DIZRHYTRHMIA - DIZRHYTHMIA - 1988

The sole album by the jazz-rock collective Dizrhythmia -- they were named in honor of Dizzy Gillespie, not the similarly titled second album by Split Enz -- is a most pleasant surprise. Led by guitarist Jakko M. Jakszyk (of the chartbound funk-poppers Level 42) and premier jazz-folk bassist Danny Thompson, Dizrhythmia also included a full-time Indian percussion player, Pandit Dinesh, alongside drummer Gavin Harrison, and features several other Indian vocalists and instrumentalists. (More familiar names like Hatfield and the North's Dave Stewart and Peter Blegvad also drop in.) This is no simple funk-plus-sitar attempt at crossover fusion, however; the Indian classical instruments avoid the usual curry house clichés, and there is no whiff of orientalism or exotica in the songs. Instead, the songs perfectly integrate rhythms and melodies from both musical traditions in roughly equal doses, supporting each other subtly but effectively. The album is low-key but not ambient (a comparison could be made to the '80s dream pop collective This Mortal Coil), with an emphasis on atmosphere rather than groove. Hardly Top of the Pops material, Dizrhythmia is an intriguing and mostly quite successful experiment. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide