Rob Luft: Dahab Days

In an interview with AAJ in 2020, Rob Luft was asked to name six all-time favourite albums. Number one on his list was Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset's Dream Logic (ECM, 2012), a duo project with electronicist Jan Bang. Said Luft: "It's an album that really sounds like dreams, it's wonderful how it floats for forty-five, fifty minutes and teleports you to another place. The production is impeccable and the sound is so glistening."

Luft could have been describing Dahab Days, or at any rate, the first half of it. The album attracts adjectives like redemptive and blissful like a magnet attracts iron filings. It was made with the same core lineup which made Life Is The Dancer (Edition, 2020), a quintet completed by tenor saxophonist Joe Wright, pianist and Hammond organist Joe Webb, bass guitarist Tom McCredie and drummer Corrie Dick. Guest trumpeter Byron Wallen returns, this time alongside new guest, alto saxophonist Steve Buckley. And, for the first time, Luft uses bowed strings: six of the ten tracks include violinist Alice Zawadzki and/or the Amika String Quartet.

The music, as before, is Luft's deceptively simple blend of jazz, prog-rock and folk (British, Balkan and Arabic). There is, however, a subtle but unmistakable division—either intentional or by chance—between the first half of the album (tracks 1-5) and the second half (tracks 6-10). Partly this is down to the inclusion of two covers and a traditional Arabic tune in the second half, while the first five tunes were all composed by Luft. Partly it is because of the arrangements and instrumental textures. Wright's energised broken-note tenor takes Apex Twins' "Flim" (#6) into Pharoah Sanders territory; there are shades of Africa on Duke Ellington's "African Flower" (#7) and, more explicitly, on Luft's "Sunshine Music" (#8), which brings a touch of highlife via Buckley's jaunty penny whistle. On the tenth, closing track, the traditional Arab tune "Lamma Bada Yatathanna," Wallen essays growls and smears that evoke the great Cootie Williams.

The whole album is a delight and, if a reservation is to be made, it is only that the slightly different feels of the first and second halves do not work to its overall advantage. Luft's blend has yet to be fully integrated and signed off. There is no doubt that he will get there.

(Luft's 2020 interview can be read here).