Trumpeter Adam O'Farrill has been an impressive performer since his youth, when he was a member of his father pianist Arturo O'Farrill's Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra. Since then he has matured into a bold improviser with an artful, often-deconstructed approach to modern post-bop jazz. Blessed with a brightly resonant trumpet sound and an improvisational style that evinces the heady influence of players like Woody Shaw and Booker Little, O'Farrill could easily play just about any style of music he wanted to. While 2021's Visions of Your Other certainly fits into the acoustic jazz paradigm, it also reveals O'Farrill to be a deeply cerebral performer with a compositional aesthetic that's far more Philip Glass than Art Blakey. It's a style that marked 2016's Stranger Days as a bold move away from the swinging acoustic jazz tradition of his peers and toward a deeply artful and challenging sound. Joining him here are his longtime bandmates including tenor saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, bassist Walter Stinson, and his brother drummer Zack O'Farrill. It's essentially the same group that recorded the trumpeter's equally far-reaching 2016 album Stranger Days, save for Del Castillo taking over for Chad Lefkowitz-Brown. There's an immensely patient quality to O'Farrill's music that often feels like he's taking his time to build a song from the ground up one note at a time. It's as if he has taken all of the rhythmic and motivic devices, montunos, and grooves from his Afro-Cuban background and found ever more esoteric ways to break them down into their core parts. "Ducks" is a good example where he and Del Castillo play spare phrases over a fractured Latin-esque groove, all of which sounds intriguingly like aliens trying to play Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" from someone's second-hand description of the source material. Equally evocative is "Kurosawa at Berghain" in which O'Farrill spirals into a kinetic trumpet solo over a buoyant bass groove, under which drummer Zack O'Farrill plays a refracted four-on-the-floor dance groove replete with refracted rim shots. That all of it ends up sounding like it's being remixed in the moment by an electronic producer feels intentional. Much of Visions of Your Other has a similarly post-modern quality as O'Farrill imbues his conceptual soundscapes with thrilling, in-the-moment improvisational creativity. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi

1		stakra
2		Kurosawa At Berghain
3		Inner War
4		Ducks
5		Hopeful Heart
6		Blackening Skies