Noa and Gil have been working together for 30 years. They met in the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary music in Ramat Ha Sharon in 1989. Gil was the co-founder of the school, the academic director and a highly respected musician and educator fluent in myriad styles but specializing in jazz. Noa was an aspiring 20 year old singer and songwriter, who had recently moved to Israel form the US, completed her military service in a Military Band, and came to Rimon in search of education and collaboration. She was immediately labeled a ”jazz singer” due to her proficiency in English, her natural improvisational abilities and her inbred connection to “The American Songbook”. Having been born in Israel to a Yemenite family, and raised in NY until age 17, Jazz is part of her identity, as natural as her Yemenite and Hebrew roots.
The duo’s first concert was in a jazz festival in Tel Aviv, Feb 8th, 1990, where they performed standard tunes with unorthodox arrangements, and some of Noa’s original compositions. That first night was an enormous success that set the stage for the incredible journey to come.
Their first international album was produced by Pat Metheny, one of the most highly respected jazz musicians in the world, but did not include standard tunes, rather focusing on Noa’s songwriting.
Over the years, Noa and Gil explored many different regions of music, wrote and performed hundreds of songs, worked with ensembles ranging from acoustic trio to bass and drum quartet to symphony orchestra, explored and fused different styles, sounds and languages, always reaching for that unexplainable, unpredictable moment of magic every musician lives for. It has always been impossible to categorize them.
Afterallogy is another step in their fascinating journey, where they have put the musical language they have developed and their past experience at the service of these great, classic jazz tunes, and added a few originals as well.
The name, beyond paying homage to the greats that inspired them (Charlie Parkers “Ornithology”), is a statement about life and music, exacerbated by the Covid 10 crisis:
After all is said and done, after 30 years, after a pandemic which shattered, jolted and stripped the world bare, after thousands of kilometers travelled and many more thousands of notes played and sung, what remains?
A deep love and respect for great music and the greatness in music, a deep love for the humanity that is brought to life by it and elevated and illuminated in whoever experiences it.
A deep appreciation for the gift of friendship…for a unique partnership, for the power and resonance that brought and kept them together all these years.
And that curiosity and passion, that meticulous quest to unveil the deepest mysteries of music that drives them always onwards.
Afterallogy is the first part of a Noa and Gil’s jazz project. The are currently working on part 2, which will include their band and be more improvisational and experimental.
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