Tsahar, Assif / Cooper-moore / Taylor, Chad – “Digital Primitives ” – [Hopscotch Records]

A bluesy, Appalachian-back-porch kind of jazz. Assif Tsahar is mostly on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Chad Taylor handles drums and percussion, and multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore supplies the “primitive” with offbeat instruments such as diddly-bow (has one string and is played like a slide guitar) and mouth-bow (similar to diddly-bow, except one end goes in the mouth for a resonating effect). We get some fine straight-ahead jazz, with the one-stringed-things filling essentially a bass player’s role, but the real intrigue here is in the array of earthy yet otherwordly sounds Moore produces, and what the other guys do with it. Other unusual touches include didgeridoo and tuned percussion. Vocals on #2.