With its longest track being just under eight minutes and its shortest just over two, Flowers In The Dark, which has a total running time of around 42 minutes, makes a strong case for concision rather than the longer durations that generally define jazz CDs.

Not that saxophonist-flautist-composer Kofi Flexxx doesn’t know how to pack a punch with a shortform piece. There is a highly impactful character in several of the ‘brief encounters’ on this interesting album that speaks of a cogent engagement with both hip-hop, with its alchemy of breakbeat and rhyme, and jazz. with its invention in rhythm and exploration of timbre. The result is pluralistic to say the least, with tracks moving from African and Asian riffing to off-piste blends of spoken word, electronica and rasping funk, which could be placed in a mix that includes the adventurous Anti-Pop Consortium-Matthew Shipp and Mike Ladd-Vijay Iyer collaborations. Many times the music sounds and feels as if it has been edited as well as performed with considerable attention to detail so that nothing superfluous is allowed to deflect attention from the groove or text, resulting in songs that are concentrated without being excessively dense. All told, this is vibrant, effervescent, provocative music that moves from the field of dance to more introspective realms with no loss of coherence.