Atzmon:
The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians.
Crucially, though, that ideology comes through at least as strongly in the saxophonist’s music, the mix of jazz and Middle Eastern folk music pursued by his now decade-old Orient House Ensemble making exactly the same political point. And, at least at this performance at London’s
Vortex club, it’s a quite spectacular triumph in artistic terms too.
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