Performers:
Omer Avital (bass), Eden Ladin (piano), Asaf Yuria (soprano and tenor sax), Alexander Levin (tenor sax), Ofri Nehemya (drums)
OMER AVITAL
Praised by critics as, “extraordinary” (New York Times), “roaringly inventive” (Jazziz), and, “one of the most exciting musicians to come onto the jazz scene in the last 20 years” (Downbeat), Omer Avital is a visionary composer and virtuoso musician whose genre-defying ensembles are pushing the boundaries of jazz expression and providing audiences with swing and spiritual sustenance in equal measure. Avital’s compositions range from sophisticated jazz conversations (Yes! Trio) to funky, Middle-Eastern grooves (Yemen Blues) to long-form, orchestral arrangements of traditional Sephardi music (Ahavat Olamim). With his latest offering, “Suite of the East,” Omer has turned his traditional jazz sensibility to the performance of Middle Eastern and North African music. The hard-charging, reflective and joyful CD was chosen by TSF Jazz as Album of the year in France and picked for NPR Music's Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2012.
Omer Avital Qantar
QANTAR, is OMER AVITAL’s dream quintet. Since forming in 2016, the improvisations they created around Avital’s compositions jelled in an immediate and uncanny way, as if the musicians were traveling along the same tightrope, aloft and daring, with an incredible solidarity held together by a bond that went far beyond performing the notes and letting go in the solos. That bond seems to have been formed from their individual careers criss-crossing so many times since leaving Israel. Indeed, all are Israeli expatriates, all living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, all then hanging out at Omer’s sharing dinner and Turkish coffee. There is a friendship these musician’s enjoy which definitely penetrates the performances. This shared history, even though years apart, imbued this quintet with the key to Avital’s music: his ability to bring the various rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies underpinning 20th and 21st century hardcore jazz expression and flow those with a polyphonic attitude and musical multilingualism.
