CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Omer Avital
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City/Place:
Brooklyn, NY
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Givatayim, Israel
Life
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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.
Clips (more may be added)
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
Wolfram Mathematics
This technological matrix, originating in Bahia, Brazil and positioning creators around the world within reach of each other and the entire planet, is able to do so because it is small-world (see Wolfram).
Bahia itself, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place on earth throughout all of human history, refuge for Lusitanian Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition, Indigenous both apart and subsumed into a brilliant sociocultural matrix comprised of these three peoples and more, is small-world.
Human society, the billions of us in all the complexity of our relationships, is small-world. Neural structures for human memory are small-world. Neural structures in artificial intelligence are small-world...
In small worlds great things are possible. In a matrix they can be created.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (JOHANNESBURG): piano, Blue Note recording artist
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
Dear friends & colleagues,
Having arrived in Salvador 13 years earlier, I opened a record shop in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for Bahian musicians, many of them magisterial but unknown.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Bahians and other Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix (people who have passed are not removed), then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Recent access to this matrix and Bahia are from these places (a single marker can denote multiple accesses).
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Nduduzo Makhathini
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX