In the past decade Mushroom Hour Half Hour has emerged as a key label in South African music, and this release by trombonist Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O is an interesting, if uneven, addition to the label’s catalogue.

There are certainly moments of pleasing invention, such as the excellent ‘Dr. Philip Tabane’, which has a wistful combination of brass, string synthesizer and wordless vocals hovering over a child-like recorder motif that makes the arrangement both celestial and rural, a kind of folk futurism.

The album as a whole is meditative if not mournful, with chants and electronics creating atmospheres that are not unattractive. However, around the half way mark the composing starts to wane. Tree-O uses relatively spare harmony in most of the material, which would benefit from richer melodic content. And that doesn’t really come on tracks that lack sufficient ideas to justify their extended running time. Despite the high standard of engineering and mixing on the set, the appealing kernels of ideas have not grown enough to fully achieve the artist’s quite obvious potential.