OHAD TALMOR
Tenor saxophonist and composer Ohad Talmor begins a bold new artistic cycle on the immersive double album Back to the Land, on Intakt Records. It all began with the discovery of something exceedingly rare: three DAT tapes found in the personal collection of the late Lee Konitz, Talmor’s mentor, dear friend and father figure for over 30 years.
What was on these lost tapes was astonishing: a document of rehearsals that took place at Ornette Coleman’s loft in May 1998. “It was Ornette and Lee together,” Talmor recalls, “with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, rehearsing all this new music that Ornette had just written for an upcoming concert at the Umbria Jazz Festival. They’re playing, stopping, talking about women, talking about reeds, things like that. They played the one concert at Umbria and I’m not aware of the music ever being played after that. None of it has been published.”
Excitedly, Talmor began to transcribe the 10 unknown, nameless Ornette Coleman tunes. “Transcribing the way Ornette writes is difficult,” he says, “because you have to make some assumptions. Also, these were a work-in-progress — Ornette was trying them out, Lee was playing them but not necessarily the way Ornette heard them at first, and it was all very fluid. But I came up with what I considered faithful transcriptions, and when I started playing them with my trio [featuring bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Eric McPherson], the whole thing took on a different life.”
Talmor came to the task with a highly accomplished record in the field of composition and arranging, freely crossing boundaries between orchestral music and large- and small-group jazz as leader of the Grand Ensemble, the Mass Transformation Nonet, the Newsreel Sextet, trios with Miles Okazaki and Dan Weiss as well as Steve Swallow and Adam Nussbaum, and the list goes on. An adventurous improviser with a richly burnished tone on tenor sax, Talmor sought to highlight the new Ornette Coleman material in a setting of varied instrumentation, all rooted in the core Tordini-McPherson trio dynamic.
Thinking back on one of his very first LP purchases — Coleman’s 1987 double album In All Languages — Talmor recalls being taken with the format: the classic Coleman quartet on one record, the electric Prime Time on the other. Back to the Land takes this as a blueprint (and includes “Peace Warriors” from the album for good measure). The first two sides find Talmor and the trio in shifting acoustic configurations with vibraphonist Joel Ross and rotating pianists David Virelles and Leo Genovese. The second LP is more electronic in nature, though the trio and its various augmentations remain very present. Trumpeters Russ Johnson, Shane Endsley and Adam O’Farrill create new improvisational layers, while harmonica virtuoso Grégoire Maret delivers a brilliant melodic showcase on the closing “Quintet Variations on Tune 10.
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2023/10/18 CULTUREJAZZ | LINK