Although this album is a tribute to Don Cherry, it is also an impromptu memorial for his son David Ornette, who tragically passed away shortly after performing many of its songs as a guest of Kahil El’Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at last year's EFG London Jazz Festival. It is hard to divorce that sense of loss from the music, yet the beauty of the studio performance, as was the case with the aforesaid concert, provides the best kind of solace.

Chicago veteran El’ Zabar has developed a very personal musical vocabulary over some five decades, moving seamlessly between drum kit and African percussion to create a sound that can have as much breathing space and understatement as it does activity and emphasis, and Spirit Gatherer builds very much on his patented sound. It benefits greatly from the input of Zabar's able and inventive bandmembers, with Alex Harding's baritone sax shoring up the low end with purring, growling riffs while trumpeter Corey Wilkes and vocalist Dwight Trible impart a melodic and contrapuntal richness that enhances the rhythmic foundation.

Reprises of Thelonious Monk's irrepressibly jaunty ‘Well, You Needn't’ and the deeply wistful ‘Lonely Woman’, the Ornette Coleman anthem on which Don Cherry performed with such grace and gravitas, are the pick of the covers, while the original material has a similar blend of ethereal, misty themes and punchy, tightly gripped grooves that marked the band's last set, America The Beautiful. A poignant gift for departed souls.