Souljazz's cultural and musical accreditations are bonafide and clear, but the hopping between cultures leaves the album ontologically indeterminate and, therefore, lacking a sense of cultural grounding. At worst, we're left with a musical hybrid that engages with the form of everything and everywhere, but the content of nothing and nowhere.

Cultural exchanges have been spanning oceans and pollinating musical movements long before The Souljazz Orchestra were doing so, but such stylistic jumps within the space of a few minutes can prove somewhat disorientating. The jump from genre to genre, country to country, can be tiring. The latter deploys the same elements, withholding its chord changes to formulaic but successfully manipulative effect.Р”В«ridging these two tracks is 'Agoya', a samba-referencing, anthemic affair that hints at a wider problem with Inner Fire. When the former's bassline is solidified and coupled with a Rhodes solo one minute in, it recalls the catharsis of 90s-era Tribe Called Quest instrumentals. This very precise approach to the foundational musical matter that underlies the group's music by no means invalidates all the tracks the same qualities that weaken 'Celestial Blues' prove affecting on 'Black Orchid' and 'East Flows The River'. This all makes the saxophone solo (neatly panned to the right), the piano solo (neatly panned to the left) and the double-bass noodling at the beginning seem purely ornamental and overly symmetrical.

A sharp rimshot is delivered on time in each bar, the bass lick is solid and consistent and, as a result, the vocals feel prosaic. In the Souljazz rendering, however, the song is evacuated of its spiritualism, and what we are left with is arithmetic and quantised. The tension between congregational collectivism and individual revelation is exquisitely realised, as is the inevitable failure to achieve the song's utopian premise: the listener truly understands the title's identification of the celestial universe and the human blues. In the original, the deliberately drunken mapping of Bartz's saxophone melody onto the unashamedly spiritual refrain, 'We must get closer to the essence of life / But be aware that it takes courage and strife / Expand your mind don't let it wither and dieРІР‚В¦' feels inspired. Take the penultimate song, 'Celestial Blues', a cover of Gary Bartz and Andy Bey's 1971 classic. In another sense, however, the flaws of Souljazz's multicultural approach to music all too present in their sixth LP Inner Fire, and are also informed by Ottawa's grey pluralism at its least appealing, Inner Fire is also far too measured, sensible and sanitised. Drawing from a global range of influences, for twelve years they've been rearranging Kuti-esque Afrobeat, Ralph McDonaldian Caribbean rhythms and (unsurprisingly) a lot of soul and jazz into complex and kinetic pastiches. In one sense, then, The Souljazz Orchestra can be seen as rallying against their home town's monotony. Replete with federal buildings, anonymous office blocks and identikit universities, Ottawa is all too measured, sensible and sanitised. Driving through Ottawa, the Canadian capital from which six-piece collective The Souljazz Orchestra hail, you may be struck by, well, nothing.

The souljazz orchestra inner fire songs