When The Guardian asked Robert Wyatt how he felt about the neologism "Wyatting"-- playing a weird song on a jukebox to freak out other patrons-- he noted that he doesn't try to disconcert people with his music; he tries to be normal. What constitutes "normal" for Wyatt is this: He was a titan of the Canterbury prog-rock scene in the 1960s before turning to jazz and experimental idioms, though he also had a big single in the 70s with a cover of the Monkees' "I'm a Believer". He's equally hard to pigeonhole via his diverse collaborators, including Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Gilmour, Max Richter, Björk, and Hot Chip. Wyatt freaks us out because he seems too chimerical and free for this age, with its mania for classification. He's a traditionalist who hears with weird ears.
His latest album, a collaboration with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the violinist Ros Stephen, is again evasive, seeming at once defiantly old-fashioned and defiantly quirky. The trio, backed by Stephen's Sigamos String Quartet, brushes the mothballs off a variety of jazz standards, from David Raskin and Johnny Mercer's weepy "Laura" to the Louis Armstrong chestnut "What a Wonderful World", and checks in at "Lush Life", "In a Sentimental Mood", and "Round Midnight" along the way. But the record also features Palestinian rapping, screwy remakes of old Wyatt songs, and Wyatt's second stab at Chic's "At Last I Am Free". The mood is elegiac yet playful, with Wyatt's advancing age and bulletproof stature creating an impression of ease, not to mention a welcome indifference to popular trends.
The fine musicianship does justice to the standards. The coarse wool of Wyatt's voice plays well against the strings, and Atzmon's alto sax injects some glossier colors. His style here blends bebop virtuosity and Middle Eastern sinuosity. In most cases, there is something pleasingly "off" or new about the standards. "Laura" has seldom sounded so understated and ghostly, and it plays wonderfully beside the original "Lullaby for Irena", an incorporeal love song. On "Round Midnight", the piano melody is transcribed to strings, and a lonesome whistle stands in for the vocal melody, drawing its wistfulness into surprising clarity. Shades of radio crackle drift through the patient, noodling "In a Sentimental Mood". Only the tranquil and straight-faced take on "What a Wonderful World" that closes the album seems untouched by a light, impish subversion.
But for all of its nostalgic comforts, For the Ghosts Within is also a protest record. Atzmon, an Israeli-born British citizen, is a notable anti-Zionist writer and activist. On the title track, his sax yodels like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, and the lyrics by Wyatt's wife Alfreda Benge are unmistakable in their sympathies: "We're still here, under the olive trees/ When will you see it's where we belong?" The theme of Palestinian displacement and rage is sounded again on the album's strangest song, "Where Are They Now?" A palimpsest of Charleston-dancing horns slams abruptly into furious Arabic raps by a pair of British-Palestinian MCs. The way Atzmon weaves exotic foreign figures into fusty Western standards is more than progressive fusion, seeming to angrily parody the besieged mindset of xenophobes and cultural purists everywhere. Leave it to Wyatt to craft a record that simultaneously celebrates and criticizes the limits of the traditional.
