Roughly speaking, there are two major poles in Wadada Leo Smith's discography: the large ensemble works and the small group sessions. This is as striking an example of the latter as the recent Heart:s Reflections is of the former, and emphatically confirms that the trumpeter-composer is a very complete musician whose ability to create a wide range of tonalities, ambiences and approaches to narrative mark him out as a key figure in contemporary improvised music. Smith:s interest in non-western metres and timbres reaches right back to the 1970s and his work has regularly maintained that slant. The presence of the Chinese pipa player-vocalist Xiao-Fen is thus entirely logical. She excels for both her textural richness and enormous discipline with regard to the use of space and silence. On many an occasion, she is the most discreet of figures, playing a delicate string of single notes for several bars, dropping out for several more and then reappearing to double the final part of a Smith phrase with disarming precision, the result of which is that she becomes something of a darting audio shadow to the trumpet. Predominantly a high pitched instrument with a thin, slender tone, the four-string pipa brings a metalliclike wash to the sound canvas, brightening it in places and reinforcing the fortissimo notes from the brass with glistening twangs. AkLaff's role should not be overlooked in so far as he plays with measured force and sensitivity, reducing his cymbals to a whisper that drifts over the African and oriental rhythms before exploding into thrillingly gymnastic syncopation when his partners sustain the long tones of a plaintive theme. No better example can be found than the title track during which the combination of the hyperactive snare work, harshly plucked pipa and misty legatos of the horn creates the kind of tightly gripped turbulence that has characterized much of Smith's best work. If the title has a literary subtext, it's not gratuitous. The music has a rich, poetic grandeur.