Let it be said one last time that John Medeski, alone among modern masters of the B-3, stands free of any ties to Jimmy Smith and his disciples. In fact, the organ has become just one of his sonic options on The Dropper, a hair-raising exercise in post-apocalyptic funk.

The group as a whole takes its improvisation way past the changes and into the idea of structure itself. Some tracks, such as "Partido Alto," play off of a riff; others, including the title track, go back to a blues form, though with a polystylistic spin that echoes Beaver and Krause. But these performances draw from the atonal and textural adventurism that dominates most of the album. Sound sources are diverse: industrial electronics, tremolo licks that evoke a teeth-gritting Duane Eddy on speed, rather plaintive talking drums. Their collisions create a landscape of sonic wreckage, in which a brief arco bass line in "Bone Digger" speaks like civilization's last whisper.

The Dropper adds to the evidence that Medeski Martin and Wood understand the dance of form and abstraction, backbeat grooves and free rhythms, sense and senselessness. More important, they know how to wrap it together in a way that suggests new levels of improvisational interaction for even more mainstream musicians, and point the way toward realtime applications for their collage-oriented, studio-bound brethren.