Gilad Atzmon Quartet @ TheEveryman Studio

Expect the unexpected – that should be Gilad Atzmon’s motto. Certainly, anyone pitching up to be in the audience for one of his gigs is in for a roller-coaster ride. Musically, Gilad takes the listener from the hinterlands of jazz, as occupied in former times by the likes of Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Roland Kirk, through to the crossover territory favoured by many contemporary alt-jazz outfits. Along the way, and to keep the diehard mainstreamers onside, he throws in a couple of standards for good measure. Not that there is anything standard or mainstream to his approach, but more of that later.

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The Discordant Who? Atzmon and Debate

To be castigated by the Guradian, possibly one of the worst newspapers in the western world, is an accolade and is bound to sell books and highlight his pitch. Just because the Guiaradn espouses liberalism, social welfare, justice, world peace, feng shui and climate change doesn’t prevent it from being a bottleneck for all these issues, and to my eyes the paper tilts at windmills and sidetracks the main issues of any story, as ‘good’ liberals tend to do. In other words it has long hair but it isn’t really much of a hippy. Of course it now adds to its CV that it has silenced a voice of dissent, the sort of act one has come to associate with dictatorship and oppression.

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