Trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas has always had a searching eye and an irrepressible curiosity. He doesn’t refuse to look back; he’s not a novelty-junkie; and he’s never shied away from his love of melody and the complications inherent in beauty. But though he’s played with a remarkable diversity of musicians, he’s managed to always sound like himself.

Douglas’ new record, High Risk (Greenleaf Music), pairs him with Ghostly International electronic artist Shigeto, along with Mark Guilana on drums and Jonathan Maron on bass guitar and keyboard bass. But though he dabbles in EDM and ambient music, the album finds Douglas mostly in a pastoral mode. High Risk grapples with nature and sensuality. It’s rich with ballads, and even more often, the trumpet lags behind the beat as Guilana works through drill-and-bass-inspired breakdowns underneath in almost a Joey-and–Dee Dee contrast of tempo. This richness is helped immensely by Jeff Countryman’s production, mixed like a classic R&B or soul-jazz record with Douglas in the role of crooner, voice front and center so every nuance of his playing washes over you.

Douglas has always had a gift for infectious melodies working in concert with gritty, surprising textures, as well as finding the perfect arrangements to highlight exactly what’s most interesting. The title track is an example of Douglas at the height of his powers. His trumpet moves from melancholy to a more aggressive cry of loneliness and freedom, a melodic line that screams against and spills out of its confinement. The backing group is beautifully egoless, with Shigeto’s washes of sound adding to the hazy nature painting quality of Douglas’ ode and Maron and Guiliana filling in the cracks. “Tied Together” has a similarly gorgeous melody, a story about looking back told through trumpet, which in turn is echoed by burbling static and synth lines rising and falling like a river behind him.

Of the head-nodding dance tracks, “Etiquette” is the most successful fusion on on the record. Guilana’s drums use echo to create a sense of space and distance and, in turn, use this depth of field to imply a spacious sound world. Maron’s bass pumps blood to both the drums and the electronic textures, but also provides a catchy hook, stretched out like chewing gum and distorted to the point where it almost resembles a tuba as he and Douglas drift into a cubist New Orleans fantasia. Here, Douglas teases and thrillingly flips against all of these things for his most unhinged, loose trumpet playing, dancing with the very edge of his voice and leaping off the end of the world. Shigeto glazes all of this in an appealing, soft-focus fog of disorientation.

What makes this record a mixed bag instead of a home run, though, is often the inertness of the rhythm section. For such a ballad-heavy record, the drums rely too heavily on schtick and forced drama when the songs are enough. Too often they add up to backgrounds that seem static rather than shading in the fascinating textures and melodies Dave Douglas and Shigeto have built into these songs.