Chants

A Portuguese band playing Middle Eastern music while paying homage to American jazz: with a premise like this, it’s either going to be a complete mess or something quite unique and interesting. Luckily, this fifth album from the Lisbon-based quartet is very much the latter.

Comprising six instrumental tracks that, with a respectful nod to classical Arabic, Gypsy and Jewish music here, and a courteous bow to Miles Davis’ electric phase there, deliver a pleasingly eclectic listening experience that is as hard to categorise as the band’s name is to pronounce. Starting out as broad North African and Mediterranean-inspired themes composed on electric piano by Nuno Damião, one of the group’s founding members who trained as a classical guitarist before turning to jazz, the tunes serve as a harmonic base for improvisations that meld elements of post-bop and modal jazz with ambient electronica (as on ‘Lost Signal’) and even a bit of dub (as on ‘Zadar’). Traditional Sephardic influences are in evidence on ‘Arah’ while the album’s cinematic sounding title-track is evocative of a shisha-smoke filled nightclub in Cairo. At just over half an hour of such enjoyably fascinating material, we can only hope their next album is a little longer.