While the Miles-Jimi union is one of the great ‘what ifs?’ in contemporary black music, a Trane-James Brown collaboration might well be the other. These boogie-ing baroque offerings from Garnett are as close as the work of a coterie of his illustrious early 1970s peers – think Gary Bartz, Eddie Henderson, Norman Connors – to providing something of an answer. For the most part the salient features associated with the two aforesaid icons – Trane's modalism and JB's funky backbeat – combine to killer effect, and if the other creative offspring of the above is Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi ensemble then its spirit also looms large. Having said that, Garnett is much more than the sum total of his influences, and his swirling, anthemic melodies, the high point being the timeless ‘Mother Of The Future’, are also a major plus. This kind of soulful spiritual jazz is indelibly tied to the dashiki clad Afrocentricity of the early 1970s yet the music has more than stood the test of time.