Metro:The Tide Has Changed

By Robert Shore

Metro Friday 1st October 2010

As the MC announces over the cabaret atmospherics of Dry Fear, The Tide Has Changed is the 'tenth-anniversary celebration...of the one and only Orient House Ensemble'. It's true that no one mixes bebop with traditional Eastern European and Middle Eastern music quite like Israeli-born reed player Gilad Atzmon's outfit. Atzmon is a controversialist and an improviser of astonishing invention and virtuosity; just lsiten to his fleet-fingered sax break on the moody title track or his searching clarinet solo on All The Way to Montenegro, which climaxes in a gravity-defying ascent that echoes the glissando at the beginning of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. His collaborators are no slouches either: Bolero At Sunrise demonstrates how richly suggestive musical restraint can be.