I've often thought that the emphatic and unifying cry of the Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop, One Caribbean!, had enormous salience to jazz. What a vibrant, groovy and hugely powerful intergenerational big band of jazz musicians of Caribbean provenance could be formed, if only in the imagination, from Jamaica. Born horn men like trumpeter Dizzy Reece, altoists Joe Harriott and Bertie King, Ellington's great trombonist of muted glory Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton and piantists Wynton kelly and Monty Alexander. And from the eastern Caribbean too, two bristling trumpeters - Vincentian Shake Keane and Barbadian Harry Beckett, or pianist Robert Mitchell, a Londoner with forebears from Grenada.

And the impassioned sound of the tenor saxophonist with St Lucian parents, Denys Baptiste, whose fourth album Identity By Abstraction is a telling statement indeed. Baptiste was born in Hounslow in 1959 and his father's record collection, which included albums by Basie and Mingus, propelled him towards jazz. He had his first saxophone lessons as a 14-year-old, while hearing the sounds of the west London Caribbean community all around him. He studied music for two years at the West London Institute before signing on for a course in jazz at the Guildhall School of Music. He played with his mentor Gary Crosby and his Nu Troop in the '90s before cutting his first album Be Where you Are in 1999, followed by Alternating Currents in 2001. In 2003 Let Freedom Ring commemorated the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's epochal Washington speech. It was a contender for Best Album and Best New Work in the BBC Jazz Awards.

Baptiste has with him some impressive musical confreres in Identity By Subtraction. Crosby joins him on bass, adding his long-serving Anglo-Caribbean heartbeat to Baptiste's own diasporan sound. The pianist is Andrew McCormick, another west London boy and alumnus of Pimlico School, a white Englishman with a deep Caribbean empathy who regularly accompanies other saxophonists of Antillean roots like Jason Yarde and Jean Toussaint. The drummer is Rod Youngs. Baptiste desribes his album as a "collage of thoughts and improvisations" and the title tune includes a rocking chorus by McCormick with Crosby's walking bass and and Baptiste pouring out his soundscapes with a weaving beauty. The second track, Apprehension, exresses the moments before and during the act of creating music, of pathmaking through notes and Baptiste's solo is ripe with nervous excitation. Dance of the Maquiritari was born after Baptiste learned from his mother that her grandparents were descendants of Amerindian peoples of the shores of the Orinico River in Venezuela. It has a south American groove heightened by Youngs's lively and jumping drums, while its successor Special Times has another family dedication to Baptiste's wife and children. His soprano radiates intimacy and melodic love. Evolution From Revolution charts the story of the Caribbean people in Britain since the arrivant experiences of the post-war Windrush generation, through the resistance of the 1970s and the continuing struggles of now-times.

Baptiste plays like a musical riot, each note spilling out the lives of his people, as he compounds a sound-chronicle, with Crosby's ever-present bass marking down the years. Another Caribbean bass doyen, the veteran Coleridge Goode, who played beside fellow-Jamaican Harriott is the hero of Harriotts Charriott - A Life in the Bass Line. Goode recounts his life and musical ideas over Baptiste's swinging orn with a moving eloquence. Song For You is a previously unrecorded tune by the late South African pianist Bheki Mseuluki, with whom Baptiste toured 20 years ago. Full of life and African free spirit, it uplifts the musicians, has their notes running across the Veldtlands. And there is more history in The Long Night, which marks the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The horn-chronicler Baptiste tells the story with the sound of truth, passion, the blues and final redemption.