Noa Fort - Everyday Actions (2021 Ears & Eyes Records)

Israeli-born vocalist, pianist, composer, and music therapist Noa Fort is blurring the lines between written and composed, group and individual, inner and outer soundscape, giving and receiving; all on the path to healing, with music.

In 2018 Fort released her debut album as a bandleader and composer, ‘No World Between Us’. Critically acclaimed, its release led to bookings at the DC Jazz Festival and BRIC Jazz Festival. All About Jazz called it “an album of comforting originality on all fronts… lyrics brimming with timeless themes”.

In this new release, Everyday Actions, her second album as a leader and composer, Fort is using her voice and piano to draw abstract musical pictures. Abandoning lyrics almost completely, it is the timbre, tone, and emotion in her voice that bring about the lyrical depth of the songs. Borrowing from her work as a therapist, Fort is giving space to the listener to bring his or her own meaning and interpretation to each piece.

Recording began on March 16, 2020, moments before NYC went into months-long lockdown. The uncertainty and wariness were in the air as the quartet recorded their takes. Later in the pandemic, Fort decided to continue the project with solo pieces, expressing in sound the solitude that was the characteristic of the past year. Eventually, these became the bulk of the album.

The music celebrates the mundane and the historical, the big and the small. Nature’s evokes the walks in urban nature that kept her sane during months of lockdown; Rovno is a piece inspired by the historic Jewish town of Rovno, now in Ukraine, her ancestor’s hometown and the site of a horrific WWII massacre of Jewish families. Tunnels and Everyday Actions explore the ways repetition with tiny variations can bring about big change. Endless Tea Party starts with a single melodic phrase, sung time and time again into the piano’s soundboard and strings; within the soundscape that is created the tune evolves. Deeping is an epic twist and turn over a mysterious pedal point. Home Scratch, written originally for a group of improvisers, evokes the need to move around while being bound at home. The Stories We Tell captures the frustration and anger experienced in an unbalanced relationship. Song For a New Year, written while Fort was a composer-in-residence at a small town in Minnesota as the Jewish New Year was celebrated, captures the optimism of a fresh start in sound.

The wide experience Fort has with the human experience informs her work as a composer/performer; the minute shifts in mood, attention, and color are all taken in as important information. This is her work as a composer and improviser; listening to her bandmates, tuned into the soundscape of the other person, of herself. It is in everyday actions that healing can take place, not in the big resolutions that are made and forgotten; changes of pattern, slow attention to daily actions, tiny moments of clarity.

1. Endless Tea Party 04:48

2. The Stories We Tell 04:13

3. Tunnels 07:00

4. Home Scratch 02:36

5. Everyday Actions 03:55

6. Rovno 04:50

7. Song for a New Year 03:02

8. Deeping 06:07

9. Nature´s 03:01

Noa Fort - voice, piano, compositions

Josh Deutsch - trumpet

Dan Loomis - bass

Ronen Itzik - drums

Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Michael Perez-Cisneros at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn NY USA

Album design by Elizabeth Lauren West

Art by Lara Lewison

Photography by Erika Kapin

Pre-order

Introducing Joel Frahm - The Bright Side (Friday, June 25th on Anzic Records)

The Joel Frahm Trio is a new band featuring Frahm on tenor and soprano saxophones, Dan Loomis on bass, and Ernesto Cervini on drums. The Bright Side is their debut recording for Anzic Records, and is the culmination of a musical partnership that has developed over the course of many tours and recording sessions spanning the last decade.

Frahm first encountered the chord-less trio format as a teenager, and says he was "mesmerized by the music they created and hooked by the feeling of freedom and space the “chordless” trio provided me as a listener.” He was part of several bands that fit that description: In the 1990s, Matt Wilson’s Quartet with Frahm and Andrew D’Angelo playing their musical version of Abbott and Costello with Wilson and Yosuke Inoue facilitating the antics on drums and bass, respectively. The millennium brought a seven year trio residency at Bar Next Door in Greenwich Village featuring Joe Martin on bass and Bill Campbell on drums. There were many nights at Smalls Jazz Club and later at Wilson Live featuring Frahm's trio with bassist and composer Omer Avital and drummer Anthony Pinciotti, another band that continues to work consistently. In fact, Frahm’s debut recording Sorry No Decaf was initially envisioned as a trio CD before David Berkman was added on piano.  This recording marks Frahm’s return to this formative trio format, this time as a bandleader.

The trio was born at a masterclass at the University of Toronto, as an offshoot of Cervini’s band Turboprop. In the ensuing years, Loomis and Cervini took the reins and began to book gigs for the ensemble, and on their first European tour a repertoire began to take shape, comprised almost entirely of recently penned original songs by each member of the band. The music runs the gamut: from X-Friends, Dan Loomis’ knotty re-imagining of the Klenner/Lewis standard Just Friends, to Frahm’s title tune The Bright Side, which was inspired by the opening riff of Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side. Cervini contributes The Beautiful Mystery, a pensive and emotional tone poem that contrasts beautifully with upbeat tracks like Frahm’s Beeline, a new melody written on the chord changes of My Shining Hour.

The Joel Frahm Trio is dedicated to playing original music with humour, emotion, blues spirit and all of the elements that people love about jazz. This  record is the first offering from a formidable band you’ll be hearing more from soon.  Also, you might be interested to learn that Frahm, a veteran of the New York City jazz scene , will be moving to Nashville mid-July.

The Bright Side will be released worldwide on Friday, June 25th on Anzic Records

1. Blow Poppa Joe (Frahm) 4:22

2. Thinking of Benny (Frahm) 7:35

3. Boo Dip Dip (Frahm) 6:17

4. Silk Road (Loomis) 7:33

5. Omer’s World (Frahm) 4:55

6. Qu’est-ce Que C’est (Frahm) 6:48

7. X Friends (Loomis) 5:18

8. Beeline (Frahm) 4:27

9. The Beautiful Mystery (Cervini) 5:15

10. The Bright Side (Frahm) 8:58

Joel Frahm - Tenor & Soprano Saxophone

Dan Loomis - Bass

Ernesto Cervini - Drums

Ernesto Cervini’s Turboprop - Abundance (ANZIC RECORDS October 5, 2018)

Worldwide Release Date: October 5th, 2018 on Anzic Records

Ernesto Cervini is a Canadian jazz drummer and leader of his own band, Turboprop, in addition to acting as a promoter of other Canadian jazz artists through Orange Grove Publicity. He is, in addition, a nice man and a musicians with “open ears,” as they say, since he promotes a wide range of jazz styles (some of which, and he knows this, I don’t care for), but within his own band there’s a big but imaginary sign hanging up that says, “True Jazz Spoken Here.”

His newest album, due for release on October 5, is a typical example of the high artistic standards he sets for himself and his musicians.

The opener, written by the band’s reed player Tara Davidson, is a wild piece in asymmetric rhythm, with Cervini’s drums churning in the background as the horns play the opening theme statement before moving quickly into a brilliant piano solo by Adrean Farrugia, followed by the composer herself on alto sax. This band not only swings, they’re highly creative soloists who feed into each other with aplomb. Cervini’s own solo is exciting and equally inventive, using cross-rhythms with apparent ease.

I was delighted to see a composition here by Tadd Dameron, the brilliant but self-destructive jazz composer-arranger from the late 1940s/early ‘50s. The original version was by bop legend Theodore “Fats” Navarro in 1949, issued under the title Sid’s Delight (as a tribute to legendary jazz club announcer and DJ “Symphony Sid” Torin). This one really jumps, with tight, excellent solos all round. Two other “old-timers” make an appearance next: Harold Arlen, next to Johnny Mercer the jazziest of jazz-influenced pop tune writers, and Charles Chaplin, who didn’t have a jazz bone in his body.

Turboprop predictably makes a nice soufflé of Arlen’s My Shining Hour, with imaginative rhythmic displacements, embellishments on the original theme, unusual harmonic shifts and quick little solos by Davidson on soprano sax, Carn, Frahm and Farrugia, while Cervini pounds the percussion happily in the background. Chaplin’s Smile (a theme for the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual telethons for decades) is played lyrically by Carn on trombone while the reeds provide nice little fills behind him. Carn then gets the bulk of the solo space, doubling the tempo and expanding on Chaplin’s theme.

Dan Loomis’ whimsical Abundance Overture begins with Cervini playing a sort of tap dance on the rims of his snare drum, with the flute, saxophone and trombone entering in a sort of Irish jig tempo. Loomis’ bass then “toughens up” the rhythm with some tight jazz playing in tandem with the leader, and Farrugia’s piano leads us into solo-land. A bit of handclapping backs up a two-part fugue played by the alto and tenor saxes before leading back into the ensemble. What a nifty arrangement!

Although written by pianist Farrugia, The Ten Thousand Things is centered around the bass, which plays the opening chorus and remains a strong presence under the reeds when they perform the theme. When Farrugia does enter, it is after a pause, and the tempo drops down to a slow ballad while he plays a sort of fantasia. The tempo eventually picks back up again and  the whole band plays interesting scored figures, with Frahm on tenor coming out of the ensemble for an excellent solo.

A free-form, wild jam ends it. Cervini’s Gramps, a ballad, opens with some soft brush work by the leader, with the two reeds and arco bass playing the simple theme. Eventually a sort of canon is set up between the tenor sax and trombone behind Davidson on alto. The finale, Song for Cito, is a relaxed 6/8 sort of piece backed by the leader’s enthusiastic drums. Pianist Farrugia is the solo star of this one, however, and he connects the musical material very well. A sort of quick “ta-da!” tag ending closes the piece, and the CD.

This is another fine outing for this talented band, and I highly recommend it to your attention.

© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

Tara Davidson – Alto/Soprano Saxes, Flute

Joel Frahm – Tenor Sax

William Carn – Trombone

Adrean Farrugia – Piano

Dan Loomis – Bass

Ernesto Cervini – Drums

www.ernestocervini.com