What makes this second collaborative album from trumpeter/Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians pioneer Smith and pianist/electronicist Iyer exceptional is the way it manages to sound both so quiet yet so urgent—like a private plea unfolding at the outer realms of conscious thought. There are shades of blues (“Floating River Requiem”), shades of ballads (“Procession: Defiant Life”), and shades of what, for lack of better tools to verbally express, one might call ambient music (“Sumud”). But the unifying driver is a sense of these traditions—call them forms of rebellion or divestment—liquefied into a kind of ectoplasmic goo that’s stretchy, tense, and impossible to pin down. “This recording session was conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility,” they offer. Outrage and faith—a novel combination.