A challenging but rewarding collection thick with ideas and inspiration, the record shows how small the world of music can be, even while jazz’s world keeps growing.”
- Chris Barton, The Los Angeles Times
Radif Suite is the product of a companionably radical cultural exchange between Amir ElSaffar, a trumpeter fluent in the Iraqi maqam tradition, and Hafez Modirzadeh, a tenor saxophonist versed in the Persian modal system of dastgah. It’s an album rooted in theory…but its end result will ring familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s and beyond… the two leaders pursue the sort of brash polyphony once synonymous with Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, and now open for sharply rigorous adaptation.”
- Nate Chinen, The New York Times Critic’s Playlist pick
The relationships that Amir ElSaffar and Hafez Modirzadeh have with the Middle East are simultaneously more complex and more natural than, say, Duke Ellington or John Coltrane’s…The result is a sound that is inclusive and compelling.”
- Bill Meyers, Downbeat
The album presents an ambitious project that investigates the possibilities of order and freedom in musical systems. Listening to Radif Suite quickly proves that binaries like East and West can only provide at most a limiting critical paradigm. What’s most exciting about this album of two multi-section pieces for a jazz quartet, is not the fact that it successfully fuses “East and West” — which, on its own is a well-beaten, tired artistic path — but the way it makes you hear the past differently.”
- Miki Kaneda, Dusted Magazine
As impressive as ElSaffar and Modirzadeh are as soloists, it’s the collocations that are most meaningful, achieving rare emotional impact as trumpet and tenor rise together to match a precise microtonal pitch or dovetail their lines in moments of collective flurry. What stands out most is the emotional depth: on ElSaffar’s “Doves over Zion,” the trio of trumpet, tenor and bass manage to evoke both longing and the moment of apparent union.”
- Stuart Broomer, All About Jazz.
…much of Radif Suite hinges on an especially playful brand of organized freedom, with intricate, folky themes giving way to scampering improv.”
- Hank Shteamer, Time Out NY
Radif Suite is jazz in every aspect of the music, while at the same time opening new melodic and rhythmic possibilities of the Arabic and Persian music, but it’s not a fusion, or even a blending of genres….[ElSaffar and Modirzadeh] are also excellent instrumentalists, demonstrating the power of pushing their horns beyond the traditional jazz sounds. A great album by two composers who clearly deserve more attention.”
- Free Jazz
…a stirring and inspired group, worthy of any accolades or praise one can muster in the creative improvised music world.”
- Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide.
ElSaffar’s study of Iraqi maqam and Modirzadeh’s expertise in Persian dastgah provide tools and inspiration for new melodic concepts and fluid, highly expressive approaches to microtonality that are remarkably in sync with 21st-century jazz aesthetics…Swooping descents, spiraling patterns, crying crescendos and sudden tempo shifts require a technically stunning cohesion from the horns. But it’s the natural ebb and flow, the speechlike quality of the themes, that sets the music apart. Amid the naked dissonance and prevailing abstraction, straight swing breaks out on “Facets Seven/Eight” and “Bird of Prey.” Slow movements such as “Facet Ten” and “Doves Over Zion” allow for a deeper look into the music’s inner mechanics.”
…unfamiliar intervals, whether bounding leaps or microscopic shifts, create harmonies that vibrate and shimmer, summoning a mood that’s both joyous and sorrowful.”
- Peter Margasak, the Chicago Reader
The new album, which shifts between freely structured jazz and the soaring themes of some post-modern muezzin, has a sense of renewed discovery. At the same time, the band shows a restraint and focus found in some of the earliest free-jazz bands”
ElSaffar and tenor saxophonist Modirzadeh lead a quartet that explores radical concepts in pitch, intonation, phrase and dissonance. Joined by bassist Mark Dresser and percussionist Alex Cline, this band takes us deeply into a place where jazz, Middle Eastern music and the avant-garde converge.”
- Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune
[Radif Suite] has two primary qualities, one sonic and the other emotional. The configuration of the band, their sound and style of playing are consciously in the tradition of the classic Ornette Coleman quartet, as updated via Masada. ElSaffar and Modirzadeh are not aping that sound and style, though, they’re expanding the possibilities and actually getting closer to the roots…The key is not to think of being modern, but to being old-fashioned, via the blues. If Coleman has always been fundamentally a blues musician, than ElSaffar and Modirzadeh are as well, their blues just have a different location in the geography of the mind, in a place where the West and East meet as wary antagonists and partners in possibility. The horns here play in a highly vocalized style, making use of the expressive opportunities of microtonal intonation, the result being more of a cry than a shout. The sound of the band playing is fascinating; dark, soft, a little sour, the pulse moving fluidly through different paces, at times frenetic and at others still.
The changing treads and the cries at the heart of the music are the vehicles for the emotional expression. In this the music is as simply and honestly made as any can be. This is profoundly sad music and profoundly powerful in the strength and clarity with which it expresses itself. ElSaffar and Modirzadeh seem to be confronting the world they see around them and codifying their reactions to it. There is no interpreting of reality, no offering of blandishments, no attempt to change that world. It’s honest reporting, bearing witness, an incredibly heartfelt and complex expression of things that can’t be put into words. It is moving to listen to, but not sad, as the music is darkly beautiful and the sensation of hearing artists who have so much to say and do so with such unflinching honesty is thrilling. In the great jazz tradition, there is a constant sense of understatement, the idea that what could be said with a scream is instead said with a whisper. And rather than a scream being all there is, the whisper hints at many more secrets inside, just underneath and surface. The ear avidly seeks these out and also gladly follows at the pace ElSaffar and Modirzadeh set, as the music is so worthy of trust and commitment. A clear contender for one of the best recordings of 2010.”
[ElSaffar and Modirzadeh] pair effortlessly on the epic Radif Suite, a stunning album neatly divided in two… it’s a surprisingly inviting amalgam of influences, merging both Iraqi and Persian modal systems—ElSaffar’s maqam and Modirzadeh’s dastgah—into a continuous whole often free of fixed meter…Beyond the theorization, the music swings at its core; the two approximate a 21st-century update of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry’s classic interplay—re-creating slow-burning intensity, swelling in and out of various motifs or breaking into a ferocious groove …with drummer Alex Cline (twin brother of guitarist Nels) splashing color and consummate bassist Mark Dresser anchoring every pivot, the quartet adds a new chapter to the jazz tradition’s ever-evolving history.”
- ASK, Time Out Chicago
What the two leaders accomplish here is no jam: It was a disciplined project where they not only plumbed the commonalities of jazz, Iraqi and Persian forms, but conceived their work in political terms. So the semitones represent what internationally rooted ethnomusicologist Modirzadeh calls a “dis-integrative” break with “colonized temperaments,” through which the musicians can present themselves as “fully human.” At one time that might’ve sounded like militant rhetoric; in the context of this music and today’s enslaved world, it’s a message for everyone, enhanced by a mood of mystical connection, breath and peace.”