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. Claqué
(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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