If your back catalogue with Ekaya includes such essential albums as The Mountain and Water From An Ancient Well, then the excellence of your own work makes you a hard act to follow. After a five-year absence from the studio, following his last records for the Intuition label, and now aged 84, would Abdullah Ibrahim's new venture with Gearbox Records match up to the high standards that he set years ago with this band of African and (mainly) American musicians? The answer is a resounding yes. And the record is in some ways more satisfying than the band can occasionally be in concert, where Ibrahim sometimes cuts off tunes too soon, or if there's not enough feedback from the crowd, seem slightly sterile. There's no sterility here, and no sense of anything being curtailed. With Terrill's drums and special British guest Alec Dankworth's bass setting out the introductory pattern for ‘Jabula’, followed by piano interjections and then a conversation with the horns, this is music as joyous and extrovert as anything in Ibrahim's long list of recordings. That outgoing mood is sustained in Monk's ‘Skippy’ with Guyton's piccolo making the running. There's a contrast with the slightly otherworldly ‘Tuang Guru’, where Jackson (who played cello on ‘Jabula’) resumes his regular place on bass and underpins the movement of this work from the back catalogue with nimble rapidfire basslines. Ibrahim sits out much of this track – just as he might do on stage – but he comes back in exactly where it matters, ushering back the scalar head arrangement. His three solo improvisations offer a very different level of emotional depth, being introvert and involving. And the high point is a return to another piece from the earlier days of Ekaya, ‘Song for Sathima’. On this, Lance Bryant catches exactly the timing and phrasing of the South African masters, and turns in a really outstanding performance on tenor saxophone, genuinely, as Ibrahim puts it, ‘singing a song’.