Credits:

Oded Tzur

Description:

This is the second ECM album by Oded Tool, the most sought-after saxophonist in the world today, who lives in New York and hails from Tel Aviv! Drummer Jonathan Blake rejoin Oded on his musical journey, infusing the leader's invention with effortless musicianship and vivid imagination. Leading the contemporary jazz world and connected beyond the genre's traditional forms, the saxophonist collaborators are given the freedom to "develop the music any way they want" within the structure and possibilities of the compositions, according to the group. The group is constantly discovering new ways to communicate, expanding its musical vocabulary in the process. Characterized by Nitai's delicate piano strokes, Jonathan's intense and confident percussion work, and Petros' deep and reliable foundation, the music "is like being on a river, with trees along the banks, so you don't really know where you are going, but it will lead you to the right place. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm sure it will lead me to the right place.Oded has carved out a particularly idiosyncratic compositional path for himself, blending raga and jazz in a way that allows the saxophonist to apply overarching musical philosophical concepts on a universal level rather than borrowing or imitating musical idioms from other countries. As Oded puts it, raga is more than a set of parameters tied to time signatures and notes. One way to define a raga is to see it as an abstract personality made of sound." One musician describes a raga as a "living entity. It is no longer a musical scale, but more than a sequence of notes. In that sense, the blues is exactly the same as the raga. There are scales, but they are not mere scales. It has an abstract character that makes you think, "Oh, that's it," just by hearing one phrase. It's like someone you can recognize from a distance. It is like a charan (the skeleton of a raga) in Indian classical music, which explains the structure of the raga as concisely as possible, like the synopsis of a play.Oded and his quartet develop the condensed musicality of "Invocation" and transform it into new shapes and forms, pensive one moment and freewheeling improvisation the next in a vast study of temperament. It took me a while to cultivate the courage to explore the other extreme as well, to see what happens when you follow an explosion at the other end of the dynamic spectrum." With this album, I finally felt comfortable exploring the whole dynamic range, the silence and eruptions, the vibrant colors." [Personnel] Oded Tzur (ts) Nitai Hershkovits (p) Petros Klampanis (double-b) Johnathan Blake (ds)