Various

Listening to this disc makes you feel like you're a witness to some of the most beautiful music being made in the world today. That's the case with virtually every volume in this highly eclectic series. And on number seven, the weaving of different genres and cultures continues to be sweet and endless - the sound-bites of black poetry against a bossa groove on Kimbu Kimr's "Raise The Dead"; the assault of hard bop drums and dub treatments on Peter Kruder's "Root Down," the congregation of Cuban percussion, Fela-esque organ grooves and a house-y thump on Universal Principles "Guyana," etc. While the interaction of such elements makes it hard to pinpoint the shared commonality of these artists, it all comes down to having an integrated balance of live musicianship, studio-wise clarity and compositional strengths, not to mention a referencing of the past while recombining these local sounds for a global future on the dance floor. That said, this isn't really music you dance to; it is laid back, but that doesn't make it jazz - at least, not if we compare these artists to Coltrane and Miles. The folks at Compost should re-title their series to The Future Sounds of Cool Jazz, since it's that pre-'60s and pre-fusion genre of light sounds that these artists have most in common with. Although the orchestration of 303 bass lines, melancholic strings and jazzy breaks on the Amalgamation of Soundz' "Phuture Soundz" is feverish enough to step above such easy-listening sensibilities.