Thursday, March 28, 2019

Guitarist YOTAM SILBERSTEIN releases FUTURE MEMORIES


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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