Jazz goes to Morocco or vice versa on Sudani’s self-titled album. The raw-sounding sessions, recorded live to DAT in villages outside of Essaouira, freely blend the hypnotic sway of Gnawan music with the jazz codification of Patrick Brennan’s alto sax and Nirankar Khalsa’s loose, swinging energy. The underlying cultural logic is that both musics stem from African bases of radically different sorts, but from a purely musical point of view, they meet on a common ground of improvisatory abandon.
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