Portland trio offering a distinctive contribution to the lineage of Great Black Music. All is Sound - now reissued - positions itself at the intersection of several African-American musical traditions: the meditative modality of Alice Coltrane's ashram recordings, the cosmic expansiveness of Sun Ra's quieter moments, and the devotional intensity that Pharoah Sanders brought to his late-period work.

The Cosmic Tones Research Trio comprises alto saxophonist and composer Roman Norfleet, cellist and multi-instrumentalist Harlan Silverman, and pianist Kennedy Verrett, who also contributes various wind instruments. Their instrumentation alone suggests an openness to chamber music sensibilities rarely explored in this idiom - the cello in particular adds a timbral warmth that grounds the ensemble's more ethereal tendencies.

The music operates primarily in a contemplative register, with delicate melodic cells developed through patient, unhurried improvisation. Gospel and Blues inflections surface throughout, not as stylistic quotations but as deep structural elements - the way a phrase bends, the weight given to certain intervals. The group draws on their collective experience in acoustic ecology and sound meditation, and this informs the music's spatial qualities: silence is treated as compositional material, dynamics are handled with unusual care.

A follow-up to Norfleet's 2023 debut on Mississippi Records (Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group), All is Sound extends that record's concerns while achieving a more unified group identity. The title functions as both description and aspiration - an affirmation of sound's capacity for restoration, articulated through thoughtful, unassuming musicianship.