It could well be that Bugge Wesseltoft's growing fascination with the diverse musical cultures the world has to offer has been helped along by Spotify: “On Spotify there is an incredible possibility to explore music, everything is there, it's amazing, I have to say I love it, I listen to so much music now, with my children, all these playlists, amazing music that was inaccessible only a couple of years ago,” he said during an interview for this magazine. Certainly this album does not lack cultural diversity with the leader from Norway, the guitarist Josemi Carmona from Spain, Shrikant Shriram and Vivek Rajagopalan from India, Amade Cossa from Mozambique and vocalists Maryam Saleh and Georges Nehme from Egypt and Lebanon respectively. Wesseltoft has always been an exemplary accompanist, and it is his piano that acts as the glue that holds these sessions together, such as ‘Moving Mountains’, negotiating the inherent tension between the Well Tempered Scale of Western music and the ‘pitches in between’ of Indian music which routinely uses a combination of stable pitches and sliding ornaments. ‘Always Hopeful’ surrenders to rhythm, with little developmental intent in the Western music sense. In contrast, the flagship track is ‘My World is OK’, infectious and celebratory, there is a joy here in music making that makes so much po-faced jazz sound as if its missing the point – the late Ed Blackwell, improvising with Asian musicians, North Africans, South Americans, and Europeans, each playing in the musical language of their cultures, said: “This to me is jazz of the future”. Naturally, there were those who disagreed, such as Stanley Crouch, an apologist for the Bush regime's march into Iraq in the pages of New York Daily News, who wrote in Jazz Times, that Blackwell “sounded like the United Nations in an instrumental session to me, not jazz… if these people from all over the world want to play [jazz]… they have have to learn how to play the blues, how to swing.” Poor old Stanley. No one has told him jazz went global as early as 1917, and not everyone today wants to march in step to the sound of America.