Meanwhile, bassist Stephan Crump exhibited a beautiful tone and a consistently lyrical, fresh state of mind in his playing, and the new band member, drummer Justin Brown, happily took on the responsibility of sketching and underscoring the flow of this sonorous music.

As for Rudresh Mahanthappa, his alto represented a very different sound in jazz — it's full and throaty, even in the soprano range — and when he soloed, his lavish, pouring scales showed him to be a truly lucid and searching soloist.

He matches up well with Iyer. Both players work fluently with the dense harmonies and the free tempo sensibility of jazz; also, both work from a rich cultural base of scales, melodies, rhythms, and chants, as in the composition, "Song for Midwood", which is basically an extended chant where chordal passages and a tonal piano interlude serve to bring on, anew, the driven, scalar search of Mahanthappa. The bass is heroic, and the chant-like theme played out to the splash of cymbals.