As a musician with a producer's ear, Miller has always been able to find the right combination of singers and players as well as material for his own projects. The highlight of his last studio outing, 2007’s Free, was ‘Milky Way’, a superb song featuring blues troubadour Keb’ Mo’, and this new set also comes up trumps as far as guest vocalists are concerned. The respective sensualities and subtleties of Gretchen Parlato and Rubén Blades work particularly well on ‘Setembro’ (‘Brazilian Wedding Song’) while Dr John's drawly hype man exuberance fits the cover of Janelle Monae's ‘Tightrope’ like a glove. What that track does very well is bring out the underlying Latin boogaloo fl avour of the original but Miller has always been adept at making albums that exploit the connectedness of jazz, soul, funk and myriad genres from the Caribbean. The other great example is the irresistibly catchy roots reggae feel that suffuses War's ‘Slippin’ Into Darkness’, which comes over as a transatlantic cousin to Marley's ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ Furthermore, Miller's ability to create maximum thrills by way of minimum notes is glorious here. His combination of harsh, hissing slap lines and darting, softer fretted figures, often squeezed into nothing more than concise two bar variations on the main theme, fuelinjects the performance without running it off the road.

As a predominantly electric album with a solid backbeat on the bulk of the material, it's easy to focus on the groove content of the set, but Miller also presents swooning melodies on occasion, none more so than ‘Redemption’, which has a deeply emotive yet subtle use of dissonance, while ‘Gorée’, a meditation on the island off the coast of Senegal from which slaves were shipped to the Americas, is also wrought with great finesse. The net result is arguably the most cogent “band statement” that Miller has made for some time, and his core five piece – Miller, Pena, Cato, Han, Jones – is grade A. Miller is one of the few contemporary artists who is something of a unifying force among different strands of black music and this latest set shows that his powers of cohesion are really still as strong as they ever were.