Rain Sultanov mans jazz's Azerbaijan outpost, running the Baku Jazz Festival and writing a history of the music in the former Soviet republic. This tribute to influences including Coltrane, Miles and Kenny Wheeler doesn't mimic them. Instead, his tone most resembles another saxophonist who distilled Coltrane's early heat into cool restraint, Jan Garbarek. Recorded at the late Jan Erik Kongshaus's Rainbow studio, its trademark, ECM-defining resonance also helps put us in Nordic dreamtime. These seven ballads are all elegies to experience, with Sultanov's balmy melancholy and introspective flights sometimes shooting off fierier plumes, but otherwise ruminative, as he seeks the spiritual in heart-slowing calm. Rainbow's fabled, fine-tuned piano gives fellow Azerbaijani Isfar Sarabski a sometimes glassily precise sound, as he traces delicate runs through ‘My John C.’, and adds an unhurried pulse to the measured lyricism and slow-burning warmth of ‘Behind the Sky’. Such unfolding melodies are the invitation into this deeply personal evocation of a high mainstream. Intensity is implicit, excitement elsewhere, feeling left glowing on some higher plain. It's an old-fashioned, lucid love letter to music which surely found its way to Soviet Azerbaijan like a message in a bottle, replied to with life-long commitment.