About

Much like listening to late period John Coltrane or modern-day Charles Lloyd, listening to Oded Tzur is akin to a spiritual experience. The tenor saxophonist's fifth album, My Prophet, is his most affecting yet. Simultaneously corporeal and metaphysical, soulful and cerebral. Inexplicably, despite having four breathtakingly singular and near-perfect albums out and about already, not to mention wall-to-wall media affirmation, Brooklyn-based, Tel Aviv-born Tzur is still a relatively niche name. At its most passionate, his music lacks populist crash bang wallop. At its most devotional, it is entirely without sentimentality or cheap incense.

All the qualities listed above have been constants in Tzur's music since his first album. My Prophet adds another dimension. The album was recorded in France in November 2023, a few weeks after Hamas' attack on Israel. After the opening "Epilogue," a thirty-second instrumental "om," the raw anguish one imagines was being felt by the band. Tzur agrees that the Quartet is reaching new levels of intensity but ascribes the cause elsewhere. Still fundamentally consonant, like all Tzur's previous music, there are splashes of dissonance and agitation. The penultimate title track, at over eleven minutes the longest on the album, is more settled, with Hershkovits sounding delicately Erik Satie-esque.

The quartet’s synergy is of a unique blend, with each player’s distinct voice adding to an ensemble sound capable of conjuring both the quietest storm and the most passionate crescendo. Hershkovits’s bountiful stylistic reach and fluent technique swirl around Oded’s unmistakable tenor tone with Klampanis providing both backbone and melody, adaptable yet guiding – just like his rhythm-partner Almeida. Oded’s third album with ECM was recorded in Southern France and produced by Manfred Eicher. — (via All About Jazz)

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Label: ECM Records
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: Germany
Released: 2024
Genre: Jazz, Contemporary Jazz

File under: ECM Records
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