The year before wowing the 2020 EFG London Jazz Festival with Jerry & the Pelican System’s Virtual Tour Project (a multi-genre video series featuring artists from around the world), the Polish saxophonist Jerzy Mączyński was in India, touring with violinist Apoorva Krishna, a fellow alumnus of the Berklee College of Music. The subcontinent and its tradition-based freestylings proved revelatory for Mączyński, as it has for other next-gen Polish jazzers including Marek ‘EABs’ Pedziwiatr (who worked with Tenderlonious on 2020’s Ragas From Lahore) and multi-instrumentalist and electronics wiz Waclaw Zimpel, whose Saagara project brought together western jazz and Indian ragas across two albums.

This inspired pairing of two like-minded friends gives ballast to the album’s central concept: Sariani, a mythical female super-hero intent on empowering the lives of women in India, and given wings by a lovely if unsettling meditation of surging textures and layers of minor-key sax sounds. The voices of Wiktoria Jakubowska and Olga Kozieł heighten the beauty of opener ‘Raga or Raga’, in which drone motifs and elongated solos unfurl toward an abandoned, trancey conclusion; while guitarist Syzmon Wójcik lends glistening chords, and Zimpel the Kirtan-style harmonium, to ‘Everest Inn’, the aural equivalent of a Himalayan sunrise.

Still, for all Zimpel’s deft production this is very much Mączyński’s album, and the twenty-something’s questing, multifarious talent is in evidence across his compositions. There are great things here, with greater things to come.