This is Mahanthappa's third CD for the ACT label, and easily his best. He is on home territory, exploring the music of his most formative influence, Charlie Parker. And while each composition (as opposed to the five interludes dotted throughout the album called ‘Bird Calls’) owes its genesis to a Parker composition, it is often a fragment of melody, or an element from the composition, which is developed by Mahanthappa into something of his own. Thus ‘On the DL’ is based on a part of Parker's solo on ‘Donna Lee’, while ‘Both Hands’ is a modified version of Parker's composition ‘Dexterity’ with all the rests removed. Each piece, as Mahanthappa explains, represents an examination of Parker's legacy in the here and now in a “detailed and holistic way”. There is also a further twist that makes this music stand out, and that is Mahanthappa's unselfconscious drawing on musical tradition of the Carnatic music of South India during his improvisations – an ornament here, a melismatic bend there – that adds a degree of colour and the unexpected. This blend of the local and the global (yes, Parker's music went global in the 1940s thanks to the gramophone record) is what makes this take of Parker wholly original and absorbing. Of course, it helps that Mahanthappa is a virtuoso musician, but ultimately it is his overall musical conception that makes this album stand out.