Wednesday, September 25, 2019

YES! TRIO: Ali Jackson / Aaron Goldberg / Omer Avital "Groove du Jour


Bound by a friendship of twenty-five years, drummer Ali Jackson, pianist Aaron Goldberg and bassist Omer Avital-three contemporary masters of jazz-release their second collaborative studio effort "Groove du Jour". Vibrant and exhilarating, their recording magnifies the spirit of swing and celebrates the excitement of playing together. With Yes! Trio, jazz is far from having said its last word!

The Yes! Trio is a group. A group created informally at the beginning of the 1990s, during a period when jazz went through a phase of refocusing before experiencing a new expansion. Coming from different horizons, its members, in their twenties at the time, met in New York and with the same desire, fittingly: to play jazz with the vitality of swing, to soak its spirit, to learn from their elders in order to be in a position to express it as their own musical language in all its modernity, its timelessness. It is no small intellectual exploit that this generation of musicians had chosen at the dawn of the new century to be faithful to an art that a wounded community had invented to save its soul. 
 
Aaron Goldberg and Ali Jackson met in 1991, when they were passing their auditions at the Manhattan School of Music. Coming from a family of African-American musicians from Detroit (his father, Ali Sr., a bassist, recorded with Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane), where he was a student at the famed Cass Tech High School, Ali Jackson (born in 1976), was given guidance in his teens by Max Roach, Donald Byrd and Betty Carter, and accompanied Aretha Franklin before even moving to New York. Aaron Goldberg (born in 1974) comes from a Jewish family in Boston, the son of scientists and destined for brilliant studies himself, discovered jazz as a teenager and was given private lessons by Jerry Bergonzi. Omer Avital and Aaron Goldberg met shortly later, in 1992, when both were students at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, before Goldberg returned to Boston to study at Harvard, where he obtained his degree. Born in Israel in 1971 to Moroccan and Yemenite parents, Avital had moved to New York several months before, hungry to play with his idols after having studied at the Thelma-Yellin School in Tel Aviv (which has turned out to be a true breeding ground for Israeli jazz talents). Though Avital met Ali Jackson during a European tour several months later, it is at the New York club Smalls starting in 1995 that these musicians began rubbing shoulders, when Avital became one of the lynchpins of a variety of groups, including his own.

It would be another fifteen years before the three musicians would make their first recording together. In the meantime, each has had brilliant careers that we are all aware of. Proudly wearing the colors that his mentors Max Roach and Elvin Jones taught him, Ali Jackson has asserted himself as one of the great heirs of the drum tradition, demonstrating the depth of his erudition for over a decade as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under the direction of Wynton Marsalis (he has also played in Marsalis' small groups), after having accompanied musicians such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Jacky Terrasson. Active for a time with Marsalis as well, Aaron Goldberg made a name for himself in saxophonist Joshua Redman's quartet, one of the major groups during the latter part of the '90s. He has launched several trios, the latest with Matt Penman and Leon Parker, while collaborating with artists such as Freddie Hubbard, Nicholas Payton, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Guillermo Klein. Bassist Omer Avital has shown himself to be a leader as well after having played with "historical" figures such as Roy Haynes and Jimmy Cobb upon his arrival in New York. Drawing inspiration from his roots (he returned to Israel for almost three years to study the oud and to immerse himself in the traditional musics of the Near East, and co-founded the groups Yemen Blues and Third World Love) he has led several groups of which one of the trademarks is to combine the voices of several saxophones and to blend the expressiveness of jazz with his own heritage.

This trio says yes to pleasure, to joy, to humor, to the energy of an expression that is not masked by technique but which serves to communicate and to interact with the others, even at the most elementary level of a simple beat/groove. Through the intimacy that each of the three members have developed with the language of jazz, Yes! Trio has this capacity - relatively unique in the current musical landscape - of mobilizing a large corpus of the history of jazz without aping it nor becoming a mere nostalgic exercise. Their vivacity, their naturalness, their happiness, their liberty illustrates how much these artists have become contemporary masters of this music, yet never forgetting to integrate the fundamentals, starting with blues and swing, but also expanding it to other spaces, to romantic melodic reminiscences, to Batucada rhythms, to a church tambourine or to urban rhythmic accents, in the web of this repertoire chosen by the three musicians, which also includes a sublime ballad with a pointillist arrangement, "I'll Be Seeing You", and a classic of modern jazz written by Jackie McLean.
  
The Yes! Trio is not just another trio. It is the incarnation of a certain truth in jazz, its very sound first of all, but also a way of approaching music that does not stay on the surface of things, or within a polite tonality or a well-played phrase. The trio also emphasizes the organic matter of the instruments, which counts as much as the notes played, the texture of skin beneath the drummer's brushes, the slap of a string of the acoustic bass. It makes the instruments speak as if they were human beings. It inverses roles, transforming the piano into percussion and the drums into melody. It effaces the hierarchies between the members of the trio to the point that, quite often, the thread of the music ceaselessly flows between the musicians in turn. Avital's bass talks and laughs, Jackson's drums murmur his spells in our ears, Goldberg's piano gives a speech and makes jokes, and it is an entire collection of stories that are spoken and performed in our presence. No, jazz has not yet said its last word, and continues to say yes to those who embrace it and love it. 

1. Escalier (Ali Jackson) 6'32
2. C'est clair (Omer Avital) 7'43
3. Dr. Jackle (Jackie McLean) 5'44
4. I'll Be Seeing You (Sammy Fain & Irving Kahal) 7'21
5. Muhammad's Market (Omer Avital) 5'58
6. ClaquƩ (Ali Jackson) 4'38
7. Tokyo Dream (Aaron Goldberg) 4'54
8. Groove du Jour (Ali Jackson) 4'20
9. Flow (Omer Avital) 6'24
10. Bed-Stuy (Omer Avital) 6'09


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