From the River to the Ocean

This 2007 album, co-billed with Hamid Drake, brings Anderson into the realm of spiritual trance jazz, and unsurprisingly he thrives there. The ensemble is heavy on strings: Jeff Parker plays guitar on two tracks, and throughout the album Harrison Bankhead and Josh Abrams switch among bass, cello, and guembri. On the nearly 14-minute title track, they congeal as an ensemble, the bassist taking a stunning cello-like bowed solo as Drake’s frame drum and Abrams’ guembri teleport the listener from Chicago’s South Side to the desert of North Africa, with Anderson’s intensely focused saxophone the through-line.