between the strings
photos by Shelly ben Shachar
click on this photo to download the full-size publicity file (photo by Gaby Adam)(from liner notes to our upcoming release, "Ariel Shibbolet and Between the Strings Live at the Tel Aviv Museum")
Jazz musicians often talk about “taking risks”, improvising to the point of not knowing what the next note will be, where the muse will take them or the colleagues and, indeed, who will grab the reins next and take the whole band on a magical mystery tour. Then there is free improvisation. Free improvisation is a discipline that, by definition, requires courage. There are no secure boundaries, there is no safety net, no rules to cling to.
Live at the Tel Aviv Museum is a prime example of going out on a limb, a bungee jump into wild blue beyond. All four players here have checked their safety belts and their preconceptions at the door of the Tel Aviv Museum. This is art in joyous freefall.
Part 2, for example, encapsulates the sentiments, energies, colors and textures of myriad worlds. The soundscape ostensibly plies unchartered waters, but there are plenty of reference points that stand out along the way. Dark, elongated chords, stretch to the edge of breaking point and escape into the unknown. There are passages that evoke images from a horror film. You wonder what lurks beyond the next corner.
But Live at the Tel Aviv Museum is not all darkness and gloom. There are fleeting dabs of insouciant klezmer, a hint of a Scottish bagpipe and a tongue-in-cheek sonic foray that follows its own muse, regardless. This is what it’s all about. Gossamer thin threads, unfurled, fall into deep chasms of the soul and the psyche, and claw their way up to the highest, most celestial plains. Wailing bows give rise to thunderous percussive expletives and glimpses of gentle melody segue into finely honed darts that mercilessly attack the senses. No violence here, despite the cacophony, and the oblique percussive statements. Each of the players infuses his own personal and cultural baggage into the fray, and it makes for an electrifying eclectic mix. This motley crew manages to combine energies, ideas and technical skills to the common good of exploring the back streets and highways of the improvisational endeavor, and do so with aplomb.
Bon voyage…Liner notes by Barry Davis, music critic Jerusalem Post
Jean Claude Jones, bass, electronics was born in 1949 in Sfax, Tunisia, raised in France, and educated in the US. From Tunisia he moved to France, where by the age of 17, a self taught musician, he began working in professional popular music and jazz bands on lead and bass guitar. After majoring in jazz guitar at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he received a music degree in 1980, he spent two years in Los Angeles studying at the Music Institute of Technology. He emigrated to Israel in 1983. In 1986 he made a definitive switch from bass guitar to double bass, and started to immerse himself in free improvised music. He later added electronics and computer-manipulated sounds to his musical arsenal.
JC Jones is an esteemed music educator and served as chair of the Jazz Department at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance between 1996 and 2000. He has performed and recorded with many leading international and Israeli musicians, dancers, poets and vocal artists, including Stan Getz (1985), Red Rodney (1986) Dave Liebman (1988). Since the 1990s he has appeared with John Zorn, Anthony Coleman, Ned Rothenberg, Slava Ganelin, Steve Horenstein, Albert Beger, Arkady Gotesman, Avishai Cohen, Julien Hamilton, Amos Hetz, Anat Shamgar, Ariel Shibolet, Harold Rubin, Victoria Hanna, Josef Sprinzak, and many others. His most recent release, Hosting Myself, from Kadima Collective Recordings is his first solo disc.
JC Jones’s current projects include the Excited Strings with cellist Yuval Mesner and guest reed player Steve Horenstein, and the Between the Strings trio with viola player Nori Jacoby and violinist Daniel Hoffman, featuring soprano sax player Ariel Shibolet. The driving force behind his work is “finding one’s space.”
Nori Jacoby, viola, studied music and composition at the Israel Arts and Science Academy in Jerusalem with Prof. Andre Hadju and Dr. Michael Wolpe. His chamber and orchestral music include “Jerusalem Dream” (2005), “Symphonic Concerto” (2003), “Lullaby" (2002), “Prayer” (1998), and “Kaprizma” (1999), which were broadcast by Israeli Radio. Jacoby has created music for the Israeli Contemporary String Quartet and the rock band The Revenge of The Tractor (for the Spring Festival, 2004). Since the Israel Festival in 2004, Nori has been performing in “Writing From Within,” an evening based on ancient Chassidic music.
In the last few years, Jacoby has been collaborating with the Israeli singer Victoria Hanna. In 2003 Nori has accompanied Hanna in the opening of The New Delhi Sacred Music Festival in the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Jacoby played his compositions and arrangements in distinguished festivals around the world, including the Singapore Art Festival (2006); the Chicago World Music Festival (2005); the Melbourne Festival (2005); the London Jewish Culture Festival (Place Theater 1999); the Krakow Dance Festival (2001); the Israel Festival (2003, 2004). Jacoby has played in ensembles of improvised music, including Between the Strings with JC Jones and Daniel Hoffman, and Mysteria, an ethnic acoustic and electronic contemporary ensemble. At the Israeli Festival (2003) Nori prompted the Israeli premiere of John Zorn’s Cobra
Daniel Hoffman, violin, a descendant of a long line of Bessarabian furriers, was born and raised near Los Angeles. In June of 2005 he moved to Israel. He started his violin studies at the age of seven, and continued his studies in Western classical music until graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in New York, whereupon he quickly turned his attentions to Eastern European Jewish folk music and formed several klezmer bands in San Francisco. In 1992, he co-founded Davka trio (now a quartet) combining Ashkenazi Jewish music with jazz and Middle-Eastern music. Davka has released five CDs of original music, including four on the Tzadik label. He also founded the Klez-X (formerly the SF Klezmer Experience) and has developed a reputation as one of the foremost experts of the Yiddish violin style, recording and performing with the top players in the field. Hoffman has received numerous composition grants, including from Meet The Composer and the NEA. He has written two new scores for the silent films “The Golem” and “Jewish Luck”. He is currently composing music for “David in Shadow and Light,” a new musical (with librettist Yehuda Hyman) based on the King David story. The musical will premiere at Theatre J in Washington DC in May of 2008.
In Israel he performs with J.C. Jones and Nory Jacoby in Between The Strings, a free music string trio, and in Trio Carpion, an Ashkenazi-roots trio performing Yiddish and Romanian vocal music and pre-war European klezmer. Hoffman currently performs in the new Jerusalem Theater Company comedy “Are You Happy Yet?” His latest releases are Davka Live and a remix of the Klez-X Harbst disc, KLZXRMX.
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