The Guardian: Gilad Atzmon, On tour

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/02/this-weeks-new-live-music

Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble.

Since he came to the UK in the 1990s, saxophonist Gilad Atzmon has displayed a rare knack for joining jazz improv surprises to lyricism and catchy grooves. An Atzmon set can rampage through rapturous love songs unceremoniously invaded by funk and bebop; bursts of free-jazz and dense Bitches Brew electronics; maybe veer into a lateral take on Wonderful World; or classical references upstaged by through-the-horn guffaws. He also runs an imaginative venture dedicated to Charlie Parker's sax-and-strings music of the late-1940s, tomorrow's Brighton gig being a reprise of that entertaining show. The others are for Atzmon's Orient House Ensemble, the world-jazz group now celebrating a decade of colliding American, central European and middle eastern music.

Corn Exchange, Brighton, Sun; Jazz Bar, Edinburgh, Wed; Montrose Folk Club, Links Hotel, Fri

John Fordham



Metro:The Tide Has Changed

By Robert Shore

Metro Friday 1st October 2010

As the MC announces over the cabaret atmospherics of Dry Fear, The Tide Has Changed is the 'tenth-anniversary celebration...of the one and only Orient House Ensemble'. It's true that no one mixes bebop with traditional Eastern European and Middle Eastern music quite like Israeli-born reed player Gilad Atzmon's outfit. Atzmon is a controversialist and an improviser of astonishing invention and virtuosity; just lsiten to his fleet-fingered sax break on the moody title track or his searching clarinet solo on All The Way to Montenegro, which climaxes in a gravity-defying ascent that echoes the glissando at the beginning of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. His collaborators are no slouches either: Bolero At Sunrise demonstrates how richly suggestive musical restraint can be.

FT -The Tide Has Changed (4 stars)

  Jazz

Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble: The Tide Has Changed

By Mike Hobart

Published: October 2 2010 00:16

Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble

The Tide Has Changed

(World Village)

The Israeli-born multi-instrumentalist marks a decade leading the Orient House Ensemble with this powerful, finished-article blend of Middle Eastern cadences and unfettered jazz. The agitational spirit is undimmed, but now there is a pensive undertow implying the tide hasn’t necessarily changed for the better.

Atzmon delivers spirituality and time-bending alto-sax virtuosity on the title track, the introduction is dark-hewed burlesque and there is a village dance finale. Highlights include a clarinet and wordless vocal lament and a soprano-sax excursion on Ravel’s Boléro



The Guardian: The Tide Has Changed (4 stars)

• • John Fordham

Saxophonist, composer, polemicist and wit Gilad Atzmon is currently celebrating 10 years with his eloquently entertaining world-jazz group, the Orient House Ensemble, and The Tide Has Changed seems to represent a mature yet still eager reflection on the story so far. It's a typically riotous mix of oompah music-hall cavortings, slurred-pitch Middle Eastern rhapsodising, luxuriously sensuous clarinet love-songs, and stormy collective blasts reminiscent of the 1960s John Coltrane quartet. The initially dolorous microtonal opening of the title track over Frank Harrison's strummed piano strings turns into an uptempo section of barked staccato sounds and swerving runs uncircled by Tali Atzmon's vocals, while Bolero at Sunrise – for Atzmon's keening soprano sax – is exactly what its title describes, and In the Back Seat of a Yellow Cab splices the versatile leader's accordion and bluesy alto sax with vocal clamours like a crowded party or the squawks of a channel-hopping radio. Atzmon's albums never quite catch the amiable ferocity of his live shows, but this one certainly expresses the Orient House motto: "Relentlessly, we remind ourselves why we decided to make music in the first place."



Mojo October 2010 The Tide Has Changed

 
“…this blistering, beautiful set…a fluid, hypnotic, optimistic blending of sounds from North Africa, the Arabian peninsula, John Surman and Charlie Parker, resulting in a multicultural balm of Gilad to soothe all aching souls.”
Andew Male, Mojo, October 2010.