Trumpeter Christian Scott's new album Christian aTunde Adjuah is not only the title of his new 2-CD set but also the name he's reclaimed from his West African ancestry. For the sleeve he dresses in the ceremonial regalia of the Mardi Gras Indians of his native New Orleans. In terms of what's on the inside, this could be deceptive: the music isn't a return to roots at all. Scott continues to follow an increasingly defiant, forward-looking path in jazz that fully acknowledges a jazz history without becoming trapped by it. Scott made a big splash with his 2007 mediation on Katrina titled Anthem and then more so in 2010 on Yesterday, You Said Tomorrow, a recording that the revered jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder chose to come out of retirement to mix. He has become more convincing with every new recording and this new one is no exception. As with Yesterday, You Said Tomorrow, some parts of the record are written and played against a socio-political background, with topics ranging from an experimental AIDS treatment in Berlin through to the Janjaweed tribe's mass rape of Sudanese women. The track ‘Who They Wish I Was’ is more personal, Scott hurling back the lazy comparisons people have drawn between his band and the Miles quintet of the 1960s. As it is, Scott's intensely brooding, but also occasionally muted and reflective trumpet can't entirely shake off the influence of Miles Davis, but it is from a wider perspective – Scott might just as well reflect the anguished melancholy of a Radiohead theme. It all hangs on his superb quintet's biting, eerie alt-guitar rock textures, the occasional David Sylvian-ish art-pop electronica and some jaw dropping, surging rockfuelled, improvised hip hop rhythms by Robert Glasper drummer Jamire Williams and bassist Kris Funn. That the attention doesn't waver over two discs and 23 tracks is a remarkable achievement as is Scott's creation of an authentic jazz universe that's all about the now.