It’s clear that there’s something very special about Endangered Blood, but it’s not immediately obvious what that might be.

Monstrous chops? Yeah, but we’re talking New York City improvisers here, so that comes with the terrain. An ability to reference a century’s worth of jazz history? Sure, and you only have to listen to the speedy, bop-inflected “Elvin Lisbon” or the Duke-Ellington-goes-to-New-Orleans lilt of “Iris”—both from the band’s recently released, self-titled debut—to pick up on that. Again, these are trained players, and you can’t graduate from jazz school without knowing the past.

What’s going on here is deeper than smarts and skills, more profound than the psychic intimacy saxophonists Chris Speed and Oscar Noriega, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Jim Black have built while playing with each other in literally dozens of different settings. And what it is, Black and I finally figure out, is Endangered Blood’s respect for songs.

“We’re all fans of songs,” the drummer stresses, reached at home in Brooklyn. “You name it: Charles Ives, country songs, rock songs, whatever. So there’s a respect for vibe and for form, as well as for making things up.”

Perhaps ironically, Endangered Blood recently played its first fully improvised gig—but even there the group’s interest in carefully crafted shapes came into play.

“We hadn’t had time to rehearse our material,” Black confesses. “But people thought all of the music was composed, anyway.”

Normally, though, Endangered Blood focuses on tunes written by Speed, who also runs the band’s label, Skirl. Like many postmodern composers, he often takes a recombinant approach, as epitomized by the aforementioned “Elvin Lisbon”.

“That was inspired by a trip to Portugal, where Chris heard [Brazilian singer-guitarist] Caetano Veloso, although it also includes this Elvin Jones groove he was working on that he had clipped from a [John] Coltrane album,” Black explains. “None of it is literal at all, when you listen to the song, but with this group of players there’s a lot of music between all of us, and it’s all usable.”

Other Endangered Blood tunes, like the Balkan-influenced “Rare”, draw on this broad spectrum of musical knowledge. But Speed’s also capable of writing from a more explicitly emotional place, as he does on the beautifully desolate meditation that is “K”. He was apparently going through a melancholy patch when he composed the tune, and his three fellow musicians display their empathy in a performance that sounds like they’re picking him up and carrying him on to a brighter future.

So it’s not only a love of song that makes Endangered Blood special: it’s also the way the performers look after each other. Which, in fact, is how the four came together: at what was supposed to be a one-time-only gig in support of a cancer-stricken friend.

“[Saxophonist] Andrew D’Angelo had his brain tumour at that point, so we just called ourselves the Benefit Band and played a bunch of Andrew’s tunes,” says Black, noting that his Human Feel bandmate has since made a full recovery. “That was our first thing, and people were like, ‘Wow, it sounds really good. You guys should keep playing.’ So we did.”

Endangered Blood plays the Ironworks on Saturday (October 15).