When you wipe away all of the minutiae and technical matters involved with the recording process, there are really only two schools of thought on the subject: You either aim to capture what's literally there or you choose to produce something that's not. Everything else is semantics and dealing with variants, mixtures, and/or a balance between the two. Those who aim to strictly capture are trying to bottle true-to-life sound, and those who produce prefer to use those sounds as the seeds to create something that's not necessarily new, but certainly personalized.

Saxophonist Marcus Strickland's Blue Note/Revive Music debut—Nihil Novi, Latin for "nothing new"—most definitely falls into the latter category. It's a production piece, with horns settled atop and submersed in sampled sounds, glazed over arenas, spoken word passages, layered vocals, and refracted rhythms. Strickland teamed with bassist-producer Meshell Ndegeocello, a genre-free visionary who's worked in many a different musical situation over the years, and she helped him to achieve his objective(s). Together they've created a forward-thinking record that's heavy on the nob-twisting but true to the spirit and soul of its creator(s).

Strickland's saxophones and bass clarinet are part of the greater whole here, helping to flesh out hybridized pictures. This crew touches on Afrobeat, dance floor culture, Eastern European folk strains, neo-soul, funk, R&B, gospel, and hip-hop, often grafting aspects of one to parts of another. The press materials—and the music—reference everybody from Madlib to