Omri Ziegele Tomorrow Trio – All Those Yesterdays
(Intakt CD 333 2020. CD review by Jon Turney)

The second track title here, O. My God, is as direct a declaration of allegiance as you’ll find. The O refers to Ornette Coleman. And with trio convenor (leader isn’t quite right) Omri Ziegele – Israeli-born but long-time resident in Zurich – playing alto, the formation aligns with Ornette’s long ago trio at the Golden Circle in Stockholm. David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums were equal partners then. This 2016 live set features equally creative cohorts, with Ziegele’s long-term collaborator Christian Weber on bass and old lion Han Bennink on drums.

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They are a resourceful, co-operative threesome, their reflexes sharp at the end of the tour. Bass and drums have the split-second flexibility Ziegele’s freebop solo style demands. His compositions, with more straightforwardly boppish heads than Ornette’s, provide nicely elastic up-tempo springboards and a couple of affecting ballads. The altoist is pleasingly astringent, moving in and out of free-er style in a manner reminiscent of Mike Osborne. Weber is full-toned and richly inventive. Bennink, still swinging mightily after all these years, tempers his exuberance with moments of rare delicacy.

The whole set has a convincing flow that’s captured best by the live recording – hard to imagine them reaching quite this level in the studio. Their commitment to spontaneity in performance extends to Ziegele declaiming a portion of Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree with appealingly cracked enthusiasm. He felt like it, so we feel it now as well. This is how this music is meant to work, too. It certainly does here.

Jon Turney writes about jazz, and other things, from Bristol on his website and Twitter.