By Filipe Freitas
Oded Tzur, 2020 - photo by © Clara Pereira
Name: Oded Tzur
Instrument: tenor saxophone
Style: contemporary jazz, post-bop, modal jazz
Album Highlights: Here be Dragons (ECM, 2020), Isabela (ECM, 2022), My Prophet (ECM, 2024)
One can sense a strong spiritual side in your music. It’s always been present, but never as strong as in My Prophet. It’s completely identifiable as your own, just like Charles Lloyd, John Coltrane, and Kamasi Washington managed to do in their creative work. Can you talk a bit about that spirituality and its evolution over time?
My music is very much a result, or a focal point, of a personal spiritual discipline. Discovering Coltrane's music for example and realizing that this art form can be more than entertainment, had certainly been a defining moment for me. In this particular album, a prequel to my previous album Isabela, I was trying to describe how a person - in this case my wife - becomes themselves. What are the processes and powers by which we discover, at a certain point or points in our lives, who we really are?
As I was writing this music and reflecting on these questions, and especially when recording this music in early November 2023, I was constantly reminded of those moments where, for all of us as individuals or for society as a whole, we move away from ourselves and forget our real nature. Forget the humanity and awareness that should define us. Recording the album became, even more than the average music making session, an effort in remembering these things and trying to reconnect with who we really are.
Even when being very methodical in this project of musical portraiture, one can't help but feel that beyond all the answers lie more questions, and that the reason a person becomes who they are is more mysterious than anything we can really put in words. Whatever devices or agents bring us to ourselves again and again, which we may call prophets, bring us there perhaps not because they tell us about the future, but rather because they point us to what we have already felt and are deeply familiar with. In that regard, at least for me, music can be thought of as the ultimate prophet.
There’s Indian classical influence in your compositions. What other non-jazz genres are you interested in, and can you share any specific recommendations within those genres?
I have always been fascinated by all musical traditions on this planet (and in fact, I am very curious if music exists on other planets), but what I'm curious about the most is whether the musical phenomenon has any underlying structures that lie underneath all the differences. In that regard, Indian classical music feels very much like a laboratory of sound: an almost scientific exploration of the behaviour of melody and rhythm in and of themselves. In that sense I would recommend the recordings of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. Nikhil Banerjee and Hariprasad Chaurasia to anyone who's curious about the genre.
How do you see the world today?
I think human beings have a severe pathology of focusing on all their differences and ignoring all they have in common, which results in us always identifying in groups and unidentifying with other groups. We have other pathologies too, like believing we can understand the complexity and nuance of extremely difficult situations by watching a tiktok video, but these in turn seem to always point back to the previous one, the incessant belief that there is an us and a them. The moment we live in presently sharpens perhaps not only the horrendous failure of political leaders but the failure of artists too, because artists are society's storytellers and this is, more than anything else, a crisis of narrative. We must ask ourselves if there is a larger and truer story we can tell, because one thing is clear: we all desperately need it.
Your quartet now features a new drummer, the Brazilian Cyrano Almeida, who replaced Johnathan Blake. What unique benefits and dynamics has he brought to your compositions?
Cyrano is an extremely intelligent musician. He has a beautiful and very broad sense of rhythm, where the softest or most understated musical events feel as natural as the richest and most explosive ones. I think he allows us to move between these two with a surprising level of ease and realism.
Name two people who influenced you the most as a musician.
Hariprasad Chaurasia and John Coltrane.
If you weren’t a musician, what would you have been?
I always thought about science and in particular physics, although of course the closest I ever got was to read a lot of biographies and take a lot of general relativity classes online, haha. Physics attempts to explain the world and I think that is essentially what art should do. In the case of art, the truth we seek is obviously not a rational truth, but nevertheless an accurate one. I believe that when we encounter such a truth in its abstract form, we call it 'beauty'.
What are the next steps in your career? Are there any new projects or collaborations on the horizon?
I'm writing my next album as well as working on a very exciting rhythm game, called Time Hero, which will be available soon on the App Store.