Guitarist Brad Shepik has admitted that a strictly musical approach to environmental issues may not be as persuasive as a song that can speak directly to specific problems with its lyrics. Nevertheless, his Human Activity Suite, a series of world music pieces intermixed with pieces highlighting the causes and effects of global climate change, is a powerful call for awareness, unity and action. It inspires with a universal glow rarely touched by song.

Commissioned by Chamber Music America and premiered in New York City in 2008, the suite employs Shepik's electric and acoustic guitars along with his more exotic tambura and electric saz, plus trumpet, organ, accordion, bass and drums, in an international mix meant both to represent the seven continents separately and fuse them—and their people—into a single planet faced with a collective problem. The well-traveled Shepik has drawn on his knowledge of various indigenous musics to construct the stages on which his versatile, accomplished musicians can improvise. The result comes off as intended: it's a passionate, if indirect, message album, flavorful in its spicy blend of world music performed within the jazz idiom.

While the record abounds with blasts of power, Shepik's compositional touch is light. He relies on the musicians around him to fill the skeletons of his global constructs rather than orchestrating anthemic calls-to-action in the mode of, say,