Bringing together a rich collection of tones, Ben Wendel creates an elegiac album without drum and bass, mixing fanfares, declarations, impressions and standards with a mix and match team of artists. Wendel himself plays soprano and tenor saxes, along with bassoon, EFX and some hand percussion, bringing in the flutes of Elena Pinder Hughes, Terence Blanchard’s trumpet, Bill Frisell on guitar, pianist Tigran Hamasyan and vocalists Jose James and Cecile McLorin Salvant.The result is a collection of sonorities that bring out almost renaissance-like drapery if rich reeds in an orchestral fashion for Salvant’s haunting reciting of “I Loves You Porgy”, while Jose James is poetic around the Coplandesque interpretation of “Tenderly”. Frisell adds a gentle folksiness to “Throughout” with the horns creating a rhythmic pulse of their own on the bel canto “Wanderers”. Hamasyan’s piano sifts through the abstract colors and cries of “In Anima” and the flutes huff and puff while blowing the house down on the cantering “Speak”. If this band comes to town, will someone please let me know?