On his sixth
album as a leader, Future Memories (featuring the superlative bassist John
Patitucci, Glenn Zaleski, Vitor Gonçalves, Daniel Dor & Andre Mehmari),
Yotam Silberstein continues to offer up unequivocal proof that for jazz
musicians, Israel is one of the promised lands, and Brooklyn continues to
possess the optimal environment for maximum artistic growth. Silberstein's
playing is also testimony that the art form of jazz guitar, brought into vivid
existence by Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green and many others, is
alive and evolving in the hands of this artist. Commenting on Silberstein's
previous recording The Village, AllAboutJazz
said,"[his] unadorned hollow-body guitar work freely invites comparison to
releases from the heyday of Blue Note Records . . . [however] he isn't piggy
backing on memories. He's forging his own path with skills and style."
JazzTimes Magazine added that, "since his arrival in New York in 2005,
Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein has made an impact on the scene with his
precision bebop lines and fleet-fingered improvisations."
Following up
an album as compelling as The Village (jazz&people, 2016) may have seemed
to be a daunting task. After all, Bill Milkowski called it, "his most
fully realized recording to date" in a feature in DownBeat Magazine.
However, Yotam Silberstein, ever forward-looking, took his music on many great
voyages of distance, erudition, and immersion, into the music of Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, and North Africa; developing real
affinities with these cultures and traditions, to the point where they have
been fully integrated into his own musical world.Silberstein elaborated,
"I feel like all these new influences combined with my knowledge of jazz,
blues, Israeli and Arabic music has merged into something very unique and
beautiful." The result is the resplendent and bountiful, Future Memories,
available on jazz&people now. The
NYC CD Release Celebration will take place at Dizzy's Club on April 2 & 3!
It is jazz
under which Silberstein's various musical argots are united and blended with
other sources of inspiration that, from Andalusia to the Far East, imbue his
music. The New York Times concurred that, "Silberstein improvises in a
cutting tone and writes heady original tunes that seem to tug the
straight-ahead jazz tradition in new directions. You'll occasionally notice
coiled rhythms and minor scales that recall Jewish folk music, but chatter in
the patois of contemporary jazz."
It is with
musicians the guitarist regularly tours with whom he has chosen to record
Future Memories, in which in addition to his own compositions are three pieces
by two great Brazilian musicians, the mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda and
Paulinho da Viola, master of the choro and heir to the tradition of Jacob do
Bandolim and Pixinguinha. It should come as no surprise that Silberstein has
added to his quartet a Brazilian, Vitor Gonçalves. This Carioca by adoption,
who has worked with Maria Bethânia and Itiberê Zwarg (a longtime member of
Hermeto Pascoal's group), settled in New York in 2012, where his twin talents
as a pianist and accordionist have not gone unnoticed. Gonçalves takes turn on
keyboards on the album with Glenn Zaleski, one of the most remarkable pianists
in NYC who has made his mark in Ravi Coltrane's quartet. The drummer, Daniel
Dor, who came to prominence in the bassist Avishai Cohen's trio, stakes a claim
as an invaluable first-call musician with his startling capacity to play odd
meters, the various rhythmic underpinnings that are crucial to the success of
Silberstein's music, and seemingly anything that his vibrant, inventive
imagination can dream up, all with the utmost taste and flair, with the common
good of the music his sole mission. Bassist John Patitucci needs no
introduction. He has been a longtime member of the groups of two of the major
figures in the history of jazz, Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, and a regular
collaborator with Silberstein, who was recently featured on the
bassist/composer's new recording, Irmãos de Fé (Newvelle, 2017). Commenting on
recording Future Memories Patitucci said, "everything really clicked with
Yotam. He is a very intuitive, very emotional player, he's lyrical, he's also
strong rhythmically, he has a voice, and he's also like an encyclopedia of
Brazilian music! I really loved the way the colors were flowing all
around."
Whether
embracing the bewitching virtuosity of the caprichos of Hamilton de Holanda, or
admirably managing the dangerous game of odd meters, his guitar can recapture
the dancing accents of a Brazilian bandolim and simultaneously evoke, with a
touch of nostalgia, the shores of the Mediterranean. Silberstein floats like a
feather over a melody as simple as a lullaby, and convokes the conjugated
spirits of the choro and flamenco. He is an artist who displays with a
confounding maestria the range of his talents and the richness of his
inspiration. If the guitar is the ideal nomadic instrument, Silberstein's
playing has retained, from his travels around the globe, a variety of
impressions that are superbly expressed in a rousing and inspired album - his
most personal to date, in his own words-and opens like so many windows on the
beauties of the world and the memories of the emotions they evoke in each of
us.
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