For her latest album, inspired by a wintertime visit to Acadia National Park in Maine, the Beijing-born, New York-based vocalist, composer and bandleader Annie Chen issues a heartfelt appeal for listeners to become guardians of the environment – and the possible consequences that could occur if we keep ignoring the planet's limited resources.

With striking sonorities, a compelling narrative, and Chen’s remarkably expressive voice at its heart, this is a recording which merits repeated listening to fully absorb its wealth of detail.

Composed by the late Zbigniew Namyslowski, album opener ‘Rozpacz (Despair)’ sees Chen deftly adapting lyrics from the opera ‘Farewell My Concubine’, with her highly charged, bebop-inspired vocal lines cascading in torrents of notes. The restless metrical shifts of Chen’s ‘Underground Dance’ imagines a post-apocalyptic future, with terrific soloing from LoRe on alto.

Chen transforms the theme of Krzysztof Komeda’s ‘Rosemary’s Lullaby’ into a declaration of hope, while the wonderful, multipartite ‘Güle Güle Istanbul’ – a song of farewell – is strongly flavoured by Mathew Muntz on meh (a Croatian bagpipe) and Vitor Gonçalves on accordion. The second half of the album consists of the four-part ‘Guardians Suite’, in which Chen’s sense of the dramatic comes strongly to the fore, not least the incredibly beautiful duet passage for voice and accordion in the suite’s second movement, ‘The Whale River Song’; and the depiction of a fox hunt in the concluding movement, ‘Vanished Tails, No Return’, where we learn that the fox is the last of its species. The septet which Chen has assembled play this music with utter conviction.