God is a Drummer

‘Without the drummer, nothing will move. And without movement, the world will stop,’ says Trilok Gurtu, explaining the title of his 20th album as a bandleader. Backed by his regular Hamburg-based jazz quartet of trumpet, trombone, keys and electric bass with guest appearances by the Indian singer Kalpana Patowary, the Turkish vocalist Zara, fiddler Emre Meralli and a German philharmonic orchestra, it's an eclectic set that spans jazz, Indian, Brazilian and Western classical influences.

It's Trilok's first album in seven years and one certainly hopes it's not a swansong: but it does seem to represent something of a musical autobiography and an attempt at a mature point in his life to distil all the streams, brooks and eddies of his heterogeneous career into a single, unifying river of song. It's hard not to hear the haunting ‘Madre’ as a tribute to his mother, the Indian classical vocalist Shobha Gurtu. The rootsy Brazilian rhythms of ‘Indranella’ honours the memory to his late friend Naná Vasconcelos and the influence of Joe Zawinul and Weather Report is evident on ‘Holy Mess’ and ‘Try This’. The bridge uniting them all is Trilok's immaculately precise sense of rhythm, whether on Western drum kit or Indian percussion.