Lloyd Miller & Heliocentrics: s/t

Label: Strut

The title of ethno-musicologist/multi-instrumentalist Dr. Lloyd Miller's collectors' holy grail LP Oriental Jazz (more name-dropped than actually heard until a couple of years ago when a track was anthologized) cues folks on how to categorize his music, but doesn't come close to conveying just how eclectically well-rounded and far-flung his playing is. True, his first recording (a 78 RPM record – born in 1938, he was rather precocious) was in the style of early New Orleans jazz clarinetist George Lewis, but with a voracious appetite for the music of many cultures kickstarted by living in Iran for a year and travels to Asia and Europe in the 1950s (and beyond), his style and the number of instruments he plays expanded so far that the only thread tying together the tracks on this new collaboration (his second with U.K. collective the Heliocentrics) is that it's modal. Yes, jazz aficionados of catholic tastes will hear sounds recalling late '60s/early '70s jazz of a multicultural bent, but psychedelia fans will just as easily identify with the mellowly hypnotic grooves and exotic timbres. Working from an advance, I can't tell how many instruments Miller plays here, but the man is known to be adept on clarinet, piano, bass, cornet, saxes, banjo, santur, zarb, oud, sehtar, dan tranh, and dam kim; whether blowing or strumming, he adds a vast array of textures in the most musical, unpretentious, unself-conscious way imaginable, and needless to say the Heliocentrics provide plenty of rhythmic impetus. (Steve)