New York pianist-composer Vijay Iyer has led many kinds of bands in an eventful career but the trio has been a key vehicle, and the iteration featuring Marcus Gilmore and Stephan Crump gigged extensively in American and Europe for a decade. Now comes a change, with interesting new personnel in the shape of drummer Tyshawn Sorey (who had depped in the past) and double bassist Linda May Han Oh.

These grade-A players cohere impressively on what is a session that pushes the vocabulary of previous releases such as Historicity and Break Stuff further down a personal evolutionary road. Iyer's originals, particularly ‘Children Of Flint’ and ‘Combat Breathing’, both of which address abhorrent injustice in America, are impressive insofar as they evoke vivid moods by way of arrangements in which the rhythmic energy is tightly gripped, if not contained and off-grid melodic motifs are imbued with the gravitas associated with such as Randy Weston or Abdullah Ibrahim. The fire crackles rather than rages. Han Oh and Sorey make for a dynamic as well as responsive presence, as many of the songs unfold with graduated tension instead of expected points of release, often creating a kind of funk by stealth as opposed to stomp. Maybe that wily balance of lightness of touch and heaviness of effect is the real achievement of an album that, as the title suggests, has a questioning momentum at its heart. The sprightly reprise of Cole Porter's ‘Night And Day’ could be for lovers, or it could be for fighters at a time of great extremes and stark polarization. Iyer continues to document the contemporary American experience, with its catalogue of inconvenient truths and dehumanizing facts, with music that deftly sidesteps convention while staying true to all manner of far-reaching traditions in Black music.