Christian Scott - Yesterday You Said Tomorrow ****

Berklee graduate Christian Scott’s major-label debut, Rewind That, earned him a Grammy nomination in 2006; the follow-up, 2008’s Anthem, a stirring musical response to the Hurricane Katrina debacle, took the fusionist trumpeter’s act to a whole new level of vision and maturity, blending jazz, indie rock, hip-hop and soul influences to dazzling chiaroscuro effect. Yesterday You Said Tomorrow –engineered by the legendary Rudy Van Gelder, who at 85 largely devotes himself to remastering back-catalogue classics – offers a similar sonic (and philosophical)blend of darkness and light, despair and optimism.

Post-rock rhythms abound,against which Matthew Stevens’s resonantly desiccated guitar provides the key counterpoint to Scott’s horn work, at times malevolently Milesian, at others,especially in the crisper higher register, slyly reminiscent of fellow New Orleans alumnus Louis Armstrong. For an album of instrumentals, it’s got a lot to say non-musically too. The titles – ‘Angola, LA & the 13th Amendment’, ‘Jenacide’, ‘TheAmerican’t’, ‘The Roe Effect (Refrain in F# Minor)’ – suggest some of Scott’ssocial preoccupations, and thanks to his much-discussed “whisper technique”, which brings the trumpet unwontedly close to the speaking voice, you can almosthear him explaining what he means by it all. All in all, not bad for a 26-year-old!

Robert Shore