Trickster Orchestra takes the songs of the Berlin duo Cymin Samawatie and Ketan Bhatti, known to ECM listeners from their group Cyminology, into a 23-piece ensemble. Western orchestral instruments sit beside sheng, koto, kanun and ney, each keeping its own tuning, and electronics run through the whole. The result is closer to contemporary composition than to jazz, though it thinks like a band.
Samawatie, an Iranian-German singer, and Bhatti, an Indian-German drummer and percussionist, founded the orchestra in 2013 out of a collaboration within the education programme of the Berlin Philharmonic. A concert at Jazzfest Berlin in 2015 gave it momentum. Samawatie sings and conducts, Bhatti plays drums, and the players include sheng master Wu Wei, koto player Naoko Kikuchi, Berlin Philharmonic violist Martin Stegner and clarinettist Mona Matbou Riahi. The album was recorded in January 2019 at the Meistersaal in Berlin, with Martin Ruch as engineer.
The texts run from Psalm 130 to the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz and the contemporary Turkish poet Efe Duyan, sung in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish. On the opening Shir hamaalot Samawatie's voice is wrapped in a string quartet, one of many smaller groups that form and dissolve inside the ensemble. Gebete, on a Rumi text, joins her with singers Rabih Lahoud and Sveta Kundish in a vocal trio that at moments recalls chant. Modara, named after the orchestra's own festival, links electronic sounds and jazz patterns with late-Romantic string writing. Por se ssedaa, first heard on Cyminology's ECM debut As Ney, returns in a new arrangement to close the album.
Writing on his blog The Blue Moment, Richard Williams heard a music in which the sheng and the viola have equal weight. "It's not a mosaic, but it is a kaleidoscope," he wrote. The German daily TAZ singled out Modara as the highlight. For Mike Gates of UK Vibe the instrumentation was the key to an "experimental and adventurous recording", one he felt might have suited the ECM New Series.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2696, released on 23 April 2021, in a jewel case with a 20-page booklet and a cardboard slipcase.
