Amir ElSaffar

There's something universally recognizable about an opening invocation. Centering around a drone note, a sense of warming up, tuning, intoning; all signs point to a beginning. Melody is emergent and seems to sprout organically from the primordial stew of sound. There's a beautiful mix of timbres and rhythms, with a relaxed intensity to the groove and the focus revolves around the orbit of the singular drone. The album is called Two Rivers, referring to the historic tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the land that lies between.

It could be considered politically relevant to make an album that combines the form and instruments of traditional Iraqi Maqam with the improvised spirit and instrumentation of a jazz combo. I use the word "could," because apart from the relevance of this meeting of musical traditions in today's world, there is a beautiful recording here with music that is pertinent and worthwhile listening.

However, to ignore the state of the world surrounding music is to perpetrate a great injustice to the relevance and agency of music to reflect, to create Utopian musical spaces where barriers are broken down, and to bring to the forefront underlying beauty that otherwise might be lost amongst violence and destruction.

There's a patience in the proceedings here that I find extremely rewarding as a listener. Tension is built and brought to peaks, but it is never in a hurry to do so, and the slope happens so subtly and gradually that it's easy to forget it's  going somewhere until it has arrived. Amir ElSaffar's trumpet playing is fantastic throughout, utilizing scales and timbres that are certainly referential to the musical heritage of Iraqi Maqam while also incorporating the language and phrasing of jazz.

Santoor, oud, doumbek, buzuq, frame drum.

Trumpet, alto sax, bass, drums, violin.

A meeting of musics. Can musics meet? What happens when they do? Do they shake hands, retain separate identities and commingle? Or do they do dirty things like fuse into a fusion? There, I said it. Let's be honest though, fusion is only dirty if jazz is fusing with profane musics like rock and roll or pop music. If it fuses with folk musics from around the world or other art music, that's perfectly acceptable. Right? Musics meet in individuals whose identities are able to span continents. It's interesting to note that the shifting of intervallic preference and timbre can lead to denotation of musical culture and locality.

Don Cherry once said: "When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them."

Amir ElSaffar, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Dafer Tawil, Tareq Abboushi, Carlo DeRosa, Nasheet Waits. It really sounds like a band, great chemistry and interplay, and everyone plays with bravado and gusto.

What good is a word like jazz if it can't let music like this into the shade of its stylistic tree? If it can't give shelter from the storm under its genre umbrella? In the liner notes, ElSaffar talks about similarities between the heterophony native to maqam music and Cecil Taylor's music. Cecil Taylor! Maqam! Heterophony! There's something going on there, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Have I mentioned that this music is hip? Because it most certainly is. Khosh Reng features a groove in 17/8 that cries out to be danced to, joyously. Blood and Ink begins with a poem that is moving without knowing anything about its translation.

All in all, this is a great album from Mr. ElSaffar and his band. and comes highly recommended. It's an album of music that spans borders, incorporates seemingly disparate elements that end up comfortable bedfellows, and comes out with an end product that doesn't feel forced in bringing it all together. The feat of apparent effortlessness is a cherished quality in the music I enjoy, and this fits the bill.

If this sounds appealing, you can find out more here. You can also buy the record directly from Pi Recordings on that page.