Zoh Amba has been making waves recently as a free jazz saxophonist in the same vein as Peter Brötzmann or Albert Ayler. With a reputation built on incendiary live performance, a list of high-profile collaborators, and a handful of critically acclaimed albums (the first of which, O, Sun, was produced by fellow avant-garde traveller John Zorn), you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of career trajectory, one that features heavily in the pages of The Wire and on the stages of the most outré jazz festivals. But Amba has other ideas. They are, in baseball parlance, a genuine two-way player, someone who excels equally in two disciplines that are so different that at first there appears to be no link between them.
The other string to Amba’s bow…