The New Seekers might have wanted to “teach the world to sing” but here on her fourth and most ambitious recording to date Esperanza Spalding is taking things one further with her barnstorming soul-funk-jazz hybrid. Whether her effusive feel-good approach to music making succeeds in a similar pop-culture way is debatable and yet the breadth of her ambition and the quality of this album speaks volumes as to the true scale of her abilities as composer, bassist, singer and bandleader. Chamber Music Society was a gently left field work that brought a noble classical tinge to her core jazz trio that featured brilliantly versatile pianist Leo Genovese, whose ability to knit together acoustic and electric textures helps cement many of Spalding's stylistic jumps here too. Thus Radio Music sets out its highly embraceable stall from the off with ‘Radio Song’ a canny blend of wry self-aware lyrics extolling the pleasures of singing along to a pop song, while not actually providing the typically banal lyric present in most pop songs. Likewise the music constantly leapfrogs from displaced counterpoint bass lines and melody parts, shoehorning in a sax solo, delicately layered three-part brass and subtle harmony vocals and more than your average quota of melodic material associated with radio-friendly songs. Things settle after this breathless start with ‘Cinnamon Tree’ sounding like a brooding string-led bridge between her Chamber and Radio Music projects, yet this builds to a pleasingly dirty guitar break from Jeff Lee Johnson. Spalding runs the gamut of her song writing abilities from the slow-burn Hammond-and-voice ballad of ‘Land Of The Free’ to the hip-hop flavoured, Q-Tip produced ‘City Of Roses’, with some classy cameos from the likes of Jack DeJohnette, Joe Lovano, Lionel Loueke and the excellent Terri Lyne Carrington. The aces up Spalding's ‘let's take fusion to the masses’ sleeve are Stevie Wonder's ‘I Can't Help It’ and the dazzling take on Wayne Shorter's ‘Endangered Species’ with its crisscrossing layers of funky grooves and slippery harmonies. And if Spalding can get rock audiences singing Wayne Shorter tunes then she really has got a musical Midas touch that goes well beyond the confines of just being jazz's next big thing.