A saxophonist who's successfully worked with Anthony Braxton, Esperanza Spalding, and acclaimed New York classical chamber group the Mivos Quartet has to be a musician of considerable technical and aesthetic breadth. Dan Blake, the New Jersey-born multi– instrumentalist and composer, fits that bill – and then some. Like Spalding, a student friend from Boston in the early 2000s, Blake also devotes music to big causes – but though Da Fe is dedicated to action on global warming, poverty, and malnutrition, it's no sermon, but a musically startling venture in which this unusual artist has taken Wayne Shorter's electronic experiments of the mid-1980s as his inspiration to expand the resources of a classic-Coltrane quartet. Spalding keyboardist Leo Genovese was invited to add post-production effects to the original tracks by Blake's group including fine Seattle-raised pianist Carmen Staaf, and subtle New York/London drummer Jeff Williams. Staaf's brooding, darkly-trilling unaccompanied acoustic piano intro is thus swept up by ghostly, windswept electronics, while Blake's evocative soprano sax leads the Coltrane-evoking ‘Cry From The East’ with Staaf in McCoy Tyner chordal mode – eventually shaded and recoloured by Blake's overdubs of the horn lines. ‘Fish In Puddles’ is also imploring anthemic and Trane-like at first, before overlapping acoustic and electronic lines give it an unsettlingly mysterious and fragmented air, ‘The Cliff’ is Monkish, and the title track bristles with eloquently graceful soprano melody, clamouringly reprocessed. Da Fe is maybe a little overcooked when less-is-more would have helped here and there, but it's a bold and very imaginative one-off.