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Yotam Silberstein’s new album is titled The Village.
EMRA ISLEK
YOTAM SILBERSTEIN
Burning Brightly
Since moving to New York in 2005 to
attend The New School, where he studied
with esteemed six-string vets Vic Juris,
Peter Bernstein, Adam Rogers and Jonathan
Kreisberg, Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein
has made quite a mark on the Big Apple scene.
He has impressed fans and critics alike
with his prodigious facility in the service of
jazz elders Monty Alexander, James Moody,
Jimmy Heath and Paquito D’Rivera, as well
as his contemporaries Brian Charette, Spike
Wilner and Antonio Hart.
On his fifth album as a leader, The Village
(Jazz & People), the Tel Aviv native is
joined by pianist and former teacher Aaron
Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer
Gregory Hutchinson on an eclectic program
that runs the gamut from delicate ballads
(“October,” “Nocturno”) to uptempo burners
(“The Village,” his paean to Greenwich Village
based on the changes to the jazz standard “It’s
Alright With Me”).
The program also contains Brazilianflavored
fare (the baiao “Parabens”), along
with renditions of tunes by Argentine pianist
Carlos Aguirre (“Milonga Gris”), Brazilian
mandolinist Jacob do Bandolim (“O Voo Da
Mosca”) and jazz pianist Lennie Tristano
(“Lennie-Bird,” his contrafact on “How High
the Moon”).
He dedicates the flamenco-flavored
“Albayzin” to the late guitarist Paco de Lucía
and nonchalantly blows through a torrent of
shifting chords on the aptly named “Changes,”
his answer to John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”
Despite Silberstein’s deep, solid foundation
in jazz—he was a Thelonious Monk
Competition finalist in 2005—he made a
conscious effort to stretch into other musical
territories on his new release: “On this album,
I was able to bring together all my different
influences, including music from the Middle
East, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Argentina,
Uruguay and, of course, jazz and blues, into
a unique, coherent voice.”
The first music that Silberstein thoroughly
immersed himself in back in Tel Aviv was
jazz. “I was really lucky because I had a great
teacher in high school named Amit Golan,”
he recalled. “He was a pianist who came back
from New York after graduating from the first
class of The New School, along with Peter
Bernstein, Brad Mehldau, Larry Goldings and
all those guys. He became a very important
figure in my life and for a lot of other Israeli
musicians. This guy was an encyclopedia of
jazz, especially music from the ’50s and ’60s.
So the first week that I got together with him,
he gave me a cassette tape, which had Grant
Green on one side and Kenny Burrell and Wes
Montgomery on the other side. And he just
said, ‘Check it out. Start transcribing and we’ll
take it from there.’ So that was a great entry
point for me.”
By age 21, Silberstein had won the coveted
Israeli Jazz Player of the Year honor, which
led to his excellent debut album, 2003’s The
Arrival, and subsequent tours of Europe and
the Middle East. He arrived in New York at age
25 on the heels of impressing the Thelonious
Monk Competition judges with his cleantoned,
fleet-fingered burn.
His sophomore release, 2009’s Next Page
(Posi-Tone), garnered much critical acclaim,
and he followed it up with two outings on the
JLP label, 2010’s Resonance and 2011’s Brasil,
the latter featuring special guests D’Rivera
(clarinet), Toninho Horta (acoustic guitar),
Claudio Roditi (trumpet) and Roy Hargrove
(flugelhorn). And Silberstein burns brightly
alongside colleagues Goldberg, Rogers and
Hutchinson on The Village, his most fully realized
recording to date.
“We’ve been playing together for almost 10
years,” Silberstein said of his gifted sidemen,
“so it’s not a pickup band. It feels like a band to
me, almost like a family.” —Bill Milkowski
20 DOWNBEAT FEBRUARY 2017