" data-original-title="" title="">Oded Tzur proves himself one of the jazz world's premier storytellers on Translator's Note. "Single Mother," the tune that opens the set, is a vibrant novelette, haunting and atmospheric, riding on the undertones of Indian classical music—a winding tale that gathers intensity and momentum, a sculpting of sounds that is by turns exotically lovely and searingly anguished.

Schooled in a myriad of musical styles, the supremely cohesive set is a striking hybridization of the American jazz form, Middle Eastern modalities, Indian rhythmic concepts and Tzur's incorporation of microtones, in the embrace of superbly synchronized quartet. It is a disc that would fit in well with the ECM Records sound.

"Welcome" is a beautiful rollick, and "The Whale Song," paired with Tzur's eloquent liner notes on the theme, sounds like a a sonic cross between the biblical mysticism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' magical realism. Here—and everywhere else on the set—Tzur's tenor sax sounds like almost any reed instrument except the tenor sax: bass flute, bass clarinet, oboe. And his quartet, a standard line-up with the sax joined by a piano/bass/drums rhythm section, sounds unlike ?any other quartet out there: nuanced and empathic, occasionally frolicsome and always gorgeously unorthodox with it's mix of influences.

"The Three Statements Of Garab Dorje" glides like a monorail on magnetic suspension, Tzur smoldering, and John Coltrane's "Lonnie's Lament," the disc's only non-Tzur original, closes the show on what seems a deep rumination on supernatural matters and ghostly apparitions.

Of special note: pianist