Although this was officially issued last year it has been hampered by distribution problems. However, any delays reaching the market place should not shorten the shelf life or lessen the impact of a significant piece of work from a significant figure in contemporary creative music. Saxophonist-bandleader Lehman has never made any secret of his affinity for producers such as RZA as much as composers like Henry Threadgill, and he gives more explicit weight to the lexicon of hip hop in its more left-sided incarnation on this project, which retains the sharp experimental edges of previous releases such as On Meaning and Travail, Transformation And Flow. To a certain extent the conceptual masterstroke is the use of two excellent MCs, the Senegalese Gaston Bandimic and American HPrizm, whose verses in wolof and English, respectively, provide some of the essential sonic as well as lyrical substance of the work. The voices are woven in and out of the arrangements very much like breathy horns to parallel the attacks of Lehman's alto and Maciek Lasserre's soprano, and the networking of these elements enhances the rhythmic and metric ingenuity, that sense of wavering agitation of the beat, that has long been a feature of Lehman's work. The inclusion of four pieces by Lasserre only serves to further broaden the canvas. In any case what emerges from repeat listening is a careful manipulation of timbres across registers, above all the cogent contrast of Bandimic's grainy, guttural tone and HPrizm's lower, denser draught. Either by way of tuba or trombone the bottom end has always been prominent in Lehman's music, but here it is given more of a looser, gymnastic character through Damion's Reed's pulsating kick drum, a second bass to Drew Gress's upright. The net result is music in which the strong cultural and political charge resonates within a framework that takes the much-patented ‘boom bap’ as a fluid rather than rigid entity. An engrossing confluence of improvisation, spoken word, complex grooves and ghostly electronics that far exceeds the confines of hip hop jazz.