A review of this year's finest.

Gilad Hekselman. (photo credit:Courtesy)

Gilad Hekselman has come of age. While that may sound a mite condescending, or even presumptuous – depending on whether you still consider the Israeli guitarist a youngster or a seasoned professional at the age of 32 – his latest release, Homes, exudes a sense of maturity, on both a personal and musical level.

Hekselman is no newcomer to the scene. He has been a resident of New York for over a decade and, besides mixing it up with the best of them on stage and in the recording studio, and performing at festivals and venues across the world, he has not stinted on his own output either. Homes is his fifth album in a matter of just nine years. That’s pretty good going by any standard. The heartening thing is that Hekselman is not just into maintaining a high market profile.

Judging by his performance on Homes, he also actually has something of value to say.

His brothers in creative arms on the record are bassist Joe Martin, with Marcus Gilmore featuring on all but one of the tracks (“Last Train Home”) on drums. Seasoned fellow instrumentalist Jeff Ballard is behind the set on that one, with both drummers in action on “Cosmic Patience” and “Keedee.”

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Hekselman clearly does not tend toward the “falafel jazz” approach. There is a tendency among some – albeit highly talented – Israeli jazz artists to settle firmly into a pretty groove mode without offering too much in the way of creative endeavor. While there is some gorgeous ornamentation and some mellifluous lines on Homes – such as the delectable “Home E-Minor” solo acoustic guitar vignette – the album is shot through with intriguing departures.

There is judicious utilization of sound manipulation, with Hekselman embracing a wide swath of textures of colors, even dipping into the odd splash of distortion, while his sidemen keep the ship steadily on course. “Cosmic Patience,” the longest cut on the album, has an ethereal side to it which fuses naturally with the tender substratum.

Eight of the dozen tracks are originals, with the others including Bud Powell’s mid-1950s bebop gem “Parisian Thoroughfare,” and “Samba Em Preludio” by Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell. The latter, along with many other Latin numbers, was Hebraized in the 1980s, recorded by Matti Caspi and renamed “Samba for Two.” Hekselman’s street level-earned maturity shines through here again, and if he does reel off the odd slice of headline-grabbing finesse it is devoid of gratuitous showmanship.

Increasingly over the past decade or so, Israeli jazz musicians have tended to dip into the Israeli Songbook for inspiration.

Homes features just one locally manufactured number – Caspi’s “Dove Song.” Typically, Hekselman takes a relaxed approach to the theme, conveying the melody and the spirit of the song in an impressively understated but nonetheless convincing manner.

read more: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Jazz-CD-reviews-439180

Gilad Hekselman goes about ....

REVIEWS

 All About Jazz
Similar to the work of Pat Metheny and Antonio Sanchez, Gilad Hekselman goes about his determined development of notes inside the fury. Add Turner on the title track, and the guitarist brings brazen bits of John Scofield-ish jazz-rock sound to the piece. Turner smooths each advance with his calming voice.

Learn Jazz Standards
Tunes such as the title track This Just In, demonstrate the extraordinary chemistry between Mark Turner and Gilad Hekselman. Their sounds blend well together and both musicians bring so much creativity to the table. Gilad Hekselman takes a powerful, atmospheric solo with a hint of overdrive to back his lines.

JazzGazeta
That deep connection is evident throughout This Just In, which is the result of Gilad Hekselman’s long history with his sidemen. Martin has played on all of Gilad Hekselman’s records, and their relationship dates back to the guitarist’s arrival in New York from his native Israel in 2004. Gilmore joined for Gilad Hekselman’s second release, Words Unspoken, in 2008, and Turner contributed his immediately recognizable voice to Hearts Wide Open.

Israeli NYC-Based Guitarist Gilad Hekselman.

 All About Jazz.
Similar to the work of Pat Metheny and Antonio Sanchez, Gilad Hekselman goes about his determined development of notes inside the fury. Add Turner on the title track, and the guitarist brings brazen bits of John Scofield-ish jazz-rock sound to the piece. Turner smooths each advance with his calming voice.

Learn Jazz Standards 
Tunes such as the title track This Just In, demonstrate the extraordinary chemistry between Mark Turner andGilad Hekselman. Their sounds blend well together and both musicians bring so much creativity to the table.Gilad Hekselman takes a powerful, atmospheric solo with a hint of overdrive to back his lines.

JazzGazeta
That deep connection is evident throughout This Just In, which is the result of Gilad Hekselman’s long history with his sidemen. Martin has played on all of Gilad Hekselman’s records, and their relationship dates back to the guitarist’s arrival in New York from his native Israel in 2004. Gilmore joined for Gilad Hekselman’s second release, Words Unspoken, in 2008, and Turner contributed his immediately recognizable voice to Hearts Wide Open.
Read more: http://the.rvj.pm

New Albums by Daniela Mercury and Gilad Hekselman

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

DANIELA MERCURY

The Brazilian songwriter and singer Daniela Mercury titled her latest album, “Canibália” (“Cannibalism”), to allude to the 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” (“Cannibal Manifesto”), a defining work of Brazilian modernism by the poet Oswald de Andrade, which praises Brazilian culture for devouring and digesting other cultures. That’s a declaration of serious ambition that the album lives up to.

Ms. Mercury expands on concepts that have run through her career by carrying regional rhythms (particularly those of her home state, Bahia) into up-to-the-minute pop, embracing Brazil’s ethnic and cultural hybrids (particularly Afro-Brazilian culture, although Ms. Mercury is white), remembering the past while transforming it. “Canibália” is smart, euphoric, time-tangling Brazilian pop: as traditional as a samba band or a carnival beat at one moment, an excursion into electronics, hip-hop or jazz the next. Although the album has misfires, including its two English-language forays, they are outnumbered by delights.

Ms. Mercury and her producers melt down genres and eras. “Oyá por Nós” (invoking the Yoruba deity of wind and storms, Oyá), written and sung by Ms. Mercury and the Bahian powerhouse Margareth Menezes, shifts between percussion that hints at Afro-Brazilian Candomblé ritual and programming that gallops toward a drum-and-bass dance club.

“O Que É Que a Baiana Tem” (“What Is It That the Bahian Woman Has?”), an electronic duet with Carmen Miranda from 1939, doesn’t backdate Ms. Mercury; it pulls Miranda into a barrage of added percussion and horns, with funk guitar bubbling underneath. “A Vida É Um Carnaval” (“Life Is a Carnival”), a Portuguese translation of a Celia Cruz hit, mingles samba, merengue saxophones, jazz chords, a rapped exhortation and keyboards that hint at African thumb piano — a brilliantly plotted, insouciantly executed pan-Afro-Latin romp.

Although “Canibália” appeared in Brazil in 2009, its United States release was apparently awaiting Ms. Mercury’s North American tour, which starts on Oct. 7 in New York at the Best Buy Theater. The delay provided a bonus: the North American package also includes a DVD of Ms. Mercury’s concert on Dec. 31 for hundreds of thousands of people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, in which she not just belts new and old songs but also dances through them alongside the Balé Folclórico da Bahia. by John Pareles and Ben Ratliff

GILAD HEKSELMAN

Gilad Hekselman, a young Israeli musician living in New York, has become important over the last five years — if not yet to jazz listeners in general, at least to the serious-minded subculture of jazz-guitar students. In that time he’s performed almost constantly with his trio and guest players at the West Village clubs Smalls and Fat Cat, and one can tell: he plays the long sweeps of notes, harmonically mobile and emotionally humid, that have grown like vines in those places.

Fifteen years ago he probably would have been signed to a major label. You might already have read about him in a men’s magazine, or seen his face on a display rack at Tower Records. But the jazz business is more modest and artist-directed now. Since 2007 he has made two fine records (“SplitLife” and “Words Unspoken”) without much notice. His third, “Hearts Wide Open,” brings a better group sound, better tunes, better soloing. This is where you, the listener, should come in.

Mr. Hekselman’s rhythm section includes the bassist Joe Martin and the drummer Marcus Gilmore. They’ve been performing these original songs for a while, and they know their dynamics, supporting quiet music with authority. (Mr. Gilmore, in particular, rushes into the available spaces like water, complementing the guitar’s rhythmic shapes with his own.) The tenor-saxophonist Mark Turner plays on most of the album too, and opens hidden rooms of his talent; on the second half of the track “Understanding,” the music turns almost gospel, and an even-tempered musician goes credibly gutbucket.

Crucially, this record isn’t only understandable as jazz-guitar music, a maze of speed and soloing. Some of these tracks — particularly “Hazelnut Eyes,” his high mark so far, with its beguiling chorus that helps seven and a half minutes fly by; the folklike “Flower”; and the short, free-rhythm “Will You Let It?” — are actually songs, singable, playable on other instruments. They are melodies that stay with you.

He’s also found a further refinement in his improvising: at places, among all the displays of study and practice, he’s able to detach from a song’s chord changes and the rhythm and play more freely, in a manner that suggests Paul Bley or Ornette Coleman (whose melody for “Blues Connotation” he keeps gesturing toward in “The Bucket Kicker”). He’s on a good road, and he’s still moving. by BEN RATLIFF >>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/arts/music/new-music-by-daniela-mercury-and-gilad-hekselman.html?_r=1