From former frontman of art-punk stalwarts Trenchmouth to polymath pillar of Chicago’s improv scene, Damon Locks’ career has led him to cross paths with so many different revolutionary musical thinkers and creators that his presence in International Anthem’s jazz-conversant community was practically a given. (In fact, his visual design sense and his artwork for releases like Nick Mazzarella Trio’s Ultraviolet and Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die were integral to the label’s identity years before he cut his first session for them.) Where Future Unfolds couldn’t help but find that similar communal connection, too. The album began as a one-man sound collage project based around speeches of the Civil Rights era, but took on the input of additional musicians over the span of four years until culminating as a live performance with a 15-member assemblage of musicians, singers, and dancers. What came out of it is a record that maintains the inspiration of past musical and cultural movements into an uncertain future where anger and optimism aren’t mutually exclusive — and neither are the past and the present, where echoes of Archie Shepp’s early ’70s funky avant-garde and Public Enemy’s freedom-or-death intensity fuel a necessarily inspirational anti-doomer Afrofutrism.