Sephardic Tinge

Anthony Coleman’s Sephardic Tinge, a trio of New York’s finest avant-garde musicians, takes traditional Jewish music and mixes it with doses of straight-ahead jazz, be-bop and Spanish music. (Sephardic is the name given to the Jews who colonized the southern portions of Spain; hence the album’s title.) The result is an eclectic amalgam of intensely spiritual and fun music.

“Our Beautiful Garden Is Open” is the third volume in the Sephardic Tinge saga. Pianist Anthony Coleman, drummer Michael Sarin, and bassist Ben Street have taken a different tack on this outing than on any of their predecessors. While the band’s first recording concerned itself with finding parallels and similarities between popular and mutant strains of American music and traditional klezmer and Yiddish song, and Selfhaters willfully explored the darkness of open modal figures and topics like cultural disgrace, “Our Beautiful Garden Is Open” is the most wide-open and focused on their sessions. Most specifically, this is a jazz trio recording that concerns itself with being just that.

The interplay between Coleman and his rhythm section is nearly symbiotic, especially in the more spacious and open compositions such as “Like Trees, Like leaves,” with its Hebraic folk music subtext and Bill Evans-like intervallic sequencing.

And then there’s the title track with a chord structure that pits fuses Ran Blake and Dave Burrell.

Here the addition of a twinned pair of Yiddish melodies against an open modal syntax with Sarin and Street playing double time against Coleman’s augmented repetitions is remarkable.

The set closes with the dirge-like Yiddish ballad “Adon Hashlichot”; but that’s not all it is.

There is an element of Tom Jobim’s Brazilian pop in the middle section that calls upon both bossa and samba to articulate the melancholy melody while shifting its mood rhythmically and chromatically. This is the best Sephardic Tinge disc yet.

A tradicional sephardic song in a cover by Anthony Coleman, included on his trio album «Sephardic Tinge» (Tzadik, 1995). With Anthony Coleman on piano, Greg Cohen on bass and Joey Baron on drums. The photos of Israel are by Oleg Chermoshniuk. You can see his work at http://www.pbase.com/olegis/root. This video was made with the single purpose of letting more people know about the work of the musicians, photographers and artists, whose works are shown. No profit is intended or obtained. If the copyrights owners wish to oppose to its exibition on youtube, just leave a message on the video, and i’ll imediatly remove it!

Album: “Our Beautiful Garden Is Open” by Sephardic Tinge / Price: $9.90 / Released: February 26, 2002 ? Tzadik

Source: Jewish iPhone Community