It's been nine years since Spiritual Unity, the debut recording of this band as a quartet, and sadly its original fourth member, the trumpeter Roy Campbell, has since passed away. Yet all of the visceral charge of that first incarnation survives intact on what could now be called a power trio, with the caveat that the vocabulary reaches far and wide beyond the rock-fusion with which that term is mostly associated. The raison d'être of the first project, the repertoire of Albert Ayler, is still to the fore, with two of the innovative saxophonist's signatures, ‘The Wizard’ and ‘Bells’, providing highlights of the session. But the remit has been significantly broadened to include the music of the ‘father’, Coltrane, who shepherded the ‘holy ghost’, as well as the Broadway show tunes that served as his early raw material. It's a winningly sound choice of repertoire as the group re-contextualises the 1960s ‘New Music’ to bring out the all-important melodic content of popular culture that nonetheless flowed into the most challenging of Ayler and Trane's abstractions. With that in mind, the inclusion of Kern/Hammerstein's ‘Old Man River’ is a masterstroke, giving the trio the chance to demonstrate their ability to tightly grip and weave jarring, almost metallic tones into a gospelish setting. This wounded melancholy crackles seamlessly into the harder strains of ‘Bells’, but the sensitivity and the sense of prayer so crucial to Trane, Ayler, and Robeson, for that matter, are duly retained. Raw and focused in execution, city and country in ambience, the Grimes-Ribot-Taylor unit fashions a compelling range of timbres as well as arrangements. Amid the improvisation and deconstruction is a real commitment to the emotional depth of story and anthem in the true sense of the words.