Sunday, April 16, 2017

Fine Musicians and Personal Growth

I have probably met more accomplished musicians than any other kind of artist, as teachers and conductors, and I have even had the privilege of playing with musicians so much better than I, that I am humbled.
Recently my wife and I heard one of these, the young Israeli pianist, Omri Mor, play in a trio with the bassist Gilad Abro and the Andalusian violinist Elad Levi. They were performing a unique kind of Andalusian/jazz fusion, and I don't think any three musicians could play any better than they did.
During the years when the late Arnie Lawrence (about whom I wrote a book) was giving free musical workshops, which I attended as often as I could, Omri, who was then 15 or so, used to come, and, even then, he was an astonishingly gifted musician. Since then he has finished a degree at the conservatory in Jerusalem and gone on to master, in addition to jazz, Andalusian music (and who knows what else).
Last Thursday night we heard Omri again, in Ashdod, playing with the Andalusian orchestra in a concert dedicated to the late Moroccan Jewish composer Sami Almaghribi. That's where I took the photograph I've attached.
Before the concert in Ashdod we attended a small symposium about Almaghribi, led mainly by Edwin Seroussi, a professor of ethnomusicology. I'm glad we attended that, because we are not exactly well-informed about the music of North Africa, and it helped us understand what we later heard. Seroussi spoke briefly about Almaghribi's stint as a popular musician in Morocco, before he became a cantor in Montreal, saying the obvious: musicians have to make a living.
It's probably always a matter of compromise between playing the kind of music you absolutely love to play and playing the kind of music people will pay you to play - a compromise in all of the arts, of course.
Omri is largely a brilliant improvising musician, with a phenomenal musical memory, and Andalusian music, like jazz, demands improvisation. To the degree that musical performance is self-expression, improvised performance is that even more so. Though, of course, the improviser must remain within the parameters of the musical genre with which he's working. The greatest improvisers expand those parameters by their playing, and sometimes their innovations are rejected by traditionalists.
Of course performers of classical music, who strive to play every note the composer wrote, and only those notes, must also be expressive of themselves, perhaps the way a great actor, playing a part, is, at the same time, also expressing herself.
The challenge for a gifted young musician like Omri, as well as for Sami Almaghribi when he was a young musician, is to keep growing and expanding as an artist. And we ordinary people, who aren't super-talented in any one field, also must keep stimulating ourselves and growing.

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