Soundtracking a film can often open up a whole new world to the jazz composer. New writing strategies and latent influences can suddenly emerge when having to create sound to moving images. That certainly seems the case with the guitarist Rez Abbasi on his ‘imaginary’ score to an Indian-produced, German-directed 1929 silent movie, A Throw of Dice, commissioned originally by the New York Guitar Festival in 2017. The film, based on an ancient Indian Sanskrit tale, provokes a more direct relationship with Abbasi’s South Asian heritage than demonstrated previously. His last album, Unfiltered Universe, with regular Invocation band, featuring fellow south Asian-American musicians Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa (the saxophonist being part of the Indo-Pak Coalition Trio with Abbasi), offered a progressive yet pulsating electric fusion, an organically understated relationship with South Asian music that distanced itself from 1970s-derived Indo-jazz fusions. His Silent Ensemble on the other hand draws more direct inspiration from the traditions of Indian Carnatic music, crucially with a soundworld largely based around classical acoustic Indian instrumentation. The meditative series of cues bulging with gentle melodic themes and mantra-like grooves is convincingly integrated with improvised material. The storyline is evoked by the titles, as it turns out a useful listeners’ guide to what the tracks are conveying in relation to the film. Meanwhile, Abbasi, steering between electric and acoustic, and Pawan Benjamin on sax, hint at the kind of angular melodicism and dissonant tonalities associated with his previous output. It’s perhaps a less intense side to Abbasi’s work than we’ve been accustomed to, but still highly musical and engaging.