(Modern Creative, Contemporary Jazz) Oded Tzur - Collection - (4 альбома), 2015-2022, MP3, 320 kbps

Be as still as a mountain, move like a great river – The Essence of Tai Chi Chuan
Originally from Tel-Aviv and now based in New-York, Oded Tzur is a young saxophone player and composer who has been exploring the connections between jazz and Indian classical music over the last 10 years. Joining the saxophone player for a first rehearsal in 2012, pianist Shai Maestro, bass player Petros Klampanis and drummer Ziv Ravitz immediately connected and started touring as the Oded Tzur Quartet. Released in April 2015 on Enja Records, Like a Great River is the quartet’s impressive début.
Admitted in 2007 to the Indian music program at the Rotterdam World Music Academy, Oded Tzur continued delving into Hindustani Classical music phrasing, rhythm and tones under the tutelage of Bansuri maestro Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. Over the years, the musician developed his very own storytelling style inspired equally by the classic Indian meandering Ragas and by western jazz improvisation.
Indian Classical music has played a huge role in the musical trajectory of giants of modern jazz like John Coltrane for instance who found in Hindustani music a novel and spiritual way of approaching modal improvisation and scales. At the same time, several contemporary jazz saxophonists have borrowed circular breathing techniques from yoga and tailored them for playing their instrument. The focus of Oded Tzur is primarily acoustic.
From a technical point of view, the musician’s study of Indian Classical music and his desire to adapt its unique approach to sound and vibration to the saxophone gradually led him to develop what he calls his “Middle Path” method, a set of techniques destined to alter the acoustic conditions of the instrument and achieve the same microtonal shifts as on traditional Indian instruments such as the bansuri flute, the sitar or the tampura.
“Indian instruments tend to feel very comfortable playing in between the notes. You just pull the string on a Sitar, for example, and a seamless slide will take place. In order to bring the saxophone to this condition we need to understand its inherent acoustic behaviors, and how we can purposefully change them to enable pitch fluidity”. Oded Tzur
But more than a technique, Oded Tzur’s approach is also deeply spiritual. The centre piece of the album for instance “The Song of the Silent Dragon” ebbs and flows beautifully over 15 contemplative minutes. There is a deep sense that the music on Like a Great River has been carefully honed with the quartet over countless live sessions – and that no stone has been left unturned along the twisting and turning melodic path.

Urgency coexists with Zen-like calm on the darkly brilliant sophomore album by tenor saxophonist Oded Tzur. The dynamics of his fearless quartet mirror its ever-shifting storytelling intent. This album ripples and resonates.
Tzur’s enigmatically titled tunes speak to the underlying purpose of this group, as do Tzur’s literally fabulous liner notes. Whether the subject is the watery feel of “The Whale Song,” the turbulent journey of “Single Mother” or “The Three Statements Of Garab Dorje,” the Oded Tzur Quartet tells stories.
Tzur’s tunes experiment with di erent forms of narrative. The “Dorje” cut, which references a Tibetan Buddhist oracle, feels like a conversation, Tzur commenting on Shai Maestro’s pearly piano, Petros Klampanis’ thrumming bass and Ziv Ravitz’s feathery yet fierce drums. The songs, imbued with a profound melodicism, are dramatic and absorbing, and the interplay transcends empathy. There is nothing ragged about this ensemble.
A student of Indian classical music, Tzur is an architect of stealth, meticulously building his tunes from the ground up. At times, his very quietude seems to roar; the way he starts and ends “Single Mother” suggests a volcano on the ocean floor. An explorer of the microtonal and a player of such restraint and patience that his explosions are particularly startling, Tzur delivers a unique sound, giving his instrument pioneering dimension and depth. At times, his tenor saxophone grazes a flute’s timbre; at others, it plumbs the depths of a bass clarinet.
The one cover is John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” While not as schematic as the original, Tzur’s version is relatively brief, leisurely and incantatory, capping a recording of enormous emotional pull.

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Oded Tzur's tenor saxophone playing is how much his phrasing resembles that of a flutist. He studied Hindustani classical music under the tutelage of Bansuri flute maestro Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, who had a profound influence on him. Tzur resides in New York City; he hails from Israel, and for some years was an integral part of his nation's fertile jazz scene. Before signing to ECM, he released two leader dates for Enja's Yellowbird: 2015's Like a Great River and 2017's Translator's Note. In different ways they explored new connections between American jazz, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Israeli classical and folk traditions. Here Be Dragons was recorded in Lugano, Switzerland with a new version of Tzur's quartet: Greek bassist Petros Klampanis remains, but drummer Ziv Ravitz has been replaced by American kit man Johnathan Blake, and pianist Shai Maestro by Nitai Hershkovits.
Tzur's sonorous abilities in melding East and West are much more subtly displayed on Here Be Dragons. Tone, timbre, and space hold the set's foreground in reflective, richly harmonic tunes that are melodically and texturally sumptuous. The title-track opener is introduced by a reflective melody in relatively few notes. But Tzur's musicians are provided both time and space to explore it and offer canny individual interpretations. Tzur's horn is at once vulnerable to the melody, yet tempered in its utterances. It sounds as if he resides between the tonal spheres inhabited by Ballads-era John Coltrane and the Ben Webster of Warm Moods. Hershkovits commits to each line with gently constructed, suggestive chord voicings. Blake's brushes shimmer under Klampanis' bassline that implies rather than states a pulse. While "To Hold Your Hand" commences similarly, it develops into swing while groove, tone and harmonics gel in savvy group interplay. Tzur' break combines Indian raga and 12-bar blues. "20 Years" is articulated as a restrained ballad, but it is unconstrained in its emotional utterances. There is lush and fluid improvisation between Tzur and Klampanis. "The Dream" is offered at a brisk tempo with syncopated rhythms that touch on African, Latin, and Israeli sources in a shapeshifting lyricism. The set closes with a reading of the 1961 Elvis Presley hit, "I Can’t Help Falling in Love" rendered in nearly glacial waltz time, with gorgeous African rhythms from Blake and a sparse bassline from Klampanis that frames both Hershkovits and Tzur, who play it nearly straight. As the album whispers to a resonant conclusion, the tune's emotional impact --due to Tzur's yearning tone and poignant understatement -- is clear. Here Be Dragons deliberately encourages its creators to join themselves to the music itself without ego or flash; that's a rarity in modern jazz.

On his follow-up to Here Be Dragons New York-based saxophonist Oded Tzur and his collaborators apply their subtle dialect in a more intense space, exploring the nuances and colours of the saxophonist’s self-fashioned raga in a suite-like sequence of quiet meditations and powerful exclamations. Throughout Isabela a heightened sense of urgency prevails, as Oded returns with his unaltered quartet to weave one underlying musical idea through a series of elaborate and impassioned designs. Since their debut appearance for ECM, the group’s interplay has grown more intimate on the road and the deep trust between the leader and his accompanists is a driving and binding force behind the music’s conceptual scope.
Oded has carved out a particularly idiosyncratic approach to composing on his musical path, blending raga and jazz in a way where the saxophonist is neither borrowing nor imitating musical idioms from elsewhere, but rather applying a comprehensive music-philosophical concept on a universal level. As Oded figures, a raga goes beyond a set of parameters bound to time signatures or notes: „One way to define a raga is to see it as an abstract personality that’s made of sound. Some musician would even refer to it as a presence that you have to make come alive. That’s where it’s not a scale anymore, but something so much more than a sequence of notes. In that sense, the blues is exactly like a raga. It has a scale, but it’s not simply a scale. It’s an abstract personality that is so distinct that you can hear one phrase of it and already go: ‘that’s blues’ – Like a person you recognise from afar.”
Once again joining Oded on his musical journey are pianist Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Petros Klampanis and drummer Johnathan Blake, who infuse the leader’s inventions with effortless musicianship and vivid imagination. Each a pillar in the contemporary jazz scene and with links reaching beyond the genre’s traditional format, the saxophonist’s collaborators are given “freedom to develop the music any way they want”, within the structures and possibilities the compositions offer. The group is constantly discovering new ways to communicate with each other and expand their musical vocabulary in the process: “It’s like we’re on a river with trees around the banks, so we can’t really make out where we’re headed, but we can be sure that it will lead us someplace good”. That place is marked by Nitai’s delicate brush strokes on piano, Johnathan’s fierce and confident percussion work and Petros’ more than reliable foundation in the deep end.
Downbeat has described Oded’s playing as “quietly fantastical and full of narrative feints” while outlining his tone as “light and sweet, with a whispered airiness”, and the saxophonist’s note-bending, microtonal technique, inspired by Indian classical instruments and touching the “barely audible”, is again at the heart of his voice and the melodies that protrude on Isabela.
The raga that pervades the album from start to finish is introduced in the opening act “Invocation”, which works like a Chalan in Indian classical music – the skeleton of a Raga that outlines the raga’s structure in the briefest possible way, much as a synopsis does a play. Oded and his quartet develop the concentrated musical matter of “Invocation” and transform it into new shapes and forms in expansive studies of temperament, shifting from pensive introspection in one moment to outgoing and free-wheeling improvisation in the next. “It took me a while to develop the courage to also explore the other extreme, see what happens when you follow the explosion at the other end of the dynamic spectrum. For this album I finally felt comfortable to explore the totality of the dynamic range, the silence but also the eruptions, the bright colours.”
Neither the silence nor the bright colours that immerse the album in manifold shades could emerge without the distinctive contributions from Oded’s fellow travellers and the group’s performance is highlighted by the crystalline acoustics of the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, where the album was recorded in September 2021.