Omer Avital via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Omer Avital:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Omer Avital
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Givatayim, Israel
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Israeli-born and Brooklyn-based, Omer Avital is internationally acclaimed as a virtuoso bassist and as a transformational composer and musical thinker. Avital is a master of the various rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies that underpin 20th and 21st century hardcore jazz expression, which he approaches with a polyphonic attitude and articulates with prodigious technique. He is an avatar of musical multilingualism, as fluent spinning out an erudite walking bassline as creating gorgeous melodies from percolating North African grooves, elemental vamps and Middle Eastern scales.
Born in 1971, Avital grew up in Givatayim, Israel in a Moroccan-Yemenite family. He studied at a local conservatory before entering the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts in Tel Aviv. Initially a devotee of blues guitar and Jaco Pastorius, he began listening to the music of Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, bought an upright bass, and quickly became a fixture on Tel Aviv’s jazz scene. After a year of mandatory military service, which he spent in the Israeli Air Force Orchestra, Avital flew to New York in 1992.
While studying at the New School’s Jazz and Contemporary Music Program and Mannes College, Avital immersed himself within an emerging downtown Manhattan scene involving a cohort of musicians who would soon be household names. In 1993, he toured and recorded with alto saxophonist Antonio Hart and tenor saxophonist Bill Saxton. In April 1994, he played the first-ever gig at Smalls, the now-iconic Greenwich Village jazz club, with Brad Mehldau and Peter Bernstein. In 1995, Smalls gave Avital a one-night- a-week sinecure, and he began composing for a four-saxophone, bass and drums sextet, using a rotating cast of saxophonists that included masters-in- the-making Mark Turner, Greg Tardy, Myron Walden, Jimmy Greene, Grant Stewart, Joel Frahm, Jay Collins and Charles Owens. In 1997, Impulse! Records included several Avital sextet pieces on Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (Impulse!); in 1998, they sponsored his first studio album, Devil Head, which, due to circumstances beyond Avital’s control, was never released. For this reason, Avital’s leader debut was the 2001 studio album Think With Your Heart (Fresh Sound), which received a 4½-star review in Downbeat. The subsequently-issued location dates, Asking No Permission and Room To Grow, both on Smalls Records, reveal the heights Avital’s sextet could reach in live performance.
Avital returned to Israel from 2001 until 2005. Based in a small village near Jerusalem called Ein-Karem, he studied the Oud, and enrolled at Jerusalem’s Rubin Academy of Music, where he taught jazz and earned a degree in classical composition. He studied counterpoint and Schoenberg; played Strauss, Mahler and Mozart in the school orchestra; studied Arabic quarter tone music in both its classical and folk forms; Israeli pioneering songs known as Zemer Ivry; and North African and Middle Eastern piyyut (Jewish traditions of sacred song).
During these years Avital also toured Israel with several bands, including Third World Love, a collective quartet with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, pianist Yonathan Avishai and drummer Daniel Freedman, that has recorded five CDs, showcasing what Jazz Times described as a “fired-up yet cozy admixture of jazz and global influences, hints of Middle Eastern melodies, Spanish accents and African rhythms.”
Soon after returning to New York, Avital documented the fruits of his investigations with the 18 tunes that comprise Arrival [Fresh Sound] and The Ancient Art of Giving [Smalls], on which he synthesized, as pianist-journalist Ben Waltzer writes, “American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past.” Along these lines, in 2010 he co-founded and music-directed Yemen Blues, a project conceived by singer-composer Ravid Kahalani, documented on the 2011 album Yemen Blues. In 2012, he contributed his oud skills to Avital Meets Avital, a project with Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital (no relation) in which they explore their shared interest in baroque, Moroccan and Israeli folk music.
That jazz remains Avital’s primary vehicle for self-expression is apparent from several albums of original quintet music with trumpeter Cohen and tenor saxophonist Frahm. One is Suite Of The East (Anzic), a 2006 date with pianists Omer Klein and drummer Daniel Freedman that was released in 2012, and earned an “Album Of The Year” designation from TSF Jazz and a “Top Ten Jazz Album’ designation from NPR Music. Another is the 2014 CD New Song (Plus Loin/Motéma), which Jazz Times described as “fresh, sophisticated, authentic and great fun to listen to.”
Informed by his experience in the polyglot melting pots of his native and adopted homes, Avital will continue to merge the streams of expression that permeate his unique musical production over the last two decades. Pragmatic and utopian, grounded and visionary, he’s a 21st century lodestar.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: omeravital
- ▶ Instagram: omeravitalmusic
- ▶ Website: http://www.omeravital.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/omeravitalmusic
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCxdLiYyTPt5lRObVBdW4Agg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1dMaqtJe9zfm2YeJYD65O9
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/1ecylWuXIarpbPCgPg0pwa
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/7HFsrmUlvSSxFSYYPzRz07
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/28MWmExcVKpuFZ292CBgY6
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/4mltjEhhL4DgkaIdjpEatA
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/6EZ2M37CIvHgEQkrx0X53h
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
