Jazz Journal - Gilad Atzmon Musical Capital

I am on the front cover of Jazz Journal this month.  A very interesting interview. We discussed art, politics, the state of Jazz and the destructive role of art funding. We spoke about the band,  the political pressure and about life in general.  A very interesting piece

Jazz Journal, February 2013. www.jazzjournal.co.uk

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‘When politicians get involved and decide who will get the money, who should be part of the discourse, we make everything conscious. We are basically killing the existential, libidinal spontaneity of this art form’

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Gilad Atzmon: Musical capital

by Mark Gilbert

The Israeli-born, UK-resident reedman, composer and writer talks to MARK GILBERT in advance of five solid months on the road to coincide with the release of Songs Of The Metropolis

 

Gilad Atzmon’s spring UK tour, partially listed in JJ last month, is impressively larger (now around 40 dates) than any tour by his peers in recent memory. How does he get so many gigs, never mind the subsequent appearances in Japan, Argentina, Europe and the USA that take him away from home until mid-June? The Israeli-born, UK-resident reedman who says “I am upset by Israel, by Jewish politics” is known for a certain political notoriety – an often valuable currency in the modern jazz world – and one of my key questions for him is to what extent he has exploited that notoriety to further his musical career.

“My views are read by millions every day [at www.gilad.co.uk], which means it is possible that my audience is bigger than many jazz artists. But if anything my views damage my career. I’ve seen one of the biggest Jewish lobbies in the world putting pressure on the Arts Council to cancel my appearance in festivals that are funded by the Arts Council. I must say about the Arts Council, they really stood for me. They said that they were very proud to give stage to Gilad Atzmon.”

The Arts Council is not alone. Ian Storror, booker at the Bristol venue he appeared at in late January says: “A Gilad performance is always a tour de force. He will have you laughing out loud one minute and in tears or thumping your fist the next . . . never dull. The musicianship is beyond doubt . . . a ‘not to be missed’ gig on any music calendar.” 

As Atzmon’s numerous CD releases attest, there is a strikingly competent and creative musician behind the horns, typically these days the soprano saxophone and clarinet. Both instruments are prominent on Songs Of The Metropolis, the latest CD from Atzmon and his Orient House Ensemble. Gig promoters might just have a vested interest, but no less an arbiter than Robert Wyatt also endorses Atzmon’s musicianship, writing that he is “The best musician living in the world today.”

At risk of biting the hand that feeds, Atzmon is sceptical about the British arts system, about the addition of form-filling to the musician’s skill-set, and it bears on his musical philosophy in general. For all his political sensibility and evident intellectual capacity (his website bears witness to the volume of writing he has done on musical and nonmusical matters), Atzmon holds that jazz at its best is a instinctive activity, one that is in perpetual danger of having its vital power drained by subsidising bodies propelled by an “Enlightenment” view of music.

“What I am saying is not against the Arts Council – I think they are doing a lot of great stuff –but I believe that the existence of an artist should be inherently dependent on the ability to communicate with an audience – I don’t say big audience. The art form that I am involved with is basically the total opposition to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is there to praise the thinking human subject. But when it comes to art, the best of it is actually produced when you are totally unconscious.

“This is why the best art – the best jazz – was produced when Coltrane and Bird were making heavy use of narcotic elements. Jazz is a suicidal art form. You sacrifice your livelihood for the sake of music. When politicians get involved and decide who will get the money, who should be part of the discourse, we make everything conscious. We are basically killing the existential, libidinal spontaneity of this art form.”

Although public subsidy trickles down to the benefit of just about everyone involved in producing or consuming (or commenting on) the arts, Atzmon’s tour is all his own work except for the help of a couple of agents. It seems of a piece with the dynamic, visceral outlook of this self-made man-musician.

*          *          *          *          *          *

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL instinct goes back to the beginning. He didn’t play the saxophone, or jazz, until he was 17, and must have worked hard to achieve the technique and musical awareness he typically shows today as conceptualist, composer and soloist. Try, for example, the series of powerfully logical climaxes he creates towards the close of his solo on Tel Aviv on the new album, or the intensity of Buenos Aires at around 6:40. Notice, in addition, the admixture of harmonic movement in pieces that sound deceptively modal.

Lest anybody should suspect there isn’t a lot of jazz here, Atzmon has paid his Real Book dues. He points out that Songs Of The Metropolis is different from his previous output because it moves away from the “D minor, Coltranesque” thing that exemplified such earlier albums as Exile – “except maybe,” he says, “in Scarborough Fair”.

“I really love harmony but we never managed to integrate harmony into the Arabic music we did. It just doesn’t work. I wanted to go somewhere else and this is where I ended up. Paris is written like a standard. Buenos Aires is like a standard. When you look at the page it looks like a jazz tune.”

The jazz wood-shedding happened early, and its fruits were clearly evident in Atzmon’s first UK album, Take It Or Leave It... (1997, Face Jazz). It’s a brave debut with just bass and drums on which he brings a distinctive orientalism to his inflections and phrasing on In A Sentimental Mood and a fresh rhythmic dynamism to Doxy. Rollins would no doubt approve of his ability to let the music breathe. Atzmon’s muscular technique is always at the service of a provocative and witty musical imagination – the sound of surprise even in these late days for the standard repertoire. Where is this tune going to go next?

Jewish identity pokes its head in again as we trace his musical roots. Discovering Charlie Parker in Jerusalem as a teenager was a revelation, and an escape: “You know why we play jazz? Because we want to run away from our Jewish mothers. I was a Jew in Israel. Had to go to the army to die in this idiotic thing. And suddenly I listen to John Coltrane and Charlie Parker and I became a free human being.”

He had no formal musical training and to this day doubts the value of jazz education, citing the ennervating effect of analysis on feeling. “All those jazz schools are there to transform spirit into knowledge. And for me jazz is the complete opposite. What makes jazz horrid and unlistenable is the conscious attempt to make it sound clever. If you want to play music, make me cry. Listen to Coltrane’s ballads, listen to Bird with strings, listen to Alabama, not to these new jazzers who try to play in rhythm signatures you know they don’t feel or understand.”

The drive to genuine, individualised, protestant (small p) feeling seems at the base of all Atzmon does. On the 2003 Exile album the stunning voice of Reem Kelani on Dal’ouna On The Return has all the individualised inflection and passion a jazz fan could wish for. Now the Orient House Ensemble relies mostly on instruments for the same communicative power. Atzmon gets this partly through following the lesson of his musical “gods”, among which are Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman, players who have spent a lifetime dealing with the unforgiving realities of standing out in the cut and thrust of New York City. They aren’t, shall we say, “enlightened” Europeans but musicians driven to a certain directness by the imperative to communicate quickly and widely. “You listen to Parker, Coltrane, Brecker – there is simplicity there but not because it is simple.”

The same urgency and clarity of expression can be heard in Atzmon’s playing, and the new record is conceptually a step along the same road. He says it’s a kind of protest (another – “I must always protest against something”) against the mush of cultural homogeneity, the “globalised flood”. It attempts to create clear if nostalgic portraits of once more distinctly differentiated locations. I tell him that Liebman once told me that jazz was now an international music. “Yes,” he says – “nobody cares about it anywhere!” One senses that Atzmon may change that attitude at venues across the globe in the coming months.

REVIEW: Gilad Atzmon and The Orient House Ensemble The Hen and Chicken 9/10

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/REVIEW-Gilad-Atzmon-Orient-House-Ensemble-Hen/story-17993308-detail/story.html

WITH a freshly installed piano the Comedy  Box at the Hen & Chicken, Bedminster proved an ideal setting for the Israeli-born saxophonist Gilad Atzmon to open their new season of jazz nights. Accompanied by The Orient House Ensemble this ultra-cosmopolitan musician performed mainly material from his recently released album Songs of the Metropolis – a jazzman's lament to the lost character of cities once noted for their distinctive musical voice.

The musical arrangements gave ample opportunity for Frank Hamilton on piano and Eddie Hick on drums to display their own skills, while an avuncular Atzmon smiled down happily at his young protégés. The ever reliable Yaron Stavi on bass completed the ensemble.

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Switching smoothly between alto and tenor sax, clarinet, and the occasional brief interlude on the accordion Atzmon began with Paris. Not the frenetic American in Paris of Gershwin, but the moody impressionistic Paris of a louche smoke-filled nightclub. Then we were in Tel Aviv with up-beat busy tempos and a slight Yiddish twist. Berlin reflected the unsubtle waltz time of a German oompah band in a beer hall. Vienna, in contrast, had more of a nostalgic valse triste about it.

Atzmon is also a novelist and political commentator with a notoriously abrasive attitude towards the rich and powerful. Between numbers he had a few jibes at the legacy of Bush and Blair in the Middle East, all delivered with his traditional dry laconic wit before he gave us the Burning Bush. He may have mellowed in the 20 years he has been settled in Britain, but his ferociously skilful technique on sax and clarinet has not diminished. London does not feature in his metropolis set, but Britain is unexpectedly represented by an impressive take on the traditional tune of Scarborough Fair. Off again to a chaotic bebop style Athens and then Buenos Aires. Not a lively tango, but a darker sleepy slow lambada. This jazz journey made for a highly satisfying evening before a large and very appreciative audience.

Jazzwise -Album Review

"The Band has created perhaps their most enduring ensemble work yet" Andy Robson Jazzwise

Jazzwise - DESERTED CITIES OF THE HEART by ANDY ROBSON

GILAD ATZMON has been a restless presence on the British and international jazz scenes since the early 1990s, with his garrulous playing style that’s as coruscating and as caustic as his provocative political views. Yet his latest work, Songs Of The Metropolis, finds him mellowing, but only a little, says ANDY ROBSON

Jazzwise Feb 2013 Edition

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/

They call him the hardest working man in jazz. And Gilad Atzmon has no problem justifying that title. “I’m always busy! As you know, I don’t fill out the forms for the Arts Council. I don’t believe it’s down to the tax payers to pay for me loving music. So for me the only way to survive is to keep working.”

And the fruits of that labour keep coming: we’re here to talk about his new release as leader of The Orient House Ensemble, Songs Of The Metropolis. But straight from here Atzmon’s off for a Blockheads gig; he’s every intention of finishing the production of Blockheads bass hero Norman Watt-Roy’s album in the new year, he’s producing long time associate Sarah Gillespie’s new album and, perhaps most exciting of all, there’s “the most expensive album I’ve ever done. Recorded at Abbey Road, a beautiful project, a double album – four sides of vinyl – it’s a tribute to Serge Gainsbourg!”

The energy, the will to succeed, (and not to mention the eclecticism) seems endless. One stereotype, of course, is that Atzmon’s drive reflects the classic immigrant’s need to work twice as hard, to be twice as good as their host, to build their new life in a new land. After all it’s 16 years since Atzmon left Palestine for Cricklewood’s green and pleasant land. But Atzmon doesn’t do stereotypes. If he identifies with any community, it is not one defined by such limited notions as nationhood or ethnicity. Instead his home is among the community of jazz people striving to find new voices, new ways of expression. And for Atzmon these musicians are free of the trammels of time and place: whether it’s Coltrane in New York, Piazzolla in Buenos Aires or Bird all over the place.

Yet Atzmon’s albums resonate with a sense of time and place: only Atzmon can take us from ‘London To Gaza’ and indeed ‘All The Way To Montenegro’ (The Tide Has Changed); only Atzmon has shepherded us from ‘The Land of Canaan’ (Exile) to ‘Autumn In Baghdad’ and, by delicious irony, ‘Spring In New York’ (Refuge). And now, with Songs Of The Metropolis, Atzmon takes us further into the paradoxical locus of his musical heart.

On one level Songs Of The Metropolis is a concept album, a travelogue of places rich with meaning for Atzmon (and indeed the band, for this is very much a band release). The notion is hardly unique. It’s only a couple of years since the ebullient Hiromi guided us through Place To Be, which celebrated puff pastry in France and crisps in Cape Cod. But travel was always going to be more complex and confectionery-free for Atzmon. Indeed, although Atzmon describes his pieces as ‘love songs’, love for him is as much about loss as it is about consumption and consummation.

“I travel a lot. Every night I fall asleep in a different town. And I fall in love every night. Every town carries a significant colour. It is the sound of language, it is the way the women behave: most towns have their own sounds, their own song.”

And some of the signposts to a city’s signature song are familiar. Atzmon’s ‘Paris’ is redolent with Bechet, accordion chords underwrite its melancholic joie de vivre, Harrison’s piano is broken-hearted yet lyrical.

But as Atzmon is quick to point out, if he has a talent as a composer as well as a philosopher, it is to ‘deconstruct’. He takes the familiar, but places in it a fresh context, breaks a tune mid-bar, shifts a tempo with the merest cue. So ‘Vienna’, hardly surprisingly, is a waltz (and Harrison, the nearest we have to Bill Evans, evokes a ‘Waltz For Debby’). Yet for all its charm, this ‘Vienna’, this paradise of sweet things, could almost be too sickly, scarred as it is with the scrape of Stavi’s bass.

Nowhere is this deconstruction more spectacular than on ‘Scarborough’, at over 10 minutes the epic heart of Songs Of The Metropolis. The saxman loves Scarborough the town, but the incongruence of positioning the sleepy seaside site alongside iconic metropolises like Moscow and Tel Aviv tickles Atzmon’s broad humour. And only he could propel the familiar folkish theme of ‘Scarborough Fair’ to a furious Coltrane-style climax, replete with quotes from ‘My Favorite Things’.

Atzmon’s re-visionings of Bird songs on In Loving Memory Of America prepared us for these deconstructions, these invitations to a dance during which we can never be too sure who is leading, who is calling the tune. And with this awareness comes a realisation that these cities are as imaginary as they are geographically specific. They are, as Cream’s lyricist Pete Brown may have had it, ‘Deserted Cities Of The Heart’.

“Yes, the music is about love, but love of something that is lost. It is about loss, about yearning… yes I am always nostalgic – you remember Nostalgico? (Atzmon’s 2009 release where he reinvented the familiar, like ‘In A Sentimental Mood’, as something new and contemporary). Look at how people yearn for Elvis. You like Elvis, but it’s not because you were with Elvis – it’s because you would’ve liked to be like that. I wasn’t in Paris when it sounded like that, but I wanted to create a sound like I dreamed it would be!” Yet one metropolis is conspicuously absent from this roll call of the world’s most vivid cities. London. Or more specifically, Atzmon’s long time UK residence, Cricklewood. He laughs: “I thought of doing a posh arrangement of ‘New York, New York’, you know, ‘On Cricklewood Broadway’. But maybe only you and me would’ve got the joke.”

Few have tried to celebrate Cricklewood, fewer have succeeded. Alan Coren, perhaps. Ten Years After’s Cricklewood Green spawned the Woodstock monster ‘Love Like A Man’. Doubtless this feature will provoke a rich correspondence about North West London’s finest. Indeed, as a Blockhead, Atzmon is all too aware of Kilburn and its High Road’s heritage. But more pertinently, Atzmon rages against London’s lack of a theme tune, musical or indeed cultural.

“I don’t say there’s no music in London but I’m sorry to say now there is no sound of London. When I first came to London, there was such a thing. There was Ronnie Size doing his drum and bass. I’m sorry to say but I ask around ‘What is the sound of this fucking city?’ And no one can tell me! If you think, there was punk, Liverpool had a sound, Manchester in the 1980s, but now, in London?

“One of the last industries in this country was the music industry. When Britain made music for the whole world it had to look for the common denominator – I won’t say lowest denominator – and in doing so you lost your identity. Everything became homogenous. I was born in Israel, and I have some criticisms of Israel. But in Israel you never spoke of identity because it was very clear to us who we are, what we are, why we kill, why we get killed; all is obvious. But here everyone speaks of ‘identity’: because none of you know what it is!

“I was talking to this right-wing thinker, I’m not taking his side, but I believe in dialogue, and he said, ‘I am from the north and we have a great tradition in the north for brass bands. But now in schools they teach steel drums.’ And that devastates me: I understand that concern. We have to make sure that the host culture is also valued.”

As if to illustrate his point, a Greek band strikes up in the bar where we are talking, at that palace of culture, The Royal Festival Hall. “It is great to hear such music, how often do you hear 7/8 in England?” notes Atzmon, clapping in time to the rising groove. “But at the same time how many cockney bands do you hear in this place, how many cockney bands get supported by the Arts Council?”

Of course Atzmon wants to shock. He concedes that he needs to shock himself, to constantly re-galvanise his relationship to the everchanging world around him. “In Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, you knew what freedom meant because you didn’t have it. But what is freedom in Britain or America? If you do not know what freedom is, then it is my job to tell you here in Britain what the boundaries of your freedom might be. I’m not a politician. I’m a philosopher and artist. My job is to stimulate exchange. I will not give you answers. I leave that to Cameron. I don’t claim to know the truth. But I’m good at exposing lies. When I see deceit, spin, one culture being celebrated at the expense of others, I freak out!”

Atzmon’s words, his rage, need heeding. A strength of democracy is to respond to criticism and insight with dialogue, to learn and co-create in response to stimulus. To respond with our own vitriol and prejudice is to fail to adapt. And not to adapt is to die. Atzmon is in the hallowed tradition of the ‘outsider’ who sees our foibles and flaws in sharper relief than we do ourselves, from the Irishman Swift to Linton Kwesi Johnson to Emeric Pressburger – another self-exiled Jew who came to England and grew to love it even as he gently jibed and probed it in movies like The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp.

“You know, I came to this country because this country is England with a lot of beautiful things I liked. But they are disappearing – partly because I am me! I am ‘Johnny Foreigner’. I am an artist and a producer and I am part of the industry. So I am responsible for some of those changes, I am aware of that. I don’t want to celebrate my culture at the expense of the culture of others.”

And indeed Atzmon can’t resist another broad grin. “But now we have reason to celebrate!” (It’s always intriguing to trace Atzmon’s use of the ‘we’ word; who are the ‘we’ that ‘we’ are now talking of?)

“According to the census,” he gleefully continues, “there are now more of us Johnny Foreigners in your city than you! You are a minority group! So according to The Guardian it is now time for you to claim your rights as a minority! Your time is now!” and Atzmon claps and laughs. “So it is funny and maybe in 10 years I will be able to write a tune for London for a new album.”

No one is more aware than Atzmon that his words are likely to be misconstrued, misquoted back in evidence against him. Even within his family the question of roots runs deep. “My son has grown up here. He is a Londoner, a patriot for Britain. But I ask him ‘Would you die for England?’ And he says, ‘Are you crazy? Only if they come and invade us here.’ But for my generation, in Israel, we were happy to die for the things we believed in. But my son is not crazy. He just wants to live.”

And it is this zest for life that unites the cities on Songs Of The Metropolis. It transcends even

Atzmon’s passion around the plight of Palestine, a passion that has so long driven his music. “For me this is the first time I’ve done music with the Orient House which is not politically motivated.” This is a statement one can hardly believe would come from his lips. For so long, anger drove the music, drove the band. But at 50, Atzmon is now looking again at the world.

“I know how to produce an angry solo. It bonded me with Coltrane through Palestine. I did it now for 10 years. I invented this Arabic-Israeli jazz, whatever you want to call it. I know how to play a Gilad Atzmon song in D minor. It takes me naturally to this Coltrane thing. I can make another 25,000 albums like that. But with Songs Of The Metropolis I didn’t want to. Before this I had created a safe territory. But as an artist I thought ‘If I don’t move now I will get stuck.’ This album moves me away from the boring political. How many times can I talk about Palestine, about being an Israeli? That would be the same solo, the same rant and I can’t do that anymore.”

And in a way, that is the bravest journey yet for Atzmon to undertake: to move from his comfort zone, to travel from his very identity, the anger and righteousness, to a world where certainties are not clear where clarities shade into ambiguity. Yet there is also a strange peace in much of Songs Of The Metropolis. Not that Atzmon is mellowing out, God forbid.

“I don’t look for peace. Or tranquility. This will sound horrible, but I get too excited by the panic I cause! I know I have something to say otherwise they would take no notice of me. But I don’t have to connect my music to my activism or intellectual work.”

This is a huge sea change in Atzmon and his ever growing aesthetic. It may also be the release valve that ensures Atzmon – composer, producer, bandleader and sax man extraordinaire – gets to travel to even further flung and yet undiscovered cities. And when London gets its song back, let’s hope it’s Atzmon who writes it. Because his conscience is the only one we deserve right now.

Ian Mann-Songs of the Metropolis

REVIEW

Friday, January 25, 2013

Reviewed by: Ian Mann

http://www.thejazzmann.com

Atzmon has produced his most mature, and in many ways his most diverse, work to date. 

Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble

“Songs of the Metropolis”

(World Village Records)

Gilad Atzmon is no stranger to the Jazzmann web pages be it as a multi instrumentalist, composer, author or political activist. So I’ll largely spare you (and myself) the historical spiel with which I normally begin my reviews. Since he moved to London from his native Israel in the late 1990’s the indefatigable Atzmon has become a major figure on the UK jazz scene releasing a series of fine albums with his working group the Orient House Ensemble as well as being a prolific sideman (across a variety of genres from tango to the Blockheads)  and an in demand producer. He’s routinely described as the “hardest working man in jazz” (although Seb Rochford must push him pretty close) and his new OHE album “Songs of the Metropolis” is a reflection of his well travelled lifestyle.

Atzmon has played music all over the globe and the album’s nine compositions are named after some of the world’s great cities- and, er, Scarborough. As Atzmon explained to Andy Robson in the February 2013 edition of “Jazzwise” magazine the album is a step back from the politics of anger that have shaped his music for so long. It’s not that he’s changed his views, he’s merely tired of repeating them (musically at least) and with “Songs of the Metropolis” he’s looking to explore areas of greater emotional and political ambiguity. It’s partly a celebration of Atzmon’s lifestyle - “Every night I fall asleep in a different town and most towns have their own colour, their own sound, their own song”.

In its way, like Atzmon’s earlier homage to Charlie Parker “In Loving Memory of America”, this is a record that expresses love not hate, but it’s still filtered through the spectrum of Atzmon’s political views and it’s this that gives the record much of it’s bite. To love the world and humanity in general and yet to hate the way it’s organised and governed seems to me to be far from contradictory and it’s a world view that shapes the sound of many of my favourite musicians from folk rock titans Oysterband to the OHE.

“Songs…” features Atzmon on alto and soprano saxophones, clarinet and accordion and he’s joined by long serving members Frank Harrison (piano, keyboards) and Yaron Stavi (bass) plus relative newcomer Eddie Hick (drums). Their eclectic world tour begins in “Paris” with Harrison’s lyrical solo piano intro and Atzmon’s surprisingly tender clarinet, the latter subsequently swooping up into “Rhapsody in Blue” soaring magnificence. There’s a dash of accordion too to give that authentic French flavour with the whole underpinned by Stavi’s resonant bass lines. It’s a romantic, idealised Paris, a Paris as it should have been, the way Atzmon “had dreamed it would be”. Atzmon’s website has a brief shorthand description/dedication for each piece with “Paris” said to have been written “in the name of love”.

“Tel Aviv” with its bustling grooves and Middle Eastern inflected reeds is more typical Atzmon albeit containing a more reflective central passage. Nostalgia is a central theme of the album and even here there is a sense of yearning. Atzmon’s website alludes to “Tel Aviv” as “the birth of the tragedy”, an oblique political reference. But for the listener it’s all about the music with the dynamic Hick and the ever receptive Harrison responding to Atzmon’s every move with aplomb and Harrison’s judicious use of electronics enhancing the atmosphere.

The brooding “Buenos Aires” is quoted as being “for the pathos”. The bite of Atzmon’s horn is cushioned by lyrical piano and bowed bass. There’s a dark, simmering quality about Atzmon’s playing, his trademark passion bubbling just beneath the surface.

It’s not normally in Atzmon’s nature to confirm to stereotypes but “Vienna” does actually turn out to be a waltz. Written “for the charm of sweetness” it features Atzmon at his most yearning and wistful as Harrison adds a sprinkling of electronic fairy dust and makes pianistic allusions to Bill Evans’ “Waltz For Debby”. With its tinkling glockenspiel it’s a wilful attempt to be beautiful (like the earlier “Paris”) but even this self conscious loveliness becomes a political act in Atzmon’s hands -“beauty is perhaps the last true form of spiritual resistance” he declares, “the song is there to counter detachment and alienation”.

“Manhattan” is also close to type with a hypnotic, shuffling groove and an urban, after hours ambience. It’s written “in loving memory of America”, an allusion to the earlier album but Atzmon’s lithe soprano doesn’t really sound anything like Charlie Parker. Harrison, who excels throughout delivers a joyous piano solo, a wonderfully versatile player he interprets the album’s varying moods with considerable aplomb.

Arguably the collection’s stand out piece is “Scarborough”, a ten minute piece that extemporises on the folk melody of “Scarborough Fair” with Atzmon indelibly stamping his own identity on his source material. The music grows from a delicate sax/piano intro, gradually escalating through increasingly intense modal patterns to embrace full blooded sax wailing in the manner of John Coltrane. The intensity then wanes before rising again through an increasingly expansive and equally brilliant Harrison piano solo before the piece resolves itself with a lyrical restatement of the theme.
Reviewing the album in the “Irish Times” Cormac Larkin compared Atzmon and Harrison to Coltrane and McCoy Tyner and the song to Coltrane’s sublime take on the similarly unlikely “My Favourite Things” which is pretty much spot on. Besides the musical possibilities Atzmon presumably chose the piece to honour Scarborough Jazz Festival. His note “as opposed to London” is also intriguing, although he lives in the capital and despite London’s apparent multi-culturalism Atzmon still feels that London is becoming increasingly homogeneous with no real identity of its own.

“Moscow” (“in honour of greatness”) combines the sense of a great power (huge piano chords, rolling toms) with that familiar sense of yearning as Atzmon doubles on reeds and accordion. There’s a lovely feature for Stavi’s double bass in the middle of the tune and a passage of delicately lyrical piano from Harrison, both admirably supported by the subtly nuanced drumming of Hick. Embracing two very different moods in the course of a single piece this is an excellent piece of writing, one of many such.

“Somewhere in Italy” (“but not too far from home”) is full of pastoral lyricism with delightful solos from Atzmon and Harrison but there’s still fire in Atzmon’s playing. Overall this may be OHE’s most reflective and openly beautiful album to date but it is emphatically not bland. By allowing himself to relax and to soften his attack Atzmon has produced his most mature, and in many ways his most diverse, work to date. My promo copy doesn’t make clear who is responsible for the production but the sound is immaculate throughout with Harrison’s piano sounding particularly lustrous.

Having said all that Atzmon still can’t resist a joke. The closing “Berlin” (“ a farewell to productivity”)  is a brief but humorous beer hall stomp featuring accordion and all four members of the OHE raising their voices in a mock boozy chorus. It’s a style that owes something to the pieces “Dry Fear” and “We Laugh” that bookended the previous OHE album “The Tide Has Changed”.

The OHE are currently on a mammoth UK tour to promote the album. I’ll be seeing their lunch time show in Abergavenny and I’m really looking forward to reporting back on that.   

TOUR DATES

January
 
25 The Victory Club,  Cheltenham

February
1 Fleece Jazz, Suffolk
2 606 London
5 Brook Theatre, Chatham
8 St Mary’s Church Wivenhoe
9   Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth
10 The Swan Hotel, Abergavenny (lunch time)
10 Chapel Arts,  Bath (evening)
14 The Boat House Broxbourne
15 The Verdict,  Brighton
21 Album Launch Pizza Express Jazz Club Dean Street, Soho , London

22 Album Launch Pizza Express Jazz Club Dean Street, Soho , London

23 Album Launch Pizza Express Jazz Club Dean Street, Soho , London
24 Jags, Ascot
27 Y Theatre, Leicester

March
2 Posk Jazz Café, London
5 The Stable, Milton Keynes
7 Bonington Theatre, Arnold,  Nottingham
9 St.Marys, Sandwich
10 -12 Town Hall, Shetland Island + master classes
13 Jazz Bar Edinburgh
14 Jazz Bar Edinburgh
15 The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, Cumbria
16 Band on the Wall, Manchester
17, Herts Jazz, Welwyn Garden City

More information at http://www.gilad.co.uk

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