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PRIVATE [73:30]
Ari Erev (piano): Assaf Hakimi (bass): Gasper Bertoncelj (drums): Gilad Dobrecky (percussion): Yuval Cohen (saxophone): Hadar Noiberg (flute)
Recorded August 2020, Pluto Studios, Tel-Aviv
Israeli Story
Playground
Childhood Scenes
Falling in Place
Old Friends
Para Sempre
Afar
So Tender
Saturday’s Coffee
Shi’ur Moledet
Olha Maria
Still Crazy After All These Years
Po
Though he was rooted in Classical music, Israeli pianist Ari Erev discovered jazz in his teens and Bill Evans, in particular, seems to have been something of a model. His fourth disc is a 13-track CD with eight of his own compositions that explore ideas of ‘home’ - as indeed do the originals that sit alongside them. With him is a group that includes the much-touted young sax player Yuval Cohen and the NY-based flute player Hadar Noiberg, amongst others.
The first thing to note is the excellent recorded sound that is naturally balanced and allows every timbre to be heard. The next is the nature of the programming, which fuses resonant warmth with a light Latin ethos, one to which Erev has often been profitably drawn in his previous albums in in his concert-giving. This often gives the music a dancing fluidity – try the opening track, Israeli Story for a perfect example of a terpsichorean Erev original that espouses just these virtues and features the beautiful playing of Noiberg. In the mid to up-tempo swinger Playground (another original) Cohen plays the soprano sax and enshrines cast-iron verities of swing and time. The trio performance of Childhood Scenes – the title may be Schumannesque but the articulate warmth is all Erev’s – shows another facet of this disc, which is a variation in ensembles, from full band to more modest proportions, as per the trio here.
Cohen’s lyric and buoyant soprano and Erev’s lightly sprung piano irradiate the Latin vibe of Falling in Place whilst Old Friends introduces the talents of bassist Assaf Hakimi who shines in this quietly evocative number. All Erev’s own pieces have a marked sense of personality and characterisation, as here. Para sempre receives a quartet performance with Hakimi here playing bass guitar for a change and expert percussion work from Gilad Dobrecky whereas Afar, dedicated to the pianist’s daughter, is a lovely piece, the flute and sax entwining and fluttering around each other like butterflies, the rhythm lissom, the generous music-making tinged with a few bluesy cadences, not least in the fills for Cohen’s sax.
There’s a nod to Keith Jarrett in his So Tender and a slow heart-warming Jobim classic in the form of Olha Maria, and a good take on Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years which shows Erev has a fine ear for compatible material from the pop repertoire.
This is a disc to inspire admiration. It covers Latin, ballad, blues, popular influence and still always remains consonant with Erev’s principles and enthusiasms and those of his band. These fine musicians have produced a warm and life-enhancing album.
Jonathan Woolf