Jasmine Myra’s music is reasonably considered spiritual jazz, a presumption invited by her presence on Matthew Halsall’s Gondwana label, whose lingua franca is meditative minimalism and softly blissful elevation. She doesn’t, though, quite fit the genre’s cliched signifiers. Her flute on this second album’s title track isn’t, for instance, pastoral but it has a swaying rhythmic root. The song feels ceremonial, and Myra’s alto is languidly relaxed, her tone burry, warm and light, a comforting, cushioning, counselling sound expressing her music’s essence.

Myra’s compositions meanwhile combine repetitive riffs with layered arrangements subtly reinforced by Halsall’s production, even as the rhythm section tugs in lively, myriad directions. ‘Knowingness’ typifies the sectional yet liquid progress, as successive phases are renewed through shivers of strings and alto fanfares, until Arran Kent’s lugubrious bass clarinet pulls into fiery solo focus. ‘Glimmers’’ subtly warping textures and hints even of Derrick May’s Detroit techno masterwork ‘Strings of Life’ in its George Hall-led rhythmic surge signal another side. ‘From Embers’, though under three minutes, finds room for Myra’s most serene sax solo, and brassy bass clarinet and strings whose massed, regal climax is like a phoenix ascending, before sinking back into stillness.

Myra at one point meant this to start the following, final track, ‘How Tall the Mountains’, which gives similar feelings more time and space, characteristically combining peace with restless, roiling energy, and ending with a spiritual samba.

Myra’s debut Horizons (2022) was a moving album, where ‘Words Left Unspoken’ emerged as an imagined dialogue with her late grandmother, who she mourned long-distance during lockdown, its music moving in concentric circles, suggesting a still place of memorial and closure. Rising’s ongoing reckoning of mental health and musical dreams heads out from that place of consolation into new emotional sanctuaries, and a dancehall of the mind. Optimism and ambition have both been scaled up.