Momin, Ravish's Trio Tarana

Miren (A Longing)

Label: Clean Feed Country: Portugal

"This is a new Tarana. The trio recorded here includes violinist Sam Bardfeld and oud player Brandon Terzic occupying Jason Kao Hwang's and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz's seats on the earlier "Climbing the Banyan Tree." Tanya Kalmanovitch guests on viola on one track. Although changes in personnel inevitable lead to differences in the music, there is a constant: the project leader is percussionist Ravish Momin, expressing his flavor of "world jazz" with Oriental, Middle Eastern, and African motives and free bop stylings in a chamber-like configuration. It's not the exotic as a gimmick, but the expression of the "global village" apparent in today's reality, as experienced in the United States, where many cultures mix or at least coexist. A former pupil of jazz drummers Andrew Cyrille and Bob Moses, Momin has also studied North Indian classical music, and the two traditions are equally present in everything he plays, not crystallized in fixed forms, but as a platform for a continuous search of new musical parameters. He is aware of the pitfalls of eclecticism, but he also believes that if the roots are strong, the direction will be steady. And indeed the roots are solid on this CD. They may feel unfamiliar, but at the same time the music inside has elements you'll immediately recognize, even if you're not sure of the source. This equilibrium between new and traditional is no easy task, but it fulfils a purpose: to connect new sound combinations with the vocabularies of our ancestors."-Clean Feed