Like his 2011 release, Love & Revolution, this latest album from Italian guitarist, DJ, producer and songsmith Nicola Conte features yet another stellar line-up of international vocalists and instrumentalists, plus the usual sumptuous arrangements. Recorded live in the studio over numerous sessions between 2006 and 2011, with vocals and overdubs added in 2013, Free Souls kicks off with the Grant Green-esque ‘Shades of Joy’ featuring the marble smooth, impossibly mellifluous vocals of Baltimore-born, Paris-based vocalist Marvin Parks. London-based vocalist Bridgette Amofah dusts down a captivating account of Bobbie Gentry's Grammy-winning slice of Southern Gothic, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’, while the Rotterdam-born singer Tasha's World shines on the Conte original, ‘Uhuru’. Having impressed on Love & Revolution, the brace of songs from Brooklyn vocalist Melanie Charles are both standouts here, ‘Spirit of Nature’, driven by Pietro Lussu's understated piano vamp, and a dulcet take on ‘Ahmad's Blues’, the latter featuring a fine solo by altoist Greg Osby.