McFerrrin's previous studio album, 2002's Beyond Words, arguably one of the most poetic jazz sets of the last decade, was, as the title suggested, about sound rather than text. Here he returns to the world of words on a large-scale production that features a small village of singers, namely various choirs and 2,500 members of an audience in Bergen, Norway as well as classical composer-arranger Roger Treece and Weather Report alumnus Alex Acuna. Although the resoundingly humanist lyrics of pieces such as ‘The Garden’ and ‘Brief Eternity’ bear the same sensitive finesse that has marked the bulk of McFerrin's songbook, there is no less of an emphasis on invention in the realm of wordlessness, be it scat singing or a quite head-turning creativity with textures, many of which present the voice as the most advanced of synthesisers. The choral accompaniment essentially magnifies what McFerrin does in a solo show where his ability to perform multiple interconnected parts is a sight to behold. But there is much more than vocal sophistry going on here, for the use of counterpoint, shifting tonality and overall narrative ambition betray the workings of a great writer and developer of concepts, which is something that is perhaps overshadowed by McFerrin's gifts as a singer. He has produced a gem loosely in the same vein as the Voicestra and Circle Songs projects but stylistically there is a more cunning use of African, Asian, Latin and European classical forms, something that organically takes McFerrin back to his work on Dialects, Joe Zawinul's overlooked 1986 opus.