A microfiction is a complete story told in a handful of sentences, and Alden Hellmuth’s “Microfictions” works on the same scale, building small, precise melodic phrases for her band to blow wide open. The New York saxophonist drew the idea from Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music, a body of work the composer began in the mid-1990s around long, steady melodic lines that improvisers can leave and rejoin at will. The written melody serves as home base, and everything else is a trip away from it.

Here those trips get wild. The drums skitter underneath while Hellmuth’s saxophone wanders loose, and the track keeps gathering force until the whole band crests at a climactic peak.

Hellmuth won a German Jazz Prize for her 2024 debut, Good Intentions, and the single comes from Tether, her first album for Nils Frahm’s LEITER label. The record mixes jazz, punk and free improvisation around a single idea: however loud and unruly the band gets, something keeps the players tied to each other and to the listener. “Microfictions” makes that line audible, since every flight eventually circles back to the melody that launched it.

The best microfictions leave most of the story to the reader’s imagination. Hellmuth leaves her band a similar amount of room, and the result is thrilling precisely because nobody ever gets lost.