Jazz

longside direct responses such as Mehldau’s, it’s easy to imagine other musicians finding time and cause to consider subjects to which they personally relate during this time of constraint. It’ll be largely coincidental, of course, as many such projects will have been gestating before the current emergency began, but this doesn’t detract from, who is a remarkable composer and bandleader and also an activist in the fields of data control and intellectual property. She directs her attention to this in , a formidable double album that deploys the forces of her big band to evoke the artificial world of technology and its exploitative uses, and the contrast it presents with the ebb and flow of nature and the real world. This powerful, uncompromising music is very much the sound of protest and a plea for humanisation, reflected in her sophisticated arrangements which are variously disturbing, strident, unsettling, puckish, uplifting and intoxicating. ( ) ★★★★★