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Gilad Atzmon Quartet – 'Gilad Atzmon Presents Artie Fishel and the Promised Band'

WMD Records: WMDCD 001968

Gilad Atzmon: saxophone; John Turville: piano; Yaron Stavi: bass; Asaf Sirkis: drums; Koby Israelite: accordion and voice; Guillermo Rosenthuler: voice; Eyal Maoz: guitar; Ovidiu Fratila: violin;

Release date 16th October 2006

This latest release from Gilad Atzmon is an extraordinary mix of klezmer-mania and Atzmon bebop, wildly mixed with band-show antics and barrelhouse burlesque. Most reviews that I have read seem only to quote from the press releases and left me wondering whether their reviewers had indeed played the album or were merely indulging in knee-jerk reactions. I did not find this circus particularly amusing: although there are bits of a laugh hither and yon, there is no way it can match anything by Zappa.

Having said that, it is imperative to remember that Gilad Atzmon is still the essential jazz musician and is one of the most consummate saxophonists of the era. The core of the band is the quartet made up of Atzmon, Turville, Stavi and Sirkis and which always produces some superb jazz. The album is no exception, though the brilliant flashes of jazz music, glimpsed between the swirling veils of absurdity, anarchism, disdain, hilarity, political humour, irony, radical rage, rebellion and subversion, seem somewhat lost to me as I strive to recover from the noise of the fairground to reorientate my senses to the music itself.

The band is currently on tour in a performance of two parts, one half I think exploring the Artie Fishel (artificial) phenomenon, the other a return to the brilliantly fiery boplicity of this excellent band. Any of you under 40 would have missed Coltrane live; if under 50, Charlie Parker too. I don’t think Atzmon is in the same league, but catch this band live and you should understand something of what the enthusiasm was about. It’s the bebop side of the band that I’m referring to, not the circus. Hear all of this before you buy the album: that makes sense. Both saxophone and piano are enormously potent and Stavi’s bass inexorably dynamic, the whole rigorously cemented by the shimmering though immutable restraint of the drumming by Sirkis.