If Miles Davis had been a generation older and still a talent-spotting genius, he would very likely have hired Immanuel Wilkins before the Pennsylvanian alto saxophonist had even recorded his acclaimed Blue Note debut, Omega, in 2020. Wilkins’ admiration for former Miles sax frontman Kenny Garrett has been plain from the start, but so have his own voicelike sonorities (perhaps echoing childhood community-church memories), and the vision to join avant-swing and modalism to thematic ideas rooted in past and present African-American experience. All those elements are central to a fascinating Wilkins venture very different from its predecessors.

He foregrounds vocalists for the first time here (four of them, ranging across global musics and including South Indian/Tamil-rooted Ganavya and jazz/folk/classical star Cécile McLorin Salvant). June McDoom’s hymnal opener ‘Matte Glaze’ and the more intense ‘Motion’ wind dreamy vocal choruses around the leader’s glittering double-time alto lines, and child’s-chants, and solemn spoken statements precede Ganavya’s delicate tone-bending reverie and Wilkins’ flying sax on the incantatory ‘Everything’. Salvant is at her candidly haunting best on ‘Dark Eyes Smile’, and ‘Afterlife Residence Time’ is a hooky 17-minute anthem for all the participants, ending in a burst of whooping Coltranesque sax ecstasy. It’s a bold, if less explicitly jazzy, departure from a fearlessly innovative explorer.