On Out of the Desert, Kühn records for the second time with Moroccan singer and guembri player Majid Bekkas and Spanish percussionist Ramon Lopez. Kühn took his unconventional jazz trio to jam with Moroccan Berbers in the Sahara Desert before retiring to Rabat to record.

The trio’s time in the desert was obviously fruitful. Kühn’s minimalist tunes and jagged but often melodic improvisations have a rhythmic finesse that interlaces effortlessly with the clattering percussion of his collaborators, three Gnawa musicians. Add to this Bekkas’s bass work on the guembri and his powerfully clear vocals and the outcome is something special.

Opening track ‘Foulani’ sets the tone with a haunting call-and-response motif underpinned by a simple piano riff. Kühn’s improvisations are always harmonically searching without straying outside the cyclical patterns the music is built on. It is the rhythmic verve of the Gnawa musicians’ (Abdelfettah Houssani, Abdessadek Bounhar and Rachid El Fadili respectively) percussion that is the key here, something that Kühn acknowledges in the CD notes.

Whether during the free jazz romp of ‘One, Two, Free’ or the funky minimalism of ‘Transmitting’, this persistently inventive accompaniment gives the album its flavour. A cameo appearance by the talking drum virtuoso from Benin, Kouassi Bessan Joseph does not particularly add anything extra to the mix but neither is he an unwelcome guest, with Kühn enjoying some witty musical sparring with him on ‘Chadiye’.

Natural music-making rather than hard-won fusion, Out of the Desert comes highly recommended.