Shadows, the first solo album by former Gal Holiday drummer James Clark, was cinematic and airy, complex and dark, and the followup Cloudwalker applied that same feel to world music, but his latest takes a very distinct turn, one suggested in part by the Egyptian font he uses on its cover. References to chess, mysticism, geometry, and ritual make this one of the more cerebral approaches by a jazz instrumentalist this year.

Yet it resists easy assimilation. Call it polyrhythmic middle-Eastern chamber music, a strange but heady mix of percussion, marimba, and keyboard washes, with melody lines provided mostly by his friends on strings and horns. The mission statement and centerpiece of the album is the 12-minute, three-part excursion “Two Dimensional Triangle,” in which an angle formed by two desert drones is connected by a third, slightly more upbeat travelogue.

Clark doesn’t return from his musical journeys with quite as many treasures this time out, in part because the musical alliance he forms is both challenging and fragile: Erik Satie’s famous “Gymnopedie No. 1” feels out of place, even with the addition of some gently disorienting synth textures, and the near-polka “Anna’s Turning Fifteen” proves he can’t apply this formula to just anything. Yet it’s another compelling step in the right direction. Call it a sidestep.