Oded Tzur

LP version. Here Be Dragons is the ECM debut of the tenor saxophonist Oded Tzur, born in Tel Aviv and based in New York since 2011. After two quartet albums for Enja, he arrived with a sound of his own, soft and fluid, shaped by years of study of Indian classical music. The record applies raga thinking to a jazz quartet without any of the trappings of Indo-jazz, and it is gentle almost to the point of stillness.

From 2007 Tzur studied with the bansuri master Hariprasad Chaurasia, who led him to use slides, slurs and microtonal shading on the tenor, an approach he calls the Middle Path. His group joins three countries. Nitai Hershkovits, an Israeli pianist formerly with Avishai Cohen, shares the foreground. The Greek bassist Petros Klampanis has played with Tzur since 2011, and the American drummer Johnathan Blake completes the quartet. They recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo of RSI in Lugano in June 2019, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The longer pieces are each built as a miniature raga over a moving bass line. In the title track a calm, flute-like tenor melody floats over a rolling piano vamp, Blake's mallets and Klampanis's shifting bass. To Hold Your Hand is based on the scale of the raga Charukesi, and 20 Years, written in memory of Tzur's father, has the slow, devotional feel of a hymn. Three short Miniatures give each player a solo in turn before The Dream, the most energetic track. The album closes with a spare, slowed-down reading of Can't Help Falling In Love, the song made famous by Elvis Presley.

Reviewers stressed the restraint. Jim Motavalli wrote in The New York City Jazz Record (2020): "Even for ECM, this is an album of radical gentleness." Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz (2020) found that each of Tzur's pieces "has hypnotic and inventive qualities" and called him a master raconteur. In the booklet Tzur adds a playful tale about Brunelleschi hunting for dragons, which ends with the line "There are no dragons, but here is a song."

LP edition, ECM 2676, released together with the CD on 14 February 2020, with a two-sided insert carrying liner notes by Steve Lake and Oded Tzur.