Last summer, at the height of pandemic paranoia and the social unrest that followed the death of George Floyd, Damon Locks gathered the members of his Black Monument Ensemble collective in a garden behind Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio. The result of those socially distanced recording sessions is Now, an album rooted in first or second take recordings that brilliantly joins the dots between spiritual jazz, soul-jazz, hip-hop style beat-making and Locks' sample collage-based experimentalism. It's a terrific album all told, with loose-limbed drums, rubbery double bass, occasional vocals (both sung and spoken) and ear-catching brass and woodwind instruments vying for sound space with eight-bit electronics, wayward samples, hazy drone tones and impressively experimental studio trickery.