Five years after his excellent TUM release Route De Freres drum legend Cyrille makes his ECM debut with an album that could neither be more different nor satisfying as a result. The aforementioned recording drew largely on the septuagenarian New Yorker's Haitian roots but, culturally speaking, this is an altogether more ‘open house’ affair, with the combination of Bill Frisell's guitar and the seldom heard Richard Teitelbaum's keyboards combining to produce a seductively poetic dreamscape on the highlights of the set. Many improvising musicians advocate arrangements that have space and clarity, but few apply that principle as well as Cyrille's group does here. The leader often plays with a sotto voce sensibility, drawing ghost trails of sound from snare and cymbals that drift tantalisingly into the haze of the keys and strings while bassist Ben Street provides an off-centre solidity, often by pedalling right on the cusp of atonality. The result is highly melodic music that sings in both a slightly haunted and haunting way, steeped in electro-acoustic sounds that put some soul in the machine. Although this is a jazz ensemble of superlative players it edges into the field of ambient and contemporary classical music in the most organic way, as the whole becomes greater than the sum of the not inconsiderable parts. Could well be a career highlight for Cyrille.