Dad Pete during the tour, and his duetting with Pat Thomas was a highlight. Plus the younger members get to carry all the gear in and out of the gigs!”

I ask him about the band’s name. He said the album’s sleeve art by Gonzalo Fuentes Riqelme was called Anthropology, so he adopted it for the band’s name.

“It was never intended to be a live band — that came as an afterthought.”

“And it’s not just about music. Music is part of a wider intellectual experience. It leads to serious questioning of wider power structures. We aim to be on the right side of history in that respect.”

The record breeds a powerful optimism, expressed in some of the track titles: People Talking Blues, Give Me Back Some Truth, Common Cause. Charlotte Keeffe’s rousing, breath-laden, rasping trumpet playing and Pat Thomas’s electronics genius give the album a particular salience, fusing with Archer’s composing audacity.

More Sheffield shining quality here, instigated in a city with a very particular soundscape and musicianship that never stops recreating.

Anthropology Band is released by Discus records (discus-music.co.uk).