The second album from Canadian-born pianist Cat Toren and her Human Kind ensemble, 2020's Scintillating Beauty, showcases the group's deeply meditative and enveloping jazz sound. The album follows 2017's Cat Toren's Human Kind and again features Toren alongside saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, oud player Yoshie Fruchter, bassist Jake Leckie, and drummer Matt Honor. A native of Vancouver, Toren first garnered acclaim as a member of the inventive Juno Award-winning instrumental ensemble Pugs Crows. Based in Brooklyn since 2010, Toren is an adept post-bop musician who studied with revered players like Andy LaVerne and Sophia Rosoff. However, with Human Kind, she has a specific sound in mind, drawing her influences from artists like Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Alice Coltrane, and other performers who helped shape the sound of avant-garde astral and spiritual jazz of the late '60s. These are passionate, flowing songs, at turns gorgeously hypnotic and emotionally unsettling. While Toren's sparkling piano is at the core of the group's sound, she gives equal time to her bandmates; Del Castillo's keening sax lines and Fruchter's wiry Middle Eastern oud accents are prominent aspects of the group's overall sound. Tracks like the opening "Radiance in Veils" and the languid "Garment of Destiny" start delicately with a shimmer of piano and oud and slowly build into a cacophonous frenzy. That said, they can also swing, as they do on the midtempo "Ignis Fatuus," where Toren's thick chords are buoyed by her rhythm section's warm groove until Del Castillo cuts across their bow spitting fiery tone spirals. More ruminative is the closing "Rising Phoenix" in which Toren plays a humming keyboard melody as Fruchter's oud makes way for a dusting of woody rattles, bells, and other percussion. With Scintillating Beauty, Toren has crafted an album that washes over you like a slow-moving tidal wave crushing and scattering everything in its path before receding into the ocean. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi

1		Radiance in Veils
2		Garment of Destiny
3		Ignis Fatuus
4		Rising Phoenix
5		Scintillating Beauty - Digital Booklet