Album review: Gilad Atzmon: In Loving Memory of America

Published on Sunday 8 March 2009 18:57

**** ENJA/TIPTOE, £13.70

THE Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon revisits his early obsession with American jazz stars such as Charlie Parker but, as you might expect, not without a sting in the tail. His loving renditions of five familiar jazz standards, complete with lush string backing from the Sigamos String Quartet, have the elegance and richness of sonority of Parker's "with strings" projects of the early 1950s embedded in them, but are interspersed with six of his own compositions drawing on a more contemporary musical vocabulary (including a short sound collage).

The effect is to create both an implicit commentary on the standards, and a powerful sense of dislocation at the end. As always, it has a political edge to it – his recollections of the America this music represents are a genuine expression of love, but also a lament for the loss of his former idealised understanding of the country, which he now sees in a different cultural and political light.

His own playing is as impassioned as ever, and his regular cohorts Frank Harrison on piano, Yaron Stavi on bass and drummer Asaf Sirkis respond in their usual empathic fashion.