A huge and soaring sound

On the surface, everything about Israeli Asaf Sirkis's new album The Song Within seems to suggest introspection - the name of his trio, the name of the album, the sleeve photograph, which was taken from the interior of a church, the use of a church organ and even the titles of the tunes.

It all seems a long way away from Sirkis's turn as the joyous polyrhythmic drummer of Gilad Atzmon's band the Orient House Ensemble, with the embrace of Levantine forms and rhythms, the free, improvised solidarity with the Palestinian people and the dramatic cosmopolitanism of sound bursting from every groove.

Sirkis's publicity material tells us that this album's "jumping off point" is the music created by ex-Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams and his Lifetime band of 1969.

Lifetime included Newark organist Larry Young and the British guitarist John McLaughlin. The US jazz critic Ralph Gleason compared the music of Lifetime's first double album Emergency! to the writing of James Joyce.

"It grows inside your head so that the more you hear it, the bigger it becomes‚" he wrote during an era when jazz-rock was soothing the boundaries between the two genres and streams of consciousness were moving freely between word and sound.

Not that Sirkis and the Inner Noise sound like Lifetime. Keyboard man Steve Lodder plays the organ of Saint Michael's Church, Highgate on three tracks and guitarist Mike Outram picks up his acoustic guitar on When You Ask Why.

There are no abstract vocals and an altogether much less frantic sound, as if the musicians have begun their own deeply-conceived search.

Larry Young's intriguing post-bop imaginings are replaced by Lodder's more ponderous and spacious voyages.

Sometimes he sounds as if his organ is emanating from a sacred place. Other times, as in the title tune, it is as if it is being played from the heart of a fairground.

Halfway through the album is a track called Miniature. It begins with a beautiful essay of guitar lyricism from Outram, with Lodder's subliminal organ offering a foundation.

As Outram progresses, bending his notes around the organist's chordings, his phrases cry and wail, shudder and amble, crescendo and collapse until the sound suddenly ends. It is an extraordinary sonic experience, moulded between Sirkis's caressing drums.

Sirkis claims that "I do not have a method of writing music. I normally record myself improvising, trying not to develop ideas‚ but rather leaving it there as it is. I do not try to intervene."

The Song Within is very much a trio record, with all three musicians playing both as equals and comrades. In Theme for Gary, dedicated to fellow drummer Gary Husband, it is as if the listener, on a lonely journey, suddenly hears a phantom organist playing sublime jazz notes from a deserted church.

Throughout this album, it is as if Outram and Lodder are playing between Sirkis's drums, as if his percussion is their leverage to create. In that sense, he adopts Williams's role, but his less overwhelming sound offers his confreres more space to invent, to fly and to come to landings of their own choosing.

That just three musicians can create such a huge and soaring sound is a miracle and even more so when that sound is so unforced.

At the beginning of Hymn, Outram's notes are astonishingly large and clear, while Sirkis's drums pound but never thrash and Lodder's underscoring organ holds his bandmates together in an immense anthem of musical union.

In The Shadow, Lodder's organ bears a sense of menace mollified perhaps, by the concluding gentleness of Sweet Song. But a debut album of sheer artistry here and a shout for further creations.