Aruan Ortiz
Inside Rhythmic Falls
(Intakt Records)
★★★★★

PIANIST Aruan Ortiz grew up in Santiago de Cuba and walked to school every morning hearing a global symphony all around him from radios, practising musicians and melodies coming from windows and balconies open to the streets.

With US octogenarian drummer of Haitian roots, Andrew Cyrille, and percussionist Mauricio Herrera on bongos, cowbells and marimbula, his album Inside Rhythmic Falls is a succession of tales of Oriente Province.

Ortiz strikes his keys powerfully and defiantly on tracks such as Golden Voice alongside Cyrille's polyrhythms and Herrera's irresistible changui beat, as if Cuba and Haiti were one country birthed in Africa and baptised in the Caribbean, so much sonic unity do they create.

The album is also a narrative of deep human emotion, which peals tenderly from Ortiz's notes. Through this record, Cuba speaks of the world's lives and lifetimes.

Last Dream of the Morning
Crucial Anatomy
(Trost Records)
★★★★★

THE TRIO of saxophonist John Butcher, drummer Mark Sanders and bassist John Edwards called their previous album Last Dream of the Morning and it was so powerfully beautiful that they decided to give their trio the same name. This new record was recorded in London's Cafe Oto.

The middle track of more than 30 minutes is Curling Vine, another metaphor for their music. It's as if the musicians' separate sounds entwine around each other, with Butcher's crying, embracing horn, Edwards' luxuriant bass and the growing leaves of Sanders' evergreen drums.

Unified, they create a sound that is audibly fertile and they are totally at one with each other.

They're truly one of the great improvising trios — listen to Butcher's emotive tenor on Free of Ghosts and the percussion and bass unity that enfolds him.

Feel it through your ears.

London Jazz Composers' Orchestra
That Time
(Not Two Records)
★★★★★

THIS year is the 50th anniversary of the formation of the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, which over half a century has been an itinerant home for a galaxy of British jazz virtuosi.

In this newly minted album, 1972 concerts in Berlin and Donaueschingen and two 1980 London sessions, including a powerful performance at the Roundhouse in London, are available for the first time.

On it are trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Harry Beckett, saxophonists Trevor Watts, Evan Parker, Mike Osborne and Tony Coe and Paul Rutherford's insurgent trombone, guitarist Derek Bailey, pianist Howard Riley, bassist Barry Guy and drummers Tony Oxley, John Stevens and Paul Lytton.

It's a momentous compendium of half a century of British jazz genius, a rampaging youthful ensemble of musical spirits congregating for the future of human unity.

A shared celebration of musical power and skill, it signals both change and reinvention.