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patrick brennan and sudani deep dish DD-104

You wouldn’t know it from the usual media sources, exccept maybe on the odd eclectic college radio show, but the mix and match process of jazz and world music continues apace. It’s a relatively underground phenom that occasionally pokes its head above the surface in places like the Knitting Factory or in the very occasional high-profile context, as with Shakti. But work is being done, and music is being made with an ear for cultural synthesis that makes artful sense.

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.

- Josef Woodward

Jazz Times, January 2001