Third World Love : New Blues, Album Review

Third World Love is a jazz quartet who has gained a solid reputation both as an exciting touring act and as talented studio band worldwide.

The experienced outfit is able to get the best out of the classic co-ordinates of some of the best jazz music and making it their own, delivering a very personal interpretation, spicing up their sound adding a unique and charming international flavor to it.

It doesn't feel inappropriate to call Third World Love a true cosmopolitan band: besides the fact that the formation performed successfully all over the world, the band features musicians from different parts of the world, and their sound portraits this singularity quite well, embedding elements from a really wide range of genres, such as middle eastern folk, Afro, flamenco, blues, Americana and even a touch of eastern-European gypsy influences.

Despite this huge melting pot of different styles that have influenced the band, Third World Love's fourth studio album "New Blues" has an organic sound which combines the feeling of listening to very skilled musicians performing some classy improvisational sections together with very clever song structures which are always evolving, musically and emotionally, carrying the listener hand in hand through a real musical journey. Everything is very sober and well balanced, and the quiet moments / loud moments dynamics of this album work really well and they are placed on the right spots, offering great climaxes as well as more introspective landscapes, keeping everything in the right proportions.

New Blues features 11 tracks, including 10 original compositions and a beautiful rendition of Duke Ellington's classic "So", brought to life by a really expressive quartet (comprised by 3 israeli musicians and an american) led by trumpeter Avishai Cohen, whose approach to the instrument is very emotional and incredibly versatile and unpredictable. Pianist Yonatan Avishai provides delicate melodies and soulful solos, as well as blessing the whole record with a very rich variety of rhythmic textures, which are completed by the warm tone and progressive taste of bassist Omer Avital and by the solid drum patterns performed by Daniel Freedman.

Every member of the Third World Love participated to the creative process behind the album, and this definitely adds in terms of variety: each musician has left a very personal and unique imprint to each and every composition on the record. Moreover every single member of the band is an essential part for the Third World Love mechanism to work perfectly, and for the music to flow naturally between all the aforementioned vast assortment of musical influences which the group has embedded in this album, using blues as a sort of glue to keep it all standing together.

The tracklist is really well planned and the elaborate opening suite "The Joy of Life" is definitely a great starter, with its mellow piano intro, pointing the finger to the direction towards which the album is going to navigate, still not giving away too much of its variety.

"Homeland" brings to mood to a different place, and it is perhaps the best example on the record of the balance between dynamics discussed above: The quiet and more introspective moments leads to a very well crafted crescendo, reaching high level of intensity and compositional skills, almost making the listener feel like if the song had a very special and unique story to tell.

"Little Echo" brings the mood somewhere else and the needle swings slightly more towards an easy listening approach, built upon a powerful melody and almost a "big band" vibe to it, enriched by an eastern european folk reminiscence.

The compositions are proof of how well these highly talented musician can feel "at home" moving in between the most disparate genres and moods, while managing in the very difficult task to give a consistent shape to the whole album, and keeping it exciting.

The result of this effort is almost cinematic as the colorful album generates very different images: from candle-lit empty bars at night (Beauty of the death, New Blues - Ain't no thing) to a taste of pretty much every corner in the world with a strong folkloristic musical tradition: from Turkey to the Southern United States, passing through the unique balcanic roots and bringing along the way bag full of that unique, colorful mediterranean spirit.