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Nicolas Meier

Silence Talks

Naim naimcd113

Thoroughly immersed in Turkish culture and music – his wife is from Turkey and he spends a lot of time there – but grounded in jazz, guitarist/composer Nicolas Meier has found the perfect musical collaborator in front-line partner, saxophonist Gilad Atzmon.

Complementing Meier's filigree delicacy on a wide range of guitars and related instruments (among them the Glissentar fretless guitar with eleven strings, which produces a wonderfully evocative lute/oud-like sound on this album's title-track) is Atzmon's fire and raw but controlled passion, enabling the band to race through the breathlessly exciting whirls of the likes of 'October in Ankara' and 'Dance of the Rain', but also to create more meditative, tranquil moods.

Drummer Asaf Sirkis and bassist Tom Mason provide both rollicking drive (Sirkis one of those drummers who seems effortlessly to internalise the music's rhythms, so that they pour out of him naturally, in an apparently inexhaustibly inventive stream) and subtle propulsion throughout, and with Meier and Atzmon producing a succession of intense and compulsive solos on an unsually varied selection of material (Turkish music, breezy fusion-tinged pieces, the odd whiff of flamenco etc., along with healthy doses of vibrant jazz), this is not only a worthy successor to YÍz (Naim, 2007), but a fine album in its own right.