Artist: Oded Tzur
Album: My Prophet
Genre: Modern Creative, Contemporary Jazz
Label: ECM Records
Released: 2024
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Epilogue (0:46)
- Child You (8:29)
- Through a Land Unsown (9:57)
- Renata (8:02)
- My Prophet (11:03)
- Last Bike Ride in Paris (7:28)
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- Personnel:
- Oded Tzur - tenor saxophone
- Nitai Hershkovits - piano
- Petros Klampanis - double bass
- Cyrano Almeida - drums
Oded Tzur, a Tel Aviv-born, Brooklyn-based saxophonist and composer, released his first two albums for Enja's Yellowbird imprint – 2015's Like a Great River and 2017's Translator's Note. While both were inspired, it was his ECM debut, 2020's Here Be Dragons, that showcased an evolving aesthetic balancing composition and lyric group interplay in a weave of spiritual jazz, modal blues, folk music, and post-bop. Two years later, Isabela showcased a striking refinement of the group's improvisational approach. The lineup on My Prophet features all returning members: pianist Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Petros Klampanis, and drummer Cyrano Almeida. There are six tracks, including the brief, ironically titled "Epilogue" that opens the album. The remainder of these compositions are between 7 and 11 minutes.
The 45-second "Epilogue" is a haunting call to prayer on a rounded saxophone before segueing into the eight-and-a-half-minute "Child You," where near Eastern folk music seamlessly encounters post-bop with a quick, Viennese waltz tempo. As Hershkovits and Tzur circle one another, the rhythm section advances the tempo's reach. The first half of the leader's solo sounds nearly muted until ratcheting up to near growling intensity before Hershkovits commences with a blistering solo that adds angular minor chords and a new bottom for the piece. "A Land Unsown" finds the pianist and bassist initiating the proceeding with a minor, folk-inspired vamp. Tzur whispers in, filling them with a warm, airy melody. Klampanis' lyrical bass break is accompanied by soft, high-register notes from the pianist that eventually claim the fore in a dazzling, understated solo. At seven minutes, Tzur restates the melody in a gravelly tone before engaging in bluesy modal conversation with the rhythm section. "Renata" softly emerges with muted tenor and piano lines playing a theme. Tzur, aided by Almeida and Klampanis, adds space and textural dimension before increasing the tempo. Hershkovits opens it up, and Tzur goes full-throated, playing inside and outside the theme as the full band builds tension and intensity as a spiritual jazz mantra before coming back down as the pianist introduces a lush, classically inspired romantic theme that the quartet meander inside of and meditate on until its nadir. The title track spends the majority of its 11-minute duration as a bluesy modal ballad. Klampanis and Hershkovits converse as Almeida brushes accents. Tzur's statement of the melody is soft, inquiring, and reverent, and the pianist's bell-like accompaniment is magical. The quartet pulls out the stops on the loping closer, "Last Bike Ride in Paris," as Tzur bridges post-bop with interlocking exchanges with the pianist, whose solo weds lyricism, muscle, and elegance, buoyed by hard swing from the rhythm section. There is not a middling moment on My Prophet. It articulates Tzur's highly original playing and composing methods, offering formally constructed, nuanced compositional bookends, while providing abundant room for his band to engage one another in musical, conversational freedom. Five albums in, Tzur feels like he's just hitting his stride.
Review by Thom Jurek