Through sideman duties with legends such as Yusef Lateef and Don Cherry; as well as work as a bandleader in his own right percussionist-composer Adam Rudolph has been a fascinating character in creative music for over five decades.

His Go-Organic Orchestra draws on musical and cultural traditions from around the world, be it Africa, the Middle East or Asia, in a wholly personal way, and this latest venture sees Rudolph take as a conceptual building block Gagaku and Noh theatre from Japan in an absorbing programme performed by an American-Japanese combo that is as sharply disciplined as it is vividly expressive.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the album's centerpiece, ‘Tsuzumi’, whose 28-minute life cycle is marked by solemn meditations, flickers of enchanting melody and stirrings of rhythm that remain as poised as an insect on a blade of grass.

The astutely layered grooves for which Rudolph is renowned can be heard in shorter pieces elsewhere on Focus and Field. All throughout the music the richness of traditional Japanese instruments such as shinobue, taiko, shamisen and shakuhachi is well to the fore, contributing to a tonal palette that upholds the ideal of ‘universal vibration’ that guided Rudolph's illustrious forebears.