Spirit Fiction

(Blue Note)

Ravi Coltrane has had arguably the hardest surname in jazz to live up to, especially being a saxophonist, but he's recording for the legendary Blue Note label, as did his father, John, before him, entirely on his own merits. Working in a variety of groupings, ranging from a freewheeling duo with drummer EJ Strickland to a beautifully voiced sextet including the album's co-producer, fellow saxophonist Joe Lovano and pianist Geri Allen, Coltrane shows his individual, pungent and probing tenor and soprano styles on numbers both composed and apparently spontaneous. Trumpeter-composer Ralph Alessi contributes strong themes (his Who Wants Ice Cream being particularly memorable) alongside Coltrane's own lovely, slightly solemn The Change, My Girl, a romp through Ornette Coleman's Check Out Time and a suitably elegiac reading of the late Paul Motian's Fantasm. If the occasionally more abstract quartet realisations by Coltrane, pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and Strickland don't perhaps have quite the same instant appeal, their character and strengths become clearer with repeated listening.