Interview: Gilad Atzmon

"IF you read the titles of the tracks of my new album Refuge one after the other, they make a poem," the self-exiled Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon tells me as we walked up Ecclesall Road in Sheffield before a gig.

So I did and here they are:

Autumn in Baghdad
Spring in New York
In the Small Hours
The Burning Bush
Her Smile
Her Tears
My Refuge
Just Another Prayer for Peace.

"That is what the record is about. I don't care if we talk about divisions or categories of musical styles, whether it's jazz, world music, soul or whatever.

"If there's anything we can produce as artists, it's beauty. And, since our elected politicians in Britain or the US are producing nothing else but ugliness, in particular for the people of Palestine and Iraq, we artists must produce beauty."

These words were some sharp preface to a performance in a South Yorkshire jazz club, with most of the tunes coming from Refuge.

Before I heard them again live, I read what Atzmon had written in his sleeve notes. He remembers that, when he founded the Orient House Ensemble in 2000, he believed that music could be a "message of peace," but, now, "eight years later, I must admit that I may have got it wrong.

"This is our fifth album. We have performed hundreds of concerts around the world and, somehow, peace is nowhere near. Every day, a new conflict comes to life.

"Once a week, a newly born fear is shaped into a sinister agenda wrapped in an image of Western goodness. As far as my homeland is concerned, peace has never looked so far away."

Atzmon was born in Israel, as were three members of his band, the Orient House Ensemble.

"I know deep inside me that the Hebraic identity is the most radical version of the idea of Jewish supremacy, which is a curse for Palestine, a curse for Jews and a curse for the world. It is a major destructive force," he says.

"For an Israeli to humanise himself, he must de-zionise himself. In this way, self-hating can become a very productive power. It's the same sense of self-hating I find, too, in Jews who have given the most to humanity, like Christ, Spinoza or Marx. They bravely confronted their beast and, in doing so, they made sense to many millions."

Atzmon now says that music is not the messenger - it has become the message as well as a refuge. And it has given him new hope.

He tells me a story which is close to his life.

"The morning after I played at the concert for Medical Aid for Palestine, I went to an assembly at my son's school in north London.

"The school is lucky because it has a wonderful music teacher, a man who loves jazz and the children love him. He's a fine musician, too, and he gets the children playing beautiful things.

"This morning, he had 700 of them singing along with Louis Armstrong on What a Wonderful World. And, as the record ended, they were all singing and they just carried on, without Louis.

"Well, my son is very young and so were his schoolmates. They didn't know about Bush and Blair and it made me think, perhaps it is a wonderful world like Louis sang, if we can only defeat and go beyond the politicians' sinister agenda.

"I felt this optimism, listening to Louis and all those children. I felt the future, it affected me a huge amount - and now I play What a Wonderful World to end all my performances."

As soon as you listen to the album's opener Autumn in Baghdad, you can hear how Atzmon's saxophone voice has changed during a decade. His sound is much fuller, much more enfolding and, as he plays, you can almost hear his words, so vocalistic is his timbre.

Sometimes I thought that I was hearing the tenor saxophone of Rahesan Roland Kirk or, in particular, the late Native American horn man Jim Pepper.

The tune has an Ellingtonian beauty and simplicity, a pure melody beginning from a sound close to exhausted quiescence, with pianist Frank Harrison's lone piano preceding a crying Atzmon alto, the sound searching, questing, wondering, sorrowing and growing towards a crescendo of empathy.

"When I first came to London," Atzmen tells me, "I met some Iraqis. They had wonderful things to say about Baghdad. Look at the wreckage now. What have we done? We elected the leaders who did this."

That Spring in New York should be juxtaposed with the late year in Iraq's mauled capital is a sonic irony in itself. Yet, the repeated soprano riff, the electronica, the discord and assumed assurance all betray a sound of the insecure, the attitudinised and vulnerable and the persons of power stuffed with emptiness.

It is only when we get to In the Small Hours that there is time and space enough to reflect and contemplate. The troubled sounds of Atzmon's alto and Harrison's tapped-out Fender-Rhodes chorus, before Asaf Sirkis's grilling drums, allow the enormity and the price of the sorrow to be reckoned.

I ask Atzmon whether The Burning Bush was a reflection of the US president.

"It is," he says. "He represents a major destructive force in the world, with few brothers or sisters like him in history.

"And, beyond all the destruction and lost lives, Bush and Blair have committed it all on our behalf. They are elected leaders. They have turned us, too, into criminals."

The wailing, troubled notes spear towards Palestinian and Iraqi skies with distant, chanting voices and a gradual acceleration of notes, as the victims of imperial violence deal with their compounding pain and rage in a world which, in Atzmon's words, "is becoming more and more hostile."

Sirkis's drums as the track ends are like mountain peaks, spectators to human agencies which grow and crescendo before fading into pained continuity.

After such cataclysmic sounds, Her Smile, starting as an Atzmon-Harrison duet, radiates a sudden harmony, with the soprano horn picking out paths of ecumenical beauty over Yaron Stavi's bowed bass.

Her Tears follow, with Stavi's bow still brushing his deep strings with lamentation. As Atzmon writes, "Submerged in tears, one comes to realise one-self, a music prevails" and Her Tears are transformed into a Levantine blues, a deep song of real life, pain and enduring survival.

At the centre of My Refuge is a horn cadence, a falling on an immense scale, before the music ascends to a joyous, almost Latin American, carnavallic conviction with the infusion of Paul Jayasinya's singing trumpet.

Just Another Prayer for Peace is the album's final track, prompted by Sirkis's subliminally ironic martial drums, provoking thoughts of US soldiers in Baghdad, British marines in Basra and Israeli troops and armed settlers across the West Bank, as Atzmon's horn sings as a voice of human resistance steeped in invasion and the pain of foreign trespass.

The naked lucidity of his sound and that of Harrison's picked-out, crystalline notes becomes a unified human song to other humans to promote the return of the blessings of peace and freedom for lands that are occupied, shattered and starved - in Palestine, in Iraq, anywhere and any time.

I ask Atzmon about his hopes for a liberated Palestine and how the ecumenical vision of his own music, taking from Hebraic, Arabic and Turkish traditions within a jazz framework, could find its true home there. And what would be the first tune he would play in a free Jerusalem?

"There will be a free Palestine," he says assuredly. Then he laughs.

"It's going to happen, for sure, and my ambition is to become the first Palestinian minister of jazz. Palestine will be liberated and the Israeli empire, the Bush empire, the neocon empire will have to clear the stage.

"And I will play the tune Al-Quds in the New Jerusalem. It's on our album Exile. It's a Hebrew song, but we have Palestinised it!

"For it is not only about liberating Palestinians, it is about liberating Israelis from themselves. It is about liberating the world."

Get hold of Refuge and play it with your friends, family and workmates. The sheer power of its sounds tells more than any words.