This is the Incredible String Band founder and veteran visionary Scottish singer-songsmith Robin Williamson's fourth ECM disc of musicalised poetry. The first three albums featured settings of Williamson's beloved Welsh bards including Taliesin, Henry Vaughan and Dylan Thomas, as well as of John Clare, Blake, Whitman, and some of his own songs. The new CD revolves around his own lyrics only, with accompaniments from two fellow virtuosi – Mat Maneri, the American improvising viola player who so richly embellished the last two releases, and, for the first time, jazz percussionist Ches Smith. All three weave ebulliently intertwined embroideries in perfect harmony with Williamson's mellifluously flowing wordsounds. The opening of the title track recalls that of ‘Under Milk Wood’: ‘Trusting in the rising light/The harbour sleeps…’ Other song-poems riff on ‘Roads’ (‘roads have no real beginning/roads have no real end’); on how ‘Night Comes Quick in LA’ (‘Youth burns brighter than neon/Burns fast, sold cheap/Up on the glittering hillsides/Sirens make coyotes howl’); on ‘These hands of mine/The child's, the man's/Somehow have turned into/My father's hands'; on the majestic detachment of swans (‘Swan sailing in your own reflection/Joining the worlds of air and water’; on ‘Falling Snow’ (‘Falling snow this fall so early/Over the hills the untrodden snow/For me is like a token/Of all that can never be known…’). There are also exquisite love poems, pastoral idylls, subtly eloquent reflections on such rare delights as ‘The dance that dances/In the soul of souls’, and waterscapes where ‘All islands spin/into the one/untainted Eden/never lost’. Williamson's voice has toughened over the decades, ranging raga-saxophone-seamlessly here, from gruff and deep to shimmering falsetto. Reader – get this CD and rejoice in a unique and veritable treasury of truly jazzwise hymns, at once deeply ancient and unimpeachably modern.