Friday-Saturday, May 15-16, 2015
Green Mill Jazz Club
4802 N. Broadway Ave.
Chicago, IL 60640
773.878.5552
9:00 p.m. show Friday, 8:00 pm Saturday, three sets
$15 Tickets at the door
New Song features a quintet which Omer Avital has led for many years, and which is a direct descendant of the ensemble with which Avital made a name for himself. However, this current group is imbued with the cultural heritage that the bass player took time exploring in the mid-2000s, when he returned to his homeland to reconnect with his ancestral roots – Yemenite on his mother’s side and Moroccan on his father’s. Avital studied its folk songs, dance rhythms and rituals, and these fed his imagination in the same way that blues, gospel and soul had fed his inspiration before them. For Omer Avital, jazz is a language of reconciliation which has allowed him, through a strange balance of demands and tolerance, to reconnect with his roots without falling into the anonymity of folklore, to take on the culture of his homeland without being forced to limit himself to it. Demands, because he knows, having learned his trade live on the stages of clubs rather than in conservatoires, that jazz does not let itself be carelessly fused with just any other style. Tolerance, because he knows that jazz is a language which allows all hybridizations so long as certain essential elements are preserved, and one into which music can be introduced that on the face of it has nothing to do with its tradition. As a true citizen of the global village, in New Song Omer Avital makes his homeland, and the contradictions within it, resonate with just one voice – his own – a voice which no-one could mistake for any other. His songs, new or old, speak to us as much of himself as of the world in which we live. And that is not the least of their virtues.