In Loving Memory of America
Friday, October 2, 2009 at 9:05AM
"Atzmon's fluid lyricism is in full flow on songbook classics and worldly originals. But as sweet romance morphs to modernist uncertainty, the bittersweet balance and rich emotional palette equally impress." Financial Times *****
"Gilad Atzmon, the expat Israeli saxophonist/clarinetist, combines thrilling jazz musicianship with a maverick political intelligence" Guardian ****
"Like the best of albums" Jazzwise ****
"Atzmon always manages to tell a story" Uncut ****
"One of the finest alto players around, Gilad pays his respects to Bird i...It's striking how similar Gilad's sweet, open-throated sound is to Parker's, but as you'd expect from the fiery philosopher-turned-Blockhead, this is no tribute album." BBC Music Magazine March 2009
"Maybe because he's such a wild card himself, saxophonist Atzmon plays Charlie Parker with a perfect mix of bluster and vulnerability." The Independent March 2009
"Atzmon is surely the hardest-gigging man in British jazz...the music here is subtle, ambiguous, often beautiful - and features a saxophonist playing deep from the heart." The Times **** March 2009
"An avid Charlie Parker disciple..." Evening Standard March 2009
"This is an outstanding album." Allaboutjazz March 2009
"is almost like a suite, with one track leading into the next" Scotland on Sunday**** March 2009
"A genuine expression of love" Scotsman**** March 2009
"The fiery Atzmon took his show from a demure chamber-music lilt to a Coltrane-inspired roar and back, and the crowd was right there through it all." Guardian Live Review ****
"A delightful evening of artfully crafted music that was rich with emotional complexity." Financial Times March 2009
"Musical genius and comic" Leicester Mercury March 2009
"Work of beauty, power and intense sonic vision" Morning Star April 2009
"Atzmon is a loose cannon: a larger than life figure with an almost overpowering musical personality... it's as perfect a jazz marriage as you could wish for"
Phil Johnson, independent on Sunday Jazz Critic
"Atzmon is a hell of a talent...essential listen for all contemporary music fans. Atzmon has done what all the best jazzers do and put his own stamp on his chosen material. This may be loving tribute to a mythic past but it is one with an unmistakably contemporary edge" The Jazz Man ****
"this is far from a retro exercise in simply re-creating the past" Socialist Review
For album info click here
Jazz - Mike Hobart
By Mike Hobart
Published: February 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 28 2009 02:00
Gilad Atzmon
In Loving Memory of America
Enja *****
Gilad Atzmon celebrates his love affair with America by buffering his alto sax with a string quartet, backed by his regular rhythm section. It is a lovely album, part homage to a famous recording session - Charlie Parker with Strings - and part rumination on lost innocence. Atzmon's fluid lyricism is in full flow on songbook classics and worldly originals. But as sweet romance morphs to modernist uncertainty, the bittersweet balance and rich emotional palette equally impress.
Guardian ****
Gilad Atzmon: In Loving Memory of America
(Enja)
John Fordham
The Guardian, Friday 27 February 2009
Article history
Gilad Atzmon
In Loving Memory of America
Enja
Gilad Atzmon, the expat Israeli saxophonist/clarinetist, combines thrilling jazz musicianship with a maverick political intelligence; anyone who knows him will look at this album's title and smell a rat. But it's not ironic; it alludes to Atzmon's nostalgia for the best of America's broad-horizon potential, what he calls "a memory of America I had cherished in my mind for many years". Atzmon found jazz through a Charlie Parker record when he was a 17-year-old in Jerusalem, and this set (with five standards and six originals) is inspired by the sumptuous harmonies and impassioned sax-playing of Parker's late-40s recordings with classical strings. Atzmon drifts in an uncannily Bird-like manner on a imploring Everything Happens to Me; brings a darker, old-Europe romanticism to his own song musIK; and mingles the string group's soft sweeps and his own crisp phrasing with a bright, funky groove on What Is This Thing Called Love. The title track (barely more than a minute long), is a street-collage of multilingual chatter with the horn interweaving over a thundering hip-hop pulse. The resourceful Atzmon tours the UK with this repertoire from next week.
6 March 2009
Gilad Atzmon
In Loving Memory of America
(Enja)
****
An avid Charlie Parker disciple, Atzmon recently recreated the Bird with Strings album with great care. Here, with five Parkerian standards and six beautiful originals (notably In the Small Hours), he sounds even better. Between his quartet and the Sigamos String Quartet, and occasionally using soprano sax or clarinet, the brilliant Israeli altoist brings new maturity and restraint to his always impassioned work. The title track magically demonstrates in one minute, 42 seconds how bebop grew from big-city street speech patterns. Hear it all live next Tuesday at St Cyprian's Church near Baker Street.
JACK MASSARIK,
Gilad Atzmon - In Loving Memory Of America
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27/02/09
Enja/Tiptoe TIP888 850-2 ****
Gilad Atzmon (as, ss, clt), Frank Harrison (p, ky), Yaron Stavi (b), Asaf Sirkis (d) plus the Sigamos String Quartet, Huw Stephen, Emil Chakalov (vln), Rachel Robson (vla) and Daisy Vatalaro (clo). Rec. date not stated
Like the best of albums, In Loving Memory Of America works on many levels. Ostensibly it’s a re-imagining of Charlie Parker’s iconic releases with strings. Some of the tracks are done reasonably straight: the opening ‘Everything Happens To Me’ welcomes (seduces?) us in, but swiftly ‘If I Should Lose You’ comes under assault from a scrape of strings, a broken piano chord, a military march… this is Parker (or rather an image of Parker) re-contextualised for our world of shock and awe.
But this is subtle shape shifting, not overt obliteration: only the brief, explosively neurotic title track breaks out of the chamber-like intimacies of this meditative, ambiguous, yearning music. Instead, Parker’s melodic grasp and the strength of the original ‘standards’ material proves more than hardy enough to withstand these reappraisals; indeed, the music thrives like a besieged people under assault.
And it’s not only Parker in the searchlight. Atzmon’s own material is revisited with help from collaborating arrangers Ros Stephen and John Turville. ‘musiK’ gets a Hermann-esque reworking that is eery, heartfelt.
As for Atzmon, those who have heard him only pained, protesting, ironic will find this melodic, disciplined performance a pleasant surprise: there’s real sweetness here, all the more so in contrast to the stripped down power of the Sigamos Quartet. A significant, passionate, gorgeous album which is not only beautiful in itself, but has that rare gift of making us listen afresh to music we once thought we knew, be it Parker, Porter or indeed Atzmon.
Andy Robson
From The Times ****
March 6, 2009
Gilad Atzmon: In Loving Memory of America
John Bungey
The “hardest-working man in showbusiness” is a double-edged accolade. It may be that you're driven; it may just be that the gigs aren't paying enough for you to ease off and watch Countdown.
Whatever the reason, Atzmon is surely the hardest-gigging man in British jazz; even now the tour van sat-nav is being tweaked before another schlep round Britain from Tuesday. But what fans will hear this time will not be the usual mix of fiery sax and fiery rhetoric (famously he's an Israeli who hates Zionism). No, the veteran Bush-basher seems at first appearance to have gone soft.
The new album is presented as a string-laden paean to the American jazz that seduced Atzmon as a teenager. His chief inspiration is Charlie Parker's recordings with strings, and on the opener, Everything Happens to Me, Atzmon's liquid sax basks in the gentle glow of the Sigamos Quartet.
But this being Atzmon, serenity is short-lived. On If I Should Lose You, querulous fiddle notes and a military snare disrupt the nostalgic melody. What is This Thing called Love is updated with a gentle groove and a hypnotic string motif. Atzmon's own material is revisited too; musiK features a piano solo of rippling beauty from Frank Harrison.
For Atzmon fans, this album reveals a new side. We've heard him do loud, ironic and satirical, too (the bonkers Artie Fishel project, when he decided he wanted to be a spoof Jew). Instead, the music here is subtle, ambiguous, often beautiful - and features a saxophonist playing deep from the heart.
(Enja, TS £12.72)
Album: Gilad Atzmon, In Loving Memory of America, (Enja)
Reviewed by Phil Johnson
Sunday, 8 March
Maybe because he's such a wild card himself, saxophonist Atzmon plays Charlie Parker with a perfect mix of bluster and vulnerability.
This excellent recording, which matches Atzmon's quartet with the Sigamos String Quartet, adds six complementary originals to five Verve standards to form a very satisfying suite. The string arrangements by Ros Stephen and Jonathan Taylor recall Last Tango in Paris as much as bebop, and there's a dark, ominous mood that's entirely appropriate.
Pick of the album: 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was': a jazz classic, reinvented
Morning Star
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/culture/music/album/gilad_atzmon
Gilad Atzmon
In Loving Memory of America (Enja-Tiptree Tip 888 850-2)
Friday 17 April 2009 by Chris Searle Printable Email
Discovering a soaring global spirit in Atzmon's tribute to Charlie 'Bird' Parker
Between 1949 and 1952 the nonpareil bop altoist Charlie "Bird" Parker recorded his Charlie Parker with Strings sessions in New York. Bird plays with his customary exuberant brilliance and assurance, his imagination and powers of improvisation flare, his blues impulse is rampant and fecund - even through the most maudlin Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley tunes such as Dancing in the Dark, What Is this Thing Called Love? and Temptation.
But what a contrast with the strings that accompany him - saccharine, insipid and implausible, contrasting with and lacking the intensity of Parker's phenomenal tone and boundless invention.
So when I first saw Gilad Atzmon's new album In Loving Memory of America, recorded with the Sigamos String Quartet more than half a century on from Parker's sessions, but including some of the same tunes as one alto saxophonist's emulative tribute to the instrument's master, I had a slight sense of a strange foreboding: what was going to happen here? How was the Levantine beauty of Atzmon's Palestinian cry going to reflect Bird's soaring blues-song? And how were Atzmon's notes going to mesh with the strings and themes of the American Song Book's subliminal mawkishness?
I shouldn't have been nervous, for the album is a work of beauty, power and intense sonic vision. The plucked string intro of the opener, Everything Happens to Me, prefaces Atzmon, playing straight melody with a cascading blues undertone. One cadence falls as if from a dizzying height and you wonder if the song, born as a love-ballad but as ironically played by Atzmon, seemingly enfold the Palestinian life, for there is the sound of exile, loss, occupation and defiance absorbed in all his notes and even more so in the insurgent-sounding drums that begin If I Should Lose You. As for the strings, there is no syrup or sentiment with their sound. They are entirely with Atzmon, gelling with his tone and carrying his strength and narrative with them.
Especially so in his own composition and theme tune for an earlier album, Musik. Here the dark melody leads through their measured composure. Atzmon soars - at one moment he reminds you of Sidney Bechet's mountainous breath, until he returns with the theme's vulnerability before a final truculent coda.
What are the children's voices at the closure of a virtual marching What Is this Thing Called Love? Are they of Palestinian or US children - for what unity could be theirs, prevented by the neocon? Creed within the following track, called expressively Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious And Insatiable.
I Didn't Know What Time it was moves close to Parker, with Yaron Stavi's bass emphatic. Yet it is redrawn by Atzmon, given a contemplative, ponderous blowing as if the world doesn't know either. His own tune In the Small Hours sustains the sense of concentrated thought in the midst of a bombarded Gazan community, more sonic beauty and more Parkeresque licks. Tu Tu Tango begins quietly, but halfway through throws out a Latino challenge, as if the people of the south American cone, up through Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela are casting an alternative to the cruel policies of the titan of the north.
The album's title tune comes as the penultimate track and carries neither bitterness nor malice. Instead, we hear ordinary US voices and street scat, with Atzmon's alto an almost distant sound, fused with the vibrant and ever-changing speech of a diverse people, the true humanity of the US on whom much of the future's potency will depend.
Finally there is Refuge, embodying a theme set forth in Atzmon's 2007 album, with one of the tracks called The Burning Bush. Now that Bush's rule is gone, much counts too on the intentions and will of his successor. This Refuge is a gleeful klezmer-style romp, with Atzmon's horn and the strings in a question and answer colloquy, radiating sheer optimism and joy. Is this a future US?
As in all jazz, the listener listens, the ear hearkens and the brain interprets. So hear Bird first and Atzmon next and take stock of the messages: the US is there, Palestine is there and the story telling hornman is there. What is he saying to us? Only he and the listener know.
allaboutjazz.com
Gilad Atzmon Plays Bird and More at Snape Proms in Suffolk, England
Gilad Atzmon - Published: September 18, 2009
By Bruce Lindsay
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=34007
Gilad Atzmon
Snape Maltings Concert Hall
Suffolk, England
August 26, 2009
Snape Concert Hall, set in beautiful Suffolk countryside, was built as a barley malting hall in the 1840s. In 1965 the hall was converted by composer Benjamin Britten into a 900-seat concert venue. Saxophonist Gilad Atzmon loves Snape Concert Hall—and, lest his love affair with the place wasn't clear from his playing, he went to the extra trouble of telling the audience on at least three occasions during the evening of his fondness for the venue, delivering a warm and entertaining performance of rare quality. Atzmon is a mesmerizing performer: a strong visual presence on stage, a stand-up comedian (at one point he tried to persuade the audience that Charlie Parker had been born in Ipswich, Suffolk's county town), as well as a gifted musician.
Atzmon was performing his Gilad With Strings program as part of the Snape Proms, accompanied by Frank Harrison on piano, Yaron Stavi on bass, Eddie Hicks on drums and the Sigamos String Quartet led by Ros Stephens. Gilad With String is, as Atzmon said, a tribute to Charlie Parker. Most of the evening's tunes were taken from Parker's 1949 recordings with a string orchestra—featured on Atzmon's album In Loving Memory Of America (Enja Records, 2009)—with the addition of some of Atzmon's own compositions. The resulting concert blended jazz and classical performers into a superb musical aggregation.
The tunes taken from Parker's recordings were beautifully arranged and performed. Each seemed to deliver its own memorable highlight. Cole Porter's "What is This Thing Called Love" was underpinned by a smooth, driving, rhythm from Stavi and Hicks: Rodgers and Hart's "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" was exceptionally beautiful throughout, from the strings' languid opening bars to their final sustained note; David Raksin's "Laura," played as the encore, was an exquisite ensemble performance. The string quartet arrangements for these tunes, by Stephens, were sympathetic to the original Parker arrangements while the Sigamos Quartet's own enthusiasm also helped to ensure that these four players created a sound that was almost as full and effective as that of the original, larger orchestra.
While these tunes were things of beauty, played with love and reverence, it was Atzmon's own compositions that were the high points of the night. "The Burning Bush" and "Refuge" were played with power and emotion from all of the musicians and clearly showed the wide range of influences Atzmon brings to bear on his writing and playing, especially those of his own Middle Eastern upbringing. In "The Burning Bush," the longest tune of the night, Atzmon vocalized through his alto as well as coaxed an exceptional purity of tone from the instrument. The jazz musicians played with increasing volume, almost in competition with the Sigamos Quartet who, despite playing with equal enthusiasm, were drowned out for the only time in the concert. "Refuge" was a powerful and dynamic performance from all eight musicians. Harrison strummed the piano strings, Stavi and Hicks provided a strong pulse at the heart of the tune, and Atzmon, on clarinet, traded phrases with the string players, who also added back-up vocals by singing through their instruments' microphones.
"Call me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious and Insatiable," performed by Atzmon on clarinet accompanied by the Sigamos Quartet, showed a gentler, more straightforward side to Atzmon's writing and playing, despite the tune's title. So, too, did a short duet with Harrison during which Atzmon played long phrases with his alto horn under the lid of the piano. Atzmon did not attach microphones to his instruments, preferring instead to play into freestanding microphones. This detachment from the electronic amplification allowed him much greater control over the dynamics of his playing, which he used to great effect. It also enabled him to prowl the stage with his instrument, playing with great sensitivity and emotion alone at center stage, or close to one or another of his fellow musicians, with little if any loss of volume—a testament to the hall's excellent acoustics as well as to Atzmon's ability as a musician.
This was a beautiful performance, in a beautiful venue. The musicians never forgot that they were playing for an audience, and as a result the concert made for an involving, affective and memorable evening.
Gilad Atzmon
In Loving Memory Of America
[Enja]
Artist: Gilad Atzmon
Released: 02 March 2009
Catalogue number: TIP8888502
Review
by Kathryn Shackleton
27 February 2009
It was Gilad Atzmon's fascination with American jazz that turned him into a musician, but his disillusionment with US politics kept him in London. In Loving Memory Of America charts the Israeli saxophonist's quirky musical journey starting with his enlightenment on hearing, ''Charlie Parker with Strings''.
One of the finest alto players around, Gilad pays his respects to Bird in a collaboration between his Orient House Ensemble and the Sigamos String Quartet. It's striking how similar Gilad's sweet, open-throated sound is to Parker's, but as you'd expect from the fiery philosopher-turned-Blockhead, this is no tribute album.
Violinist Ros Stephen's lush arrangements for Everything Happens To Me and April In Paris stay true to ''Charlie Parker with Strings''. What Is This Thing Called Love hijacks Parker's riffs, though, updating them into danceable funk, while muttering strings haunt the tango interpretation of ‘f I Should Lose You.
Alongside Bird's tunes there are reworked tracks from other OHE albums and brand new pieces, all continuing the 'with strings' theme. Tutu Tango is part burlesque fairground and part bar-room tango while musiK sets Frank Harrison's thoughtful, exploring piano against a delicious weight of strings.
Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious And Insatiable also appears on singer/songwriter Sarah Gillespie's debut, produced by Atzmon. On this raw ballad plaintive violin meets powerful Middle Eastern clarinet, while the album's tiny title track splices background chatter and rumbling beats. With its distant scat and sax lines it's a vision of New York living on in Gilad's head.
Recorded on the cusp of the transition from Bush to Obama, In Loving Memory of America tempers schmaltz with grit. This is not the wacky world of Artie Fishel or the magnum opus of Refuge. In Loving Memory is Gilad's epitaph to his American dream.
Album review: Gilad Atzmon: In Loving Memory of America
Published Date: 09 March 2009
By KENNY MATHIESON
****
ENJA/TIPTOE, £13.70
THE Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon revisits his early obsession with American jazz stars such as Charlie Parker but, as you might expect, not without a sting in the tail. His loving renditions of five familiar jazz standards, complete with lush string backing from the Sigamos String Quartet, have the elegance and richness of sonority of Parker's "with strings" projects of the early 1950s embedded in them, but are interspersed with six of his own compositions drawing on a more contemporary musical vocabulary (including a short sound collage).
The effect is to create both an implicit commentary on the standards, and a powerful sense of dislocation at the end. As always, it has a political edge to it – his recollections of the America this music represents are a genuine expression of love, but also a lament for the loss of his former idealised understanding of the country, which he now sees in a different cultural and political light.
His own playing is as impassioned as ever, and his regular cohorts Frank Harrison on piano, Yaron Stavi on bass and drummer Asaf Sirkis respond in their usual empathic fashion.
Published Date: 29 March 2009
By Alison Kerr
In Loving Memory Of America
Enja Tip Toe TIP 888 850 2, £12.72
This strangely beguiling album is a homage to the America of the Israeli saxophonist and clarinettist Gilad Atzmon's early dreams, and the people who made him fall in love with jazz, especially Charlie Parker. Featuring a string quartet and some very stylish arrangements, the CD – a mix of standards and original compositions – is almost like a suite, with one track leading into the next. Sumptuous strings play alongside a funky Fender Rhodes, notably on 'What Is This Thing Called Love'.
Manic beat preacher
Between his firebrand political outbursts and his blistering live gigs, Gilad Atzmon has somehow found time to pay homage to his heroes. He talks to John Lewis
John Lewis
The Guardian, Friday 6 March 2009
A few days before I meet Gilad Atzmon, he finds himself at the centre of an international storm. The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has approvingly cited Atzmon during a debate with Israeli president Shimon Peres. "Atzmon, a Jew himself," said Erdo?an, "says that Israeli barbarity is far beyond even ordinary cruelty." Ever since, Atzmon has been getting 200 emails a day, his BlackBerry is constantly buzzing and his words are being debated by hundreds of bloggers around the world. Atzmon is revelling in the attention.
"A world leader quoting an artist?" he laughs. "Isn't that incredible? Not a singer, not even a fucking pianist, but a stupid fucking saxophonist! Ha!"
It may come as a surprise to some that Atzmon is a saxophonist at all. His career as a musician has long been drowned out by the clatter of his extra-curricular activities: the furious attacks on Israel (he writes and edits for the website Palestine Think Tank); the philosophical texts on Jewish identity that get discussed by the likes of Noam Chomsky; the two comic novels that have been translated into 24 languages.
However, since his arrival in London in 1994, Atzmon has also established himself as one of London's finest saxophonists. His work rate is phenomenal: he plays more than 100 dates a year, alternating between his straightahead bebop quartet and his Arabic-tinged Orient House Ensemble (named after the old PLO headquarters in east Jerusalem). As well as recording nine of his own albums, he tours and records with the Blockheads, the band he joined two years before the death of its leader, Ian Dury. He is recording a third album with another great English pop eccentric, Robert Wyatt, who describes him as "one of the few musical geniuses I've ever met". The day we meet, Atzmon is producing an album for the Dutch-Iraqi jazz singer Elizabeth Simonian; he has also recently helmed LPs by the singer-songwriter Sarah Gillespie, the afro-jazz percussionist and singer Adriano Adewale, and Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy.
This month, Atzmon launches his latest project, the album In Loving Memory of America. It's what he calls "a very personal story, of how I fell in love with jazz and fell in love - and out of love - with America".
Atzmon was born in Tel Aviv in 1963, into what he describes as "a conservative, secular Zionist family". During his National Service, he served as a paramedic in the Israeli army in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and started to question some of the fundamental tenets of his upbringing. "I realised that I was part of a colonial state, the result of plundering and ethnic cleansing," he says. He sought solace in jazz, in particular the recordings that Charlie Parker made with a string section in the early 1950s.
"Charlie Parker With Strings was the first jazz album I fell in love with when I was 17," he says. "It's the record that made me want to be a jazz musician. I loved the way the music is both beautiful and subversive - they way he basks in the strings but also fights against them. Since then, I've never been crazy about smooth jazz albums with strings, which is why I wanted to do it properly myself, to put Parker's ideas in a modern context."
The strings are orchestrated by the violinist Ros Stephen from Tango Siempre, the British tango outfit with whom Atzmon has recorded and toured recently. Despite the unorthodox setting, the project is Atzmon's most full-on "jazz" album since 1999's incendiary, pianoless set, Take It Or Leave It.
"It's true," he admits. "I've developed a reputation as a so-called jazz saxophonist, but the irony is that I rarely make jazz records these days. But I always love playing jazz because, even when I'm playing it, I don't know what the next line is going to sound like. That's what makes it truthful and genuine.
"That's one of the problems with a lot of contemporary jazz. Most of the young musicians I come across now are visually oriented. They learn licks by reading music from textbooks, but they don't learn the longer line. When I teach students, I tell them to put the instrument aside and learn to sing." He sings a complicated bebop line. "Only then, once you've learned to sing something, should you learn how to play it. It's like how Indian musicians learn to sing 'ta-ra-ta-da' for years before they are allowed pick up the tabla.
"I call it reverting to the primacy of the ear. Western education is very visually oriented: you play two bars of one chord, two bars of another - it's all written out in grids. I see the way my daughter learns the cello. It's codified, methodically. But there is no way to write Arabic music." He hums a melismatic Arabic phrase. "There is no way you can write that down. You have to learn to internalise it before you can play it on an instrument. You have to listen. And that's where I see the overlap with politics. I see Arabic music as injecting ethics into my music. We don't listen to Arab voices. We don't listen to Hamas. We don't listen to Hezbollah, or Ahmadinejad."
It doesn't take long for Atzmon to ricochet from talking about music to talking about politics, and a lengthy, furious and often hilarious argument about Islamism ensues. The problem is that trenchant politics often sit uneasily alongside music, particularly when that music is instrumental. Atzmon's musical method has been to play with notions of cultural identity, flirting with genres such as tango and klezmer as well as various Arabic, Balkan, Gypsy and Ladino folk forms. Only one of his albums has been truly bad - his 2006 comedy klezmer project, Artie Fishel and the Promised Band, a clumsy satire on what he regards as the artificial nature of Jewish identity politics - but even his best albums have a slighly tame, homogenous feel that shares little with his blistering live performances.
"My albums are nothing like my live shows," he says. "It's very deliberate. I don't think that anyone can sit in a house, at home, and listen to me play a full-on bebop solo. It's too intense. My albums need to be less manic. Of course, the album as a format is dying - soon the only place anybody will sell CDs is at gigs - but they still serve as a very important document of whatever project I'm working on."
It is Atzmon's blunt anti-Zionism rather than his music that has given him an international profile, particularly in the Arab world, where his essays are widely read. (He favours a one-state solution in Palestine; he concedes that it will probably be controlled by Islamists, but says, "That's their business.") It has also made him many enemies, even among some former allies. Some Palestinian activists see his provocatively anti-Jewish rhetoric as discrediting their cause, while the Socialist Workers party, which once proudly paraded him at conferences, has distanced itself from him.
"I don't give a shit, really," he says with a shrug. "The Palestinian cause doesn't belong to any one person. And I don't identify with any political party. That's the advantage the artist has over the politician. The politician, like the scientist or the academic, looks at the world and tries to tell us things about ourselves. I am an artist. I look into myself and try to tell you things about the world. We push envelopes because we look into ourselves. You don't have to listen to me. You can take it or leave it. But it's my truth."
• Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble and the Sigamos String Quartet play St Cyprian's Church, London, on Tuesday, then tour. In Loving Memory of America is out now on Enja
RAY COMISKEY
This week's jazz releases reviewed.
GILAD ATZMON
In Loving Memory of America Enja ***
Atzmon’s music has often reflected his passion and political commitment. They’re evident in this bittersweet tribute to America and his jazz heroes of the 1950s and 1960s, which sets his brilliant clarinet, alto and soprano saxophones against the backdrop of the Sigamos String Quartet and his own rhythm section. Atzmon’s fine playing and more than half the repertoire inevitably echo the Charlie Parker music of the strings, and the retro feel is pointed. This is a salute to Atzmon’s idea of America when that idea stood for something vastly different from his perception of the place today.
Yet Parker (and Atzmon’s other jazz heroes) had a more jaundiced idea of the country then, based on experience, which muddies the political undercurrents of Atzmon’s tribute. But it doesn’t take from the music’s astringent beauty or the compellingly ambivalent warmth of his performance.
In Loving Memory of America
Gilad Atzmon | Enja Records (2009)
By Bruce Lindsay Discuss
This is an outstanding album. Reed man Gilad Atzmon has taken five standards, re-interpreting the versions recorded with strings by Charlie Parker, added six of his own compositions, and created an original, supremely enjoyable and affecting piece of work.
The album's title refers to an imagined land—the country that Atzmon envisaged when, as a 17 year-old in Israel, he first heard Charlie Parker playing "April in Paris" and fell in love with jazz and America. According to his liner notes, this is not the America that Atzmon sees today, where jazz is no longer a revolutionary music, but it is still the home of his "priests" and "heroes." In Loving Memory of America is a fitting tribute to those artists.
This is not an album that slavishly copies the sound of Parker with an orchestra. That sound is an inspiration for the album, and Atzmon's arrangements of the standards bear a clear resemblance to the originals, but there is no attempt to play solos note for note, to recreate the sound of the '50s orchestra or to ignore the 60 years that have passed since the first of Parker's recordings. Indeed, two of Atzmon's own compositions—"In Loving Memory of America" and "Refuge," a reworking of "My Refuge" from Refuge (Enja, 2007)—show some of the composer's contemporary influences, and stand in marked contrast to the rest of the album, the former layering free-form sax, scat singing, street sounds and Fender Rhodes over a heavy percussive beat.
Instead of using a full string section Atzmon collaborates here with the Sigamos String Quartet. The result is a more open, pared-down, sound which gives the jazz musicians space while still managing to create a rich and full sound on tracks including "musiK."
The album's rhythm section adapts beautifully to everything Atzmon's arrangements ask of them. This is particularly true of "What is This Thing Called Love". Drummer Asaf Sirkis' restrained funk and bassist Yaron Stavi underpin Frank Harrison's Fender Rhodes, Atzmon's sax and a beautiful, flowing performance by the strings to create perhaps the finest track on the album. By contrast, "Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious and Insatiable," an Atzmon composition which also appears as a song on singer Sarah Gillespie's Stalking Juliet (EGEA, 2009), rests the rhythm section in favor of emotive interplay between Atzmon's clarinet and the Sigamos Quartet. "Tu Tu Tango" references "Everything Happens to Me" and creates images of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, before and after its tango rhythms take centre stage.
This is an imaginative, emotionally engaging tribute to Atzmon's earliest jazz influences, featuring some extremely skillful and stylish playing—a class act from everyone involved.
Gilad Atzmon at All About Jazz.
Visit Gilad Atzmon on the web.
Track listing: Everything Happens To Me; If I Should Lose You; musiK; What Is This Thing Called Love; Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious and Insatiable; I Didn't Know What Time It Was; In The Small Hours; Tu Tu Tango; April In Paris; In Loving Memory Of America; Refuge.
Personnel: Gilad Atzmon: saxophones, clarinet; Frank Harrison: piano; Yaron Stavi: bass; Asaf Sirkis: drums; Sigamos String Quartet: Ros Stephen: violin, Emil Chakalov: violin, Rachel Robson: viola, Daisy Vatalaro: cello.
Uncut March 2009 John Lewis ****
Manchester Evening News (13th March 09)
Yorkshire Post (6th March 09)
****
REVIEW
In Loving Memory Of America
Gilad Atzmon
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Reviewed by: Ian Mann
4 out of 5
A loving tribute to a mythic past but one with an unmistakably contemporary edge
Expatriate Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon has cut a distinctive figure on the UK music scene over the course of the last decade. Nominally a jazz player his records have also contained strong elements of his Middle Eastern routes and his incendiary live performances and radical politics have made him impossible to ignore. Add to this his rock’n'roll life as a one time member of the Blockheads plus his work as a sideman and producer for numerous other artists and you have one busy guy. He’s even written a couple of novels too. Atzmon is a hell of a talent.
His own records have sometimes been uneven and there has been an air of “every thing but the kitchen sink” about some of them, but one things for sure, a Gilad Atzmon record is always going to have something interesting to say. For jazz listeners his 2008 release “Refuge” was probably his most consistent offering to date. It marked Atzmon’s first experiments with electronics and the results blended in superbly with the rest of the music.
“In Loving Memory of America” marks another departure as Atzmon and his band play with a string quartet for the first time. The record is inspired by the vintage “Charlie Parker with Strings” recordings which turned Atzmon on to jazz in the first place. In this sense the album is a tribute to Parker and the other bebop heroes but the title is a double edged sword. It refers to how the young Atzmon fell in love with America and it’s music but inherent in the title is his disillusionment with current US foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Palestinian issue.
“In loving Memory..” finds Atzmon working with his regular band the Orient House Ensemble. Fellow Israeli emigres Yaron Stavi (bass) and Asaf Sirkis (drums) are joined by England’s own Frank Harrison on piano and keyboards. They are augmented by the Sigamos String Quartet (Ros Stephen and Emil Chakalov-violins, Rachel Robson-viola and Daisy Vatalaro-cello) on nine of the eleven tracks. The string arrangements are either by Stephen or by Jonathan Taylor, both of whom worked with Atzmon in the group Tango Siempre.
The programme consists of five standards associated with Parker plus six Atzmon originals, including three previously recorded compositions re-arranged specifically for this project. Much of the time Atzmon plays things relatively straight. His obvious love for his source material is demonstrated by the opening “Everything Happens To Me” where his gorgeous alto playing is cushioned by Stephen’s superlative string arrangement. It’s beautifully recorded too, Atzmon has rarely sounded so good.
“If I Should Lose You” adds more modern elements to the performance such as a touch of dissonance in the string arrangements and Sirkis’ consciously militaristic drumming. It retains the essence of Parker but in an inescapably contemporary setting.
Atzmon’s own “MusiK”, the title track of his 2005 album is reprised beautifully here, the composer’s brooding clarinet backed by the Sigamos’ haunting strings. Harrison’s lyrical piano also features memorably as the Orient House Ensemble begin to make their mark on the album.
“What Is This Thing Called Love” is also given a highly effective contemporary makeover with Sirkis’ shuffling drum groove and Harrison’s trilling electric piano juxtaposed against the strings and Atzmon’s reeds. As with “If I Should Lose You” this is a wholly convincing homage but a long way from being a straight copy. Like all the best jazz Atzmon stays true to the spirit of his influences but emphatically puts his own stamp on the proceedings, something emphasised by the use of “found sounds” (children’s voices, police sirens, street noises) in the piece’s closing moments.
The title of Atzmon’s original “Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious & Insatiable” may suggest a return to his iconoclastic style of old. However it turns out to be a piece for solo clarinet wrapped up in a sympathetic string arrangement by Jonathan Taylor. Certainly there is an air of longing and regret about the music but not the angry blast one might have expected.
The standard “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” is a leisurely excursion which incorporates the strings but also features the OHE in a more overtly jazzy middle section featuring Harrison’s electric piano.
For the original “In The Small Hours” Atzmon’s pure toned alto floats above a bed of lush strings with a dash of seasoning provided by Harrison’s Rhodes and Sirkis’ delicate drumming. The arrangement perfectly captures that indefinable “after hours” ambience.
“Tutu Tango” is another reprise from the “MuziK” album. The addition of strings gives much of the the piece a more reflective feel than the original version but there is still room for a couple of boisterous “circus style” sections.
“April In Paris” is dealt with fairly straight with the leader’s gorgeous alto and Harrison’s acoustic piano particular highlights.
The brief title track brings us bang up to date with a collage of voices and street sounds backed by a hip hop beat. Reeds and Rhodes weave their way in and out of the melange. It is effectively a curtain raiser for the closing “Refuge”, a re-working of the title track from Atzmon’s previous album.
“Refuge” incorporates the most overtly Jewish/Middle Eastern music we have heard so far, juxtaposing this with a Latin flavoured closing section. It is perhaps, Atzmon’s summing up of the cosmopolitan nature of New York, the dream city he never got to reach. Alternatively it can be viewed as a paean to the healing powers of the international language of music. Like much of Atzmon’s output there is plenty of room for interpretation.
“In Loving Memory…” is an album that has attracted a compelling amount of critical praise. It is certainly an interesting record with some exceptional playing and a great deal of care has gone into the arrangements. As a long term Atzmon watcher I do have reservations however. Some listeners, like myself will have got three of these tunes already, albeit in different arrangements.
There is also the question of the strings themselves. Skilfully arranged as they are I still prefer my Atzmon without them and with a few more rough edges. A lot of this is down to personal taste. “With Strings” is not my favourite context for Parker either (I’m with Ken Clarke on this one) so I must admit to a hint of bias here.
For all this “In Loving Memory Of America” is still a fine album and a thought provoking one. Atzmon’s falling in love with America and his subsequent estrangement is a path many of us have followed in recent years. Atzmon has set this journey to music and personal reservations aside “In Loving Memory..” is still an essential listen for all contemporary music fans. Atzmon has done what all the best jazzers do and put his own stamp on his chosen material. This may be loving tribute to a mythic past but it is one with an unmistakably contemporary edge.
In Loving Memory of America
Gilad Atzmon moving tribute for America's greatest heroes
"On an especially cold Jerusalem night I heard Bird playing "April in Paris" on a radio program. I was knocked down. It was by far more organic, poetic, sentimental and yet wilder than anything I had ever heard before. Bird was a fierce libidinal extravaganza of wit and energy. The morning after, I decided to skip school, I rushed to the one and only music shop in Jerusalem. I found the jazz section and bought every album that was on the shelves. It was that moment when I fell in love with jazz, it was that moment when I fell in love in America"
Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's latest album entitled In Loving Memory of America might well be the best album Gilad has ever recorded (and God knows Gilad recorded plenty of good music in the past). This latest album, however, stand apart from all his previous recordings.
The album is recorded with the Sigamos String Quartet. His usual band (keyboard player Frank Harrison, bassist Yaron Stavi and drummer Asaf Sirkis) is also present. This unique combination of a jazz band with a string quartet will immediately reminds jazz fans of another famous jazz album: Charlie "Bird" Parker's "With Strings". Gilad's reference to Bird's album is also shown through several of the pieces also recorded on "With Strings", including the nostalgic and very moving "Everything Happens To Me" which begins Gilad's new album.
"In Loving Memory of America" is not, however, simply a re-recording of Bird's pieces: seven of Gilad's best past compositions are intertwined within Parker's jazz standards. What is amazing is how well these various compositions are blended together. For example, the third track on the album, Gilad's "musiK", is followed by "What Is This Thing Called Love" which is also present on Parker's recording. Gilad's version is, however, very different, slower, far more deliberate and tense, and it eventually "resolves" into Gilad's very moving "Call Me Stupid, Ungrateful, Vicious And Unstable" which begins with an almost Piazzolla-like opening with the strings supporting a lamentful exposition by Gilad's clarinet.
Gilad's use of the strings if far most complex and sophisticated than Parker's. The latter saw them mainly as a support for his instrument, whereas Gilad uses them much more as an interlocutor to his own phrases. Again, the figure of Piazzolla immediately comes to mind.
In fact, while Bird is the obvious reference, Piazzolla is the esoteric figure standing behind much of the lyricism and drama present in Gilad's latest album. Still, hints of this hidden filiation can even be found amongst Gilad's key musicians. Ros Stephen, for example, has played for many years in the tango quartet Tango Siempre. And can you guess who did many of the arrangements of "In Loving Memory of America"? The very same Ros Stephen, of course!
Still, for all the references found in this album, "In Loving Memory of America" is Gilad's album first and foremost. As John McLauglin likes to say, jazz musicians are "Thieves and Poets", and Gilad is not exception. Still, the poetry of Gilad's album is definitely uniquely his. Most importantly, it is Gilad's pain at seeing what the America of his youth has turned into which forms the basso continuo of this unique to this album.
One could ask whether the America of Gilad's youth every existed. I would say that it definitely did, if only in the hearts of those who listened to jazz music - America's beautiful gift to the world -in their youths. Gilad's music is a lament for the loss of this (mostly, but not exclusively, imagined) America, and it is a tribute to all those who share that pain today (one can think of all the jazz musicians who, with Charlie Haden, recorded the album Not In Our Name). Call it a much belated loss of innocence of poets and artists (the "bleeding hearts and artists" as Roger Waters would, no doubt, call them) , if you want, but somebody had to weep for this America the beautiful and jazz musicians did.
Music is probably the most sublime form of art because it allows to directly convey the the listener emotions which very often cannot be expressed in words. In this sense, it is also the most abstract art. The paradox, however, is that music and, in particular, jazz music is - or, at least, should be - also extremely subversive.
Emotions are, after all, probably the most powerful element of one's personality and, therefore, one of the most powerful influences on our thoughts and actions. In the booklet which comes with the album, Gilad writes: I do realise that ‘things have changed’. I do grasp that Jazz is not exactly a form of resistance anymore. It is not even a revolutionary art form. Maybe. Maybe not. But I don't believe that Gilad would ever have been capable of releasing such a powerful album if he did not feel that somebody out there was listening, feeling and understanding. The very fact that he did release this album is therefore an act of revolutionary resistance.
Sometimes, the emotion-idea is given rather directly, like in Gilad's piece "Refuge" which begins with a tension building Middle-Eastern melody which abruptly transforms itself in an African sounding explosion of joy. One could be forgiven for instinctively thinking of the collapse of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the precedent this sets for the last Apartheid-like regime left on this planet: the "Jewish state" of Israel. Sometimes, the emotion-idea is far more subtle, like in Gilad's "In The Small Hours", but no less powerful.
The entire album feels like a "painful embrace", painful because of the immense sadness it expresses, but an embrace nonetheless, because of the shared love it conveys to its audience. This mixture of seemingly contradictory feelings is yet another feature common to Gilad Atzmon and Astor Piazzolla. I sometimes think of it as "wise sadness" or "peaceful pain". It is this amazing capability for art to sublimate pain - or even agony- and to transform them into energy, beauty and hope.
There is one thing which Parker's and Gilad's albums definitely have in common: being deceptively easy to listen to. These albums need to be carefully listened to many times before they reveal all their nuances and subtleties . This is particularly true of Gilad's album which is, in many ways, a more complex and more multi-layered creation than Bird's more "straightforward" recording.
Two things should, in particular, be mentioned here: the very elegant and sophisticated arrangements and the very minimalist yet absolutely superb playing by Frank Harrison on the piano and, in particular, on the Fender Rhodes (a sound which I regret not hearing more often).
"In Loving Memory of America" is the kind of album which you can listen to for hours and days at a time without ever getting bored or feeling that you got enough of it. It is intoxicating and addictive as only the very best jazz albums ever are.
You can already order the album on Amazon in the UK, at Jazz CDs or, for those living in the USA, pre-order it at CD Universe.
Either way - get the album. It is truly a masterpiece.
In Loving Memory of America
Music Review by Charlie Hore, April 2009
Gilad Atzmon
Disclaimer - I've never previously much liked Gilad Atzmon's CDs. Live, he can be brilliant, with a bite and intensity that make him one of the best jazz artists working in Britain today. But I've rarely felt that he's managed to capture that on CD.
This is very different, though. His new recording mixes a love of and nostalgia for the jazz tradition with some very contemporary orchestration and sounds. But while the central concept is rooted in jazz history, this is far from a retro exercise in simply re-creating the past.
Atzmon's primary inspiration is the recordings that Charlie Parker made with strings in the late 1940s, which for a lot of jazz fans might seem like an odd place to start. Parker, the saxophone player who was at the heart of the 1940s bebop revolution, was by the early 1950s looking to expand his horizons, and threw himself into a project of recording classic songs with a string orchestra behind him.
This produced one great live recording (a benefit concert for a jailed American Communist Party councillor, incidentally), but otherwise quite mixed results. Few Parker fans rated the string recordings as among his best, even though he was at the height of his powers. The orchestra was neither particularly sympathetic nor well orchestrated, and their lumpy, saccharine sound grates the more you listen to it.
But Parker soars, swoops and dives over these plodding backgrounds like a swallow at dusk, and it was one of these recordings - Cole Porter's April in Paris - that first introduced Atzmon to jazz. Part of his aim here is to transmit that sense of excitement and discovery, and in that he succeeds admirably. His usual band is joined by a string quartet, and they mesh together with great enthusiasm.
It's Parker's vision that Atzmon pays tribute to here. His playing is melodic and unashamedly sentimental, but it is a thoroughly modern take on the classic repertoire. And there are more than a few surprises buried in here, not least on the title track.
The title comes from Atzmon's belief as a young man that jazz and the US represented freedom, and his disillusion with both. As he sees it, jazz is no longer a form of resistance, nor a revolutionary art. You don't have to accept the argument to appreciate the music, and yet there's a particularly elegiac quality to much of this set which comes out of that genuine sense of loss.
As with Courtney Pine's latest project, a homage to the clarinet player Sidney Bechet, this feels like an exploration of jazz history in order to find new inspiration for today, and it works both as a concept and as great music. The best days of jazz may be in the past, but CDs like this are proof that there's life in it yet.
Gig Reviews
Saint Cyprians, London
Published: March 12 2009 22:48 | Last updated: March 12 2009 22:48
Gilad Atzmon’s latest project showcases his rich-toned alto sax and woody clarinet by adding a subtly voiced string quartet to his working rhythm section. Called In Loving Memory of America, it is part homage to a seminal recording session – Charlie Parker’s Bird with Strings – and part contemplation on a young man’s infatuation with America. At a gig that launched both the album and a short UK tour, the serene surroundings of St Cyprian’s church were a somewhat surreal setting for Atzmon’s bullish anti-Zionist activism, but added to a delightful evening of artfully crafted music that was rich with emotional complexity.
Atzmon, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1963, was aged 17 and preparing for military service when he first heard Parker’s alto sax on the radio. It was a personal defining moment, the start of a love affair with jazz and the land that gave birth to it. His relationship with America is now somewhat soured, but his music has ripened into well-rounded maturity, and here perfectly captured the bittersweet emotions of lost innocence with a mix of re-worked jazz classics and his own Middle East-tinged originals.
Bird with Strings remains controversial. Parker elevated the American songbook to high art, but the accompanying orchestral players seemed to have little understanding of his music. This gig showed how much has changed, with the well-tempered, note-perfect string quartet shifting through romance, irony and despair on the point of a pin. The arrangements, mostly by lead violinist Ros Stephens, referenced the original Parker recordings, enhancing mood and delivering contrast. And from the opening plunks of “Everything Happens to Me” through the abstract scrapes of “If I Should Lose You” to the world-jazz-driven Atzmon originals, they impressively integrated classical textures with jazz delivery.
Atzmon followed in Parker’s footsteps with confidence, giving the show-tune melodies full weight and limiting virtuosity to a few isolated cascades. Atzmon’s trademark mix of jazz and Middle Eastern music was also reprised with edgy, string-embellished arrangements of “Burning Bush” the sedate “MusiK” and the Latin-tinged finale “Refuge”. The encore, a first outing for the haunting film noir theme “Laura”, was a delicious added treat.
Mike Hobart
"Atzmon is a loose cannon: a larger than life figure with an almost overpowering musical personality. As his bluesy bebop improvisations on alto sax shoot across the bows of the supremely composed Sigamos String Quartet, the whole thing grounded by the easy swing of the Orient House Ensemble's expert rhythm section, it's as perfect a jazz marriage as you could wish for"
Phil Johnson, independent on Sunday Jazz Critic
Leicester Mercury
Gilad Atzmon with strings
A packed Y Theatre audience experienced a musical feast last night. Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon promised a tribute to famous jazz album “Charlie Parker with strings” and not only succeeded, but seamlessly included his own music which surpassed the original. Yaron Stavi’s bowed double-bass blended superbly with the Sigamos string quartet in two standards from the album, which were followed by Gilad’s “Early Hours” (based on “Round Midnight”). Atzmon’s “Burning Bush” reached extraordinary Coltrane-like levels of intensity – Middle Eastern phrases, a tone on alto sax like a Turkish oboe, a magical drum solo from Asaf Sirkis, Atzmon then playing mouthpiece only, and then the sax trumpet-style with no mouthpiece!
The quartet featured with clarinet in the second set’s opener. Gilad’s glorious duet with Frank Harrison’s piano on “Yardbird Suite” steered from Bach fugue to bebop arabesques. Originals “musiK” and “Tutu Tango” covered a gamut of styles. Ballad “Laura” was a glorious encore. “Our album got five stars in the Financial Times in a credit crunch. We need five stars in Time Out”, quipped Atzmon, musical genius and comic.
Chris Beggs
Gilad Atzmon’s “In Loving Memory of America” is available from Enja records.
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