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 Talinka is a music-loving adventure. For us, the love of music extends beyond style and genre. We blend folk, early music, jazz, tango and free improvisation.  We believe in songs and beauty being vital forces of nature. We adhere to simplicity, harmony and warmth.  We hope you’ll enjoy our debut album as much as we enjoyed giving birth to it. 

Tali, Jenny, Gilad and Yaron 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vocals / Tali Atzmon
Viola da Gamba, Flute, Baroque Violin & Vocals / Jenny Bliss
Double Bass / Yaron Stavi
Bass Clarinet, Soprano Sax & Accordion/ Gilad Atzmon

 

 
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Talinka Tour

26/1 Thu, The Vortex, London

29/1 Fri, The Albion Beatnik, Oxford @7pm

17/3 Fri, Wakefield Jazz, Wakefield @8pm

22/5 Mon,  Beaver Inn, Devon @7.30

23/5 Tue, The Western Hotel, St Ives @ 8pm 

3/6 Sat, Hermon Chapel Arts Centre, Oswestry @7:30pm

4/6 Sun, The Alex, Fellixtowe, Suffolk @8pm

24/6 Sat, Posk Jazz Cafe, London @8pm

20/7 Thu, Cheadle Hulme Con Club

7/10 Sat, The Verdict, Brighton

21/10 Sat, Heath Street Church, Hampstead, London

11/1/18 Sun, Bonington Theatre, Nottingham

London Jazz News

Every now and again you come across a jazz album which dispenses with all the usual features and starts afresh: instrumentation, form, melody, harmony and soloing protocols are all reworked here with simplicity, depth and maturity. The project brings together vocalist Tali Atzmon and her multi-instrumentalist husband, Gilad, with Yaron Stavi on bass, baroque specialist Jenny Bliss on viola da gamba, violin and flute, and on some tracks Frank Harrison on piano, and has created a format in which this newly configured band can explore original material and jazz standards in an appealingly dark and brooding way. 

The eponymous opening track is a taut yet delicate interplay between wordless vocals and soprano saxophone, setting the scene for an enticing range of combos that follow: viola and bass clarinet, accordion and piano, voice and bass, bass and bass clarinet. A strong feature of the album is a series of precise rhythmic textures which the vocals can cut across, picking out an unexpectedly fresh melodic line or tonality, breathing new life into songs like the bittersweet Don’t Explain or the elegiac You Don’t Know What Love Is, and moving chamber-like between tangos and baroque flavours. It’s like tasting a very complex malt whisky in which you can sense the landscape it came from and the time taken to reach this moment from its inception. The intensity and topicality of Losing Vision is a particular highlight. 

At times, especially when Gilad is playing his soprano, it’s like listening to a pared-down balkanised version of Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble working through some early Piazzola. The provocative, disturbing turns on some solos are artfully balanced by the overall sense of lush restraint. It’s creative without trying too hard, and impressive throughout is the colour and control in evidence in Tali Atzmon’s voice, which bestows an emotional timbre to the band’s offering that is full of tenderness, of warmth touched with sadness.

Sarah Chaplin, London Jazz News

Gilad Atzmon (bass clarinet, sorprano sax, accordian and classical guitar); Tali Atzmon (vocal); Jenny Bliss Bennett (viola da gamba); Yaron Stavi (bass) + Frank Harrison (piano); Enzo Zirilli (perc).

(Review by Peter Jones)

Although far less well-known than her multi-instrumentalist husband Gilad, Tali Atzmon deserves better recognition for the quality of her writing and singing on this debut album of the group that includes both of them, along with Jenny Bliss Bennett on the baroque instrument the viola da gamba, and Yaron Stavi on double bass. Not included in the live line-up but heard occasionally on the album are pianist Frank Harrison and percussionist Enzo Zirilli.

Musically, Talinka follow a similarly winding path to the one trodden by Gilad over the years; it’s the sound of people around the world who have had a hard time of it - keening, remorseful music, but full of beauty. On the sweet, gentle title track, Tali sings wordlessly in the style of the Brazilian Minas Gerais region. More typical perhaps is Tali’s composition Losing Vision, a song about refugees, on which she is backed only by bass clarinet, bowed viola da gamba and bass. Her other two tunes – When You’re Gone and Every Now And Then – are among the strongest on the album. 

 

The jazz standards are not neglected: that icon of passive suffering, Billie Holiday, is represented by Don’t Explain, whilst a similar mood is evoked by Gene de Paul’s You Don’t Know What Love Is. Invitation, with its sinuous, hard-to-sing melody, sounds Brazilian but is really of Polish origin, like its composer. Here it’s rendered as a tango (so now we’re in Argentina), with middle-eastern soprano sax thrown in. We hear the tango again on Gilad’s composition Four 2 Tango, with another beautiful, wordless melody, plus some rather alarming vocal improvisation.

 

It all sounds like a recipe for musical chaos, especially with no drummer, so why does it work? The answer, I think, is that the band doesn’t care about musical, historical or international boundaries. They play what sounds good.

Peter Jones

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