Emad Armoush’s Rayhan – Distilled Extractions (Afterday Audio 2025)

By Nick Ostrum

It begins with a whirl of sound, out of which Francois Houle’s clarinet rises to lead the piece into a lively Arabic dance. The rhythm, played or implied, remains, but the horns and strings swing back into a stew of improvisation that recalls, with Middle Eastern inflections, the free jazz fumblings especially of late 1950s/early 1960s Ornette and Don Cherry. They lean toward melody but are also pulled to the cacophony that would soon be realized as free improv in Europe. Here, Armoush balances that impulse with his folk and classical Arabic training to produce something that is absolutely stunning, especially when punctuated by his hauntingly emotive voice.

Distilled Extractions is Armoush’s group Rayhan’s second recording, at least as far as I can find. Accompanying the core of Kenton Loewen on drums, Houle on clarinet, JP Carter on trumpet, Jesse Zubot on violin and, of course, Armoush himself on oud, ney and vocals is cellist Marina Hasselberg, who has played everything from early music to contemporary classical to collaborations with Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock and John Dieterich. (Notably, this is the same Rayhan line-up that performed on 2023’s Electritradition, though there in duos rather than collectively.) The stylistic reach is wide, though much of that reach, especially into free jazz, is integrated along different scalar and rhythmic lines. At its core, however, lies dance music – by definition a communal undertaking - driven by a steady rhythm and eastern scales and syntax. This alone might be enough to make this album compelling, especially when performed by band this tight. The improvisations, however, the protracted pronouncements/recitations, the genuinely weird atmospherics, the unstructured improv sections truly distinguish Distilled Extractions from the crowd.

In an odd way, this reminds me of the Grateful Dead at their digressive best. The group eventually get back to the melody and the “song,” but the listener is often left wondering how it happened, and excited that things happened in the way they did. To these ears, at least, this is one of the best so far of 2025.

Distilled Extractionsis available as a CD and download on Bandcamp:

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