Some record­ings, the best kinds, are ones that you don’t review so much as you dis­cuss the musi­cian, because who they are and what they do is what mat­ters, the discs them­selves (as pol­ished as they may be) seem like orga­nized view­points into a con­tin­ual stream of cre­ative and devel­op­ing ideas. The dura­tion, num­ber of tacks, sequenc­ing, the pack­age, all could be merely acci­den­tal. And as good as that prod­uct may be, there’s always the sen­sa­tion that the record­ing is an inad­e­quate pic­ture of the real musi­cal accom­plish­ment, and even the sense that it’s slightly dated, that enough tie has past since the stu­dio ses­sions that the play­ing has moved on from there.

That’s the feel­ing I get from Vijay Iyer’s great new trio CD, Accelerando, a dip into the stream of the pianist’s musi­cal val­ues and imag­i­na­tion. This stream just hap­pens to be wide enough that you can’t see across, swift enough that you’d want to think sev­eral times before putting a foot in, and hides as yet unplumbed depths. Accelerando con­tin­ues the series of excel­lent releases on the ACT label — His­toric­ity, his fas­ci­nat­ing solo record, last year’s sur­pris­ing and sat­is­fy­ing Tirtha with the amaz­ing gui­tarist Prasanna —  discs that are both high qual­ity and way­points along that stream.

Iyer, still rel­a­tively young, has a sub­stan­tial career under­way. His early discs, with their explo­sive power, inten­sity and bit­ingly smart pol­i­tics, alone make him one of the most impor­tant con­tem­po­rary jazz musi­cians, but his con­stant musi­cal devel­op­ment just adds to that. He is of the moment in jazz in the best way, work­ing his way towards an eter­nal future point that incor­po­rates the music that has gone before and that yet to be imag­ined. This is so vital to jazz, so much of which tends to drown itself in its own past. An impro­vis­ing art that has one foot in art music and one in pop music must nec­es­sar­ily be cre­atively rest­less in each.

And so, this disc, with a group that Iyer is clearly increas­ingly, intu­itively com­fort­able with. His­toric­ity, as good as it is, sounds in ret­ro­spect like a group fig­ur­ing out what it can do together. Now, it seems they can do any­thing. The play­ing is increas­ingly flow­ing and intu­itive, the nat­ural result of time spent work­ing together. There’s a strong feel­ing, like on the arrange­ment of “Human Nature,” that the group inter­play and impro­vi­sa­tions are new and renewed each time they play a tune, and that what’s on the disc just hap­pens to be that one moment — go catch a gig, and that solo break will turn out to be com­pletely different.

Through the years, Iyer has gone from empha­siz­ing raw power and darkly obses­sive osti­natos to richly com­plex play­ing that has a foun­da­tion of rhyth­mic com­plex­ity, uses more inter­nal voices and more nuanced har­monies, and con­tin­ues to develop greater lyri­cism and wit. There’s no less excite­ment, though, just catch the bur­geon­ing drive of “Opti­mism.” His taste and vision seem to be expand­ing along with his style, and he val­ues how he can make jazz new in the con­tem­po­rary moment. His pianism builds on great avatars of cre­ative play­ing Her­bie Nichols and Duke Elling­ton, and he does amaz­ingly intense things with the com­pletely unex­pected choice of the Heat­wave song, “The Star of a Story,” and turns into Fly­ing Lotus’ “mmmhmm” into an old-fashioned sound­ing del­i­cacy. At the core of his musi­cal think­ing is his arrange­ment of Henry Threadgill’s “Lit­tle Pocket Size Demons,” from the Too Much Sugar for a Dime album. Putting so much of the music onto the piano, and keep­ing it in the mid­dle range, clouds Threadgill’s lean pro­file, but the play­ing is so excit­ing, and the group cap­tures Threadgill’s uncanny way with a beat. It’s also an impor­tant state­ment of what is impor­tant in jazz right now, who brought the music to where it is, what it can do, and where it can go. Accelerando is a must for any­one inter­ested in this point in the musi­cal moment, and is guar­an­teed to be one of the best jazz record­ings of 2012.