The sessions that comprise Suite of the East date back to 2006, following this band's month-long residency at Small's in NYC's Greenwich Village. Each band member is well known to Avital, some associations go back to 1992, and in the intervening years all have burnished their reputations on the New York scene. Their various interrelationships can be traced through a series of critically acclaimed CDs, not least by Avital himself, of which this, according to the AllMusic website, is his ninth. Inspired by a three-year stay in Israel, Avital's compositions retain the hard-driving spirit of New York jazz while re-spinning the essentially hard bop disposition of the music (and nothing can be more hard bop than a trumpet/tenor front line) around middle eastern-inspired melodies and their associated asymmetrical rhythms. It's powerful stuff (‘Free Forever’ stands out), representative of the best on the New York jazz scene. Fifty years ago, this band would have been a sensation.