NEW RELEASE
Omer Avital QANTAR - NEW YORK PARADOX
COMING SPRING 2020 on ZamZama Records and Jazz & People
"NEW YORK PARADOX..."
“One of the most exciting musicians to come onto the jazz scene in the last 20 years”
DownBeat Magazine
“One of the key figures in the new wave of jazz . . . an integral presence on the local scene . . .”
The New Yorker
Bassist/composer Omer Avital, one of the most celebrated and revered musicians on the global jazz scene, offers his latest creative tour-de-force, New York Paradox, to be released on Avital’s label, Zamzama Records (in partnership with jazz & people), in Spring 2020.
New York Paradox is the second album from Avital’s dream Quintet, Qantar (following up their self-titled debut), featuring Eden Ladin (piano & keyboards), Ofri Nehemya (drums), Alexander Levin (tenor sax), Asaf Yuria (soprano & tenor sax).
WHAT IS QANTAR?
Omer's Dream Quintet
Qantar is more than just another group, it is for all intents and purposes a family and a community with its own customs, growing traditions, and even language (both musical and verbal). These five artists have formed a special friendship that projects a singular energy on the bandstand and on their recordings. Indeed, all are Israeli expatriates, all living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, all regularly hanging out at their leader’s home, sharing dinner, Turkish coffee, stories, ideas, joys and sorrows. This shared history, even though years apart, imbibes this quintet with the key to Avital’s music: the ability to bring the various rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies underpinning 20th and 21st century hardcore jazz expression to flow with a polyphonic attitude and musical multilingualism.
The recording of New York Paradox came together after three years of the guys playing together regularly. It was recorded in Avital’s NEW studio/club/lounge - Wilson Live! in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a very comfortable, homey environment, captured by the band’s good friend, engineer Roy Boukris. Avital added, “we know the room as we have been playing here a lot in the past year and a half, and we recorded in the same room with no separation, no edits, no fixes; we just played the room as if we were on a gig.”
