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Jeff Oster: True Sophisticated electronic looping, harmonized fluegelhorn lines and textured, ambient arrangements by John Diliberto It was exactly two years ago that Jeff Oster's debut album, Released, was our CD of the Month. For his second album, the fluegelhorn and trumpet player expands and goes beyond the themes of that album. Co-produced again with guitarist and Windham Hill founder, Will Ackerman, True maintains many of the characteristics of Released with sophisticated electronic looping, harmonized and multi-tracked fluegelhorn lines and textured, ambient arrangements.

The opening track "Saturn Calling" sets the pace with a quietly heroic, surging groove that alternates with pensive, wind blown fluegelhorn cries. After the ambient loops and textures of his first album, you can hear Oster's jazz fusion and progressive rock tendencies leaking out. From the opening track, you can hear the jazz voicings in his harmonized trumpet lines, but the loops and delayed U2/The Edge guitar sets a mood you won't find in jazz.

There are some gorgeous arrangements like "Violet," which features Patrick Gorman (sounding remarkably like Will Ackerman) on acoustic guitar, while also playing electric guitar textures. With swirling cello from Eugene Friesen and one of those open plains piano breaks by Philip Aaberg it's a plangent elegy topped by Oster's yearning horn.

A couple of tracks take the smooth jazz slide, notably "Serengeti" with its cool lounge rhythm, but it's redeemed by one of Samite's transcendent vocal choirs. I would not have put the funky "Once In A Blue Moonlight," with its R&B wordless testifying vocal from Melissa R. Kaplan, on this album, but a trio with Ackerman and Aaberg, the ruminative "On One Knee," gently gets the album back on track.

With its illusory edges and blurring of electric and acoustic textures, much of which is provided by sound designer Brian Carrigan, True is deftly sequenced. It accommodates dark film noir moods on "This Place" along with the jubilant, uplifting "Mumbai," a triumphant ode with a surging drum loop, Kaplan's wailing wordless vocals and Oster's clarion fluegelhorn cries sounding the charge.

Jeff Oster has been true to the promise of his debut album and True is our Echoes CD of the Month for September.