Alternately bewitching and bewildering, this album celebrates Abdullah's current work with 16 shortish tracks. The personnel fluctuates too, some items being entirely unaccompanied, while others have harmonised bowed cello or a simulated pizzicato bass (no indications of who does what in the cello department). Quite a few numbers feature front-line contributions from Guyton, who apparently has played with the posthumous Basie and Ellington bands. He has a straight-laced tone playing ensemble clarinet and an annoying classical vibrato on written flute passages, but then surprises with quite passionate improv on the same instruments. Ibrahim himself is at his most soberly lyrical, and some of the material harks back to earlier work. ‘Root’, for instance, is a sloweddown, reharmonised ‘Mannenberg Revisited’, while another familiar retitled Abdullah riff is ‘Essence’, as indeed is ‘Trace Elements For Monk’ (it also happens to end by quoting ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, which both Monk and the young Dollar Brand recorded). But what's the significance of Abdullah playing a three-minute version of ‘Cara Mia’, a 1950s pop hit attributed (but not here!) to the pseudonymous orchestra-leader Mantovani?