Atzmon’s Orient House ensemble tours to promote their new, eighth album, The Whistle Blower. Gilad is one of the great sax players of our era – Robert Wyatt has described him as the best musician in the world today. Despite the fact that he is an in- demand session player (selected by Pink Floyd to take the sax chair on their first album for 20 years The Endless River, released in November 2014) and author, Gilad keeps the jazz flame burning and on this album makes perhaps his most jazz orientated album yet. With new drummer Chris Higginbottom providing a more traditional jazz feel in the sticks department, Gilad explores his soprano technique to particularly fine effect, demonstrating just what a sensitive touch he has and how fine an improvisor – particularly on the extended solos of the Coltranesque Let Us Pray. Gilad says this is a mellow album, but there’s muscle here too with the Orient House Ensemble driving the rhythm along in the way that only a long-running institution of this kind (almost unheralded in the jazz world at any time) can do. The Whistle Blower is a great title for a horn player’s album and of course references Gilad’s political stance. I’m sure it has nothing at all to do with the fact that For Moana is a wolf whistle in the direction of that very Italian poitician Ms Pozzi…
“It’s quite a trip from the opening Middle Eastern ululations of the strongly driving Gaza to the stately dance measures and accordion musings of the folkish “Song” but somehow everything here – including the French-pop spoofs of the brief, concluding final track – gels to give a finely-focused picture of a man who, for all his complexity, describes himself in his poetically taut sleeve notes as an “avid admirer of simplicity and transparency”. (Jazz Journal, May 2015).
