Isabela

Description

For his second ECM album, New York saxophonist Oded Tzur introduces an unprecedented and particularly sensitive sense of urgency into his music, as well as a conceptual approach enriched by his unique voice, reflecting through a series of complex devices and forms a whole underlying network of passionate musical ideas. Here we find the same quartet that recorded Here Be Dragons in 2020, but the complicity between the four musicians has continued to amplify and intensify from an expressive point of view. Throughout Isabela, the saxophonist and his collaborators - pianist Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Petros Klampanis, and Johnathan Blake on drums - develop the specificities of their collective discourse with great subtlety but in a more intensive way, exploring all the nuances of colors inherent to Oded's self-taught ragas in a sort of suite alternating between meditative sequences and expressive bursts. This remarkable session was recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano in October 2021 under the artistic direction of Manfred Eicher.