When a musician like Pine cuts a song called ‘Rivers of Blood’ or Miles takes a title like ‘I am a Man’ we know we’re in the presence of a person plugging into a bigger picture than just the noise of their chosen horn. Miles’ music has always been about dialogue: with other musicians, with listener and audience, with the big stories in the world around him. Miles himself notes this recording was made in the shadow of Trump’s election, an event that underwrites much of this music: anger tempered by pride and control, moments of baffled melancholia, a reaching back to the past (Ornette and Ellington are among giant shades that walk amid these tunes), and, emphatically, of beauty and hope for the future. It helps of course that Miles has pulled together a stellar band for music of such light and shade, fragility yet solidarity. So Moran lays down a long blues meditation over Blade’s rolling toms on the epic ‘Darken My Door’, while Frisell is at his impertinent best on the rapscallion rhythms of ‘Jasper’. The blues indeed underwrites much of Miles’ writing, as though he’s tapping the source: yet this is music of now, today: his own muted horn may evoke Miles (the other one), but it has its own unique tone. Throughout it all, space though there is for improvisation, it’s Miles’ writing, a mix of pop clarity and blues sensibility, knotty chord clusters or jump start tempo shifts that catches the ear, the soul. Not always an ‘easy’ listen, but then some truths are hard to hear. This is music of spiritual and political change, summed up by the cut ‘Revolutionary Congregation’: a homage to the likes of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, it’s peaceful but not passive: it’s music that won’t back down. Buy this record. And better still: spread the word. You are a man: that has to mean something.