The 40-year-old mother of four will showcase her latest recorded offering, Free The Dolphin, at next week’s Jerusalem Jazz Festival, and then on to the Israel Museum.
By BARRY DAVISCELLIST-VOCALIST Maya Belsitzman and drummer Matan Ephrat revisit Miriam Roth's children's classic 'A Tale of Five Balloons.' (photo credit: MUPERPHOTO)
If you’re looking to pin Maya Dunietz down, to pigeonhole her in some neatly defined area of musical endeavor, don’t waste your strength. You’d probably be better off trying to put together a viable Israeli government.The pianist seems to have done it all, well a good deal of it, and continues to flex the frontiers of sonic and other artistic exploration across a broad spectrum of styles, genres and disciplines.The 40-year-old mother of four will showcase her latest recorded offering, Free The Dolphin, at next week’s Jerusalem Jazz Festival, the seventh edition of which is set at its regular berth of the Israel Museum, June 22-24, as part of the Israel Festival.All the shows will be held outside, in and around the Sculpture Garden; hence, thankfully, audiences will be able to enjoy the musical entertainment while inhaling the Jerusalem air au naturel, mask-less.Dunietz’s gig is one of the late shows on the opening day of the festival, with her trio of bassist Barak Mori and drummer Amir Bressler due to take the alfresco stage at 10:10 p.m.So, what should we expect from the threesome? In brief, an expansively roaming open-ended excursion into a wealth of sounds, rhythms, genres, cultural and ethnic baggage, naturally, all liberally laced with extemporaneous intent.And if writing music, leading her own bands and tickling the ivories across a musical classification stretch that takes in rock, free improvisation, classical music, forays into various ethnic domains and straight-ahead jazz were not enough, Dunietz has dipped her talented hands into the plastic arts, too, with her exhibition bio including a show at the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris.She says it is all part of the same creative continuum. “For me, the plastic arts and music complement each other. They are one and the same. They are just different approaches to two senses which you take and run with.”DUNIETZ HAS been running along quite a few avenues of thought for some time now. After first putting her infant hands on a piano keyboard, at the age of five, she was soon drawn to the complexities of contemporary musical envelope-pushers, including the works of 20th-century trailblazers such as electronic music pioneer Gyorgy Ligeti and electroacoustic music founder John Cage.Her inquisitive streak flourished even further when she made it to the Thelma Yellin School of the Arts in Givatayim, and jazz seeped into her evolving musical consciousness. Things became even more serious soon after graduating.
“I guess I was around 13 [when she opened up to jazz]. When I was 19, I started looking into other styles and researching other sounds,” she recalls. “I started looking into more elementary sound. I was surrounded by jazz [at school], and then I got into salsa, and then sacred music from Cuba.”But the youngster was never going to be a one-trick musical pony. “I was also interested in contemporary music, classical music and free improvisation. I started getting into all that when I was in New York. There I came across other people who were very enthusiastic about all of that.”The group dynamic in the Big Apple was a crucial catalyst to Dunietz’s learning curve. At the time, in the late nineties, Israel was still something of a backwater on the global jazz scene. These were still the relatively early days of the Internet, and means of checking out the work of artists of all ilks, from around the world, such as by just popping into YouTube, were not even a twinkle in any home computer user’s eye.Still, Dunietz had benefited from something of a vicarious taste of the global jazz capital, before she boarded the plane for the States, when she came under the heavyweight didactic wing of Arnie Lawrence.Lawrence was a Jewish American saxophonist and educator who had played with such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus, and had helped found the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, in New York, in the mid-’80s.Lawrence moved to Jerusalem in 1997 and boosted the local jazz scene considerably, nurturing the incipient talents of numerous budding jazz artists here.“I was one of Arnie’s ‘kids’ who went around with him,” Dunietz declares. “I used to go to Ramallah with him every week. I learned a lot from Arnie.”The regular trips across the Green Line featured jazz gigs at the Flamingo venue where some of Lawrence’s students chalked up some precious stage time alongside various Arab musicians.“I played with [now internationally renowned Paris-based pianist] Yonatan Avishai and [celebrated Andalusian-style jazz pianist] Omri Mor. Omri and I would practice on the telephone. We’d play each other stuff over the phone, all sorts of trash,” she laughs.Those invaluable forays to Ramallah, along with classes taken with Lawrence, certainly fired Dunietz’s imagination, and she took that with her across the Atlantic when she enrolled at the New School.But the young pianist was always eager to look beyond the recognized disciplinary demarcation lines. “In New York I met all sorts of ‘crazy’ people who didn’t want to stay within the parameters of the [jazz] chord changes, songs and that sort of thing.”In truth, when she left these shores, Dunietz took with her a wealth of diverse musical experience, after stints with the Jerusalem Salsa Band and the Avram Felder Big Band, and developed vocal chops with the Bat Kol Choir.Her take on sonic creativity was also expanded by a trip to Ivory Coast, at the age of 16, for an international music convention, where she met and befriended mbira player, vocalist, and songwriter Chiwoniso Maraire, who became her close friend and artistic collaborator until Maraire’s death in 2013.She certainly didn’t waste her New York time either, taking advantage of the manifold stylistic opportunities the metropolis churned out to mix it with such forward musical thinkers as multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer John Zorn, percussionist-composer Susie Ibarra, bassist-oud player Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. There seemed to be no limits to Dunietz’s curiosity and desire to venture into uncharted quarters.A few years after her New York jaunt she took her artistic development to even higher levels by enrolling at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the Netherlands, and studied composition with Gilius van Bergeijk, who has gained a reputation for deconstructing structured scores and running with them in every which direction.That sounds like a perfect fit for Dunietz, who, during her time in the Netherlands, was introduced to the beguiling textures and layering of analogue synth walls and began to experiment with electronics. While based in The Hague, the Israeli duly created several instrumental works and built her first installation performance object.Mind you, any idea that Dunietz is exclusively locked into ethereal realms is way off the mark. Over the years she has played with rock acts such as Boom Pam and Habiluim, raucous klezmer outfit Oy Division and singer-songwriters Rona Kenan and Noam Rotem.All of the above, and plenty more, come into play in Free The Dolphin, although you would be hard-pressed to put your finger on exactly where. The record is an eclectic affair which takes in bluesy intent, Arabic and Andalusian seasoning, meditative outings, funk, groove and even some romantically inclined lines.ACCLAIMED BASS guitarist Yossi Fine hooks up with poetry slam artist Orit Tashuma. (Credit: LOWELL DOWNEY)The final cut, “The Wine of Love,” pushes the energy level a little higher as former member of the French “trashy drum-machine punk” band Cheveu, Daniel Lemoine, who also happens to be married to Dunietz, delivers a silky recitation of the eponymous poem, amazingly written by late leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini.There is a sense of space on much of the six-tracker, and Mori and Bressler are clearly fully on board for the ride. Yes, there are stylistic hooks that most experienced listeners will catch, but there is also something clearly unfettered about the project, and the numbers tend to leave you hanging, as it were, waiting for the next note to materialize.Should be interesting to see how that ethos translates to a live rendition.“Yes, that is the sense, that music can continue infinitely,” Dunietz notes, adding that is very much part and parcel of what she looks upon as the adventure of creation. “When I was preparing the material for the record, I had some sort of melody or mood, color or harmony, some starting point for a space of awareness. From there I left things open.”That reflects an adventuresome spirit and the courage to leave things loose and allow the muses and the music to follow their natural path. No doubt, the audience of the open-air concert will catch some of the free-flowing spirit.ELSEWHERE ACROSS the Jerusalem Jazz Festival agenda, devised by perennial artistic director and internationally acclaimed trumpeter Avishai Cohen, who, incidentally, also guests on Free The Dolphin, one can find jazzy slots of various stripes; an intriguing Arabic music concert with the Tarabass ensemble fronted by leader bassist Hagai Bilitzki, who gravitated eastward from his jazz beginnings; and a number of crossover offerings, including the pairing of cellist-vocalist Maya Belsitzman and drummer, real life partner Matan Ephrat, with vocalist Gilad Kahan weighing in with his beat-fueled show.DYNAMIC SHOTZNEZ quartet will take its creative cue from Anish Kapoor's works at the museum. (Credit: ORI KAPLAN)Music fans looking for higher octane fare should dig the dynamic Shotnez foursome of Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan – both members of the popular eclectic Balkan Beat Box act – bassist Itamar Ziegler and multi-instrumentalist Uri Brauner Kinrot. The band will take its creative cue from the museum’s striking exhibits of Anish Kapoor’s works, as well as items displayed in the Africa and Oceania Art Gallery.Other staged gigs include traditional Jewish music-based jazzy Niggun Quartet and a quintet led by saxophonist Asaf Yuria and trumpeter Hillel Salem, also featuring Katya Tubul on piano, bassist Yonatan Levy and celebrated drummer Ofri Nehemia.Rosa and her Salmons sextet will offer an entertaining mix of r&b, soul and jazz originals, while singer-songwriter Gal De Paz’s hosting of the Las Piratas marching band should push the wattage and decibel ratings skyward. Stellar bass guitarist Yossi Fine’s hookup with poetry slam artist Orit Tashuma promises to be a rhythmically and textually interesting run out, and fans of world music should enjoy cross-genre musician Ofer Mizrachi and his trio, who will span an expansive ethnic hinterland, taking in sounds, rhythms and textures from India, Turkey and Caucasia, with some jazzy seasoning thrown in for good measure.CROSSOVER MUSICIAN Ofer Mizrachi and his trio will take in sounds, rhythms and textures from India, Turkey and Caucasia. (Credit: OFER MIZRACHI)For tickets and more information: www.jerusalemjazzfestival.org.il
