Yesterday You Said Tomorrow paints a complex, compelling jazz quintet self-portrait of trumpeter Christian Scott (who appears tonight on NBC's  Late Night With Jimmy Fallon sitting in with The Roots). Sometimes Scott's fourth Concord Jazz release captures beauty, like in his snapshot of "Isadora," a ballad where Scott plays Miles' whispered technique so prettily. Sometimes, like "The Last Broken Heart (Prop 8)" and "The Roe Effect (Refrain in F# Minor)," Scott turns up the heat on his bittersweet, ephemeral tone, igniting flames of consuming loss and regret, and moaning out his New Orleans soul in a genuinely tragic instrumental voice.

Sometimes the Scott quintet sounds content to venture into the modern jazz landscape, with deeply explorative interplay through "The American't" and "After All." Other times they playfully prowl around the fringes of jazz, gorging on this spacious cover of "The Eraser" from the solo debut by Thom Yorke (of Radiohead).

And sometimes, Yesterday rages and seethes. The quintet nurtures dark and bitter electronics into "An Unending Repentance," though its eventual melody proves quite beautiful for pianist Milton Fletcher, Jr. to explore. Scott's trumpet absolutely shrieks to cleave through the racket of "K.K.P.D." ("Ku Klux Police Department") and "Angola, LA & the 13th Amendment" with a tone honed to a hard, metallic sheen.

Yesterday mostly sounds like Christian Scott's world today. "[The album] was designed in subject matter and sound to have the brevity and character of the recordings of the '60s," Scott writes in its notes, "a period when music was in direct relationship to society in view and application."

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  The Eraser

  Christian Scott, from Yesterday You Said ...

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