Lloyd Miller

★★★★ Orientations FOUNTAINAVM. LP

Rare tracks, 1960-2021, from an Iran-facing outlier of spiritual jazz.

Western musicians can sometimes sound dilettanteish when they dabble in Eastern musics, not least when they do so under the cover of spiritual jazz. It’s tough, though, to dismiss the bona fides of the multiinstrumentalist Dr Lloyd Miller, whose cultural immersion involved living for many years in Iran, even becoming a TV presenter there. Orientations collects a deep range of his musical adventures over the past 50-odd years, as he finds ever more inventive ways to fuse jazz with the traditions of the Middle- and near-East. Sometimes, the fusion is superficial: Summer Thyme In Tehran is essentially a straight, nice enough version of Gershwin’s Summertime, with an exoticised title. Elsewhere, though, the hybridising is deeper: Improv In Isfahan, a heady mix of Persian folk, cosmic drone, New Age synths, and Miller’s Bill Evans-ish piano, is astonishing. “It sounds pretty hip,” someone notes during a 1963 rehearsal of Pentakarnatica; they’re not wrong.

John Mulvey