Ayelet Rose Gottlieb evokes the awe of the moon with 13 Lunar Meditations
Show brings in a large, eclectic cast of musicians who will spread from Music on Main’s Modulus Festival over to Coastal Jazz’s improvised IronFest III series
Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s song cycle 13 Lunar Meditations: Summoning the Witches is a deeply sophisticated exploration of the night sky, an open-hearted attempt to bridge conflict-ridden cultures, and an ode to her child.
Music on Main presents 13 Lunar Meditations: Summoning the Witches at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on November 5. IronFest III takes place at Ironworks from November 3 to 5. Jay Clayton will give a free vocal workshop sponsored by the New Orchestra Workshop Society at the Roundhouse on November 3 from 1 to 2:30 pm
AYELET ROSE GOTTLIEB’S song cycle 13 Lunar Meditations: Summoning the Witches is both a deeply sophisticated exploration of the night sky and an open-hearted attempt to bridge conflict-ridden cultures. But at its heart is a child-like sense of wonder that’s rare in the international avant-garde.
We’re not speaking metaphorically.
On the line from her Montreal home, the Jerusalem-born former Vancouver resident explains that she while she has always been in awe of the moon, it wasn’t until after the birth of her daughter that earth’s satellite began to play a totemic role in her life and art.
“My little girl had quite a lot of physical challenges as a baby,” Gottlieb reveals. “She had to undergo some surgeries and some difficult things which resulted in her having a lot of anxiety around change, and the way I tried to help her overcome it became this ritual that we developed around the moon. We would go out every night looking for the moon, and she made up this little song where she just sings ‘Moon, moon, there you are. Moon, moon, I love you.’ And we would do that every single night; we would sing ‘Where are you?’ and when we would find it we would sing ‘There you are!’ So the moon opened the door for our conversations about the nature of life—that we have to embrace the fact that things change, because they do, and yet at the same time the world, and life itself, is reliable. You can trust that life continues and that there’s a cyclical nature to things; that things end and return and grow and shrink and evolve, but also stay consistent.
“It became a very visual thing that I could show her,” the singer and composer continues, “and that allowed her to release some anxiety and to grow her trust in her actual existence on this planet.”
Jazz legend Jay Clayton improvises over at IronFest. Photo by Andreas Scherrer
Gottlieb’s daughter will be in Vancouver when her mother unveils the latest iteration of 13 Lunar Meditations at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre as part of Music on Main’s annual Modulus Festival, and her voice will be heard. Other contributors include an exceptional band, including violinist Eylem Basaldi, guitarist Aram Bajakian, bassist Stéphane Diamantakiou, and drummer Ivan Bamford; joining Gottlieb at the microphone will be 81-year-old jazz legend Jay Clayton and the Luna Choir, a talent-packed vocal ensemble under the direction of musician and Roundhouse programmer DB Boyko.
Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Israelis, Ukrainians, Americans, Canadians, senior citizens, and the very young: this is a diverse cast indeed, made even more so by the poets who have been enlisted to provide texts. These include the 13th-century Sufi mystic Shams-i Tebrizi; the late Mahmoud Darwish; and Palestinian-American writer Naomi Shihab Nye. Many, like Gottlieb herself, have grown up in contested terrain, but all have gazed in wonder at the same moon.
“It’s not that I go out looking for that, but it’s also something that I am preoccupied with, being from Jerusalem,” Gottlieb says. “I think about those topics a lot, and I have strong feelings about them, so in a way I am drawn to musicians that have a shared experience with me of experiencing our world through those prisms. But the connection with Aram, for instance, doesn’t start from the fact that he’s of Armenian descent, and that he’s the grandchild of Armenian refugees. But I know this about him; I know this is part of the work that he does as an artist and as a person. So I acknowledge that when I write for him. It’s more about acknowledging that than about choosing him because of that, if that makes sense.”
One intriguing aspect of having this large and eclectic cast of musicians in Vancouver is that the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society is partnering with Music on Main to feature some of the 13 Lunar Meditations performers in smaller, fully improvised configurations on the last night of its three-day IronFest festival.
Just how improvised will these sessions be? Well, when we reached Clayton at her New York City home, the pioneering singer wasn’t even sure of who she’d be playing with. (For the record, it will be pianist Róisín Adams and drummer Jen Yakamovich, both up-and-coming local performers.) What kind of preparation does it take, we ask, to make music with people you’ve only just met and perhaps never heard?
“Well, you live 80 years,” Clayton replies. “That’s how you get yourself prepped. You just live.”
It’s the same approach she’ll take to 13 Lunar Meditations, she adds. “I’m in it mostly free. In other words, Ayelet has all these different kinds of moon poems and environments and dances, so I have to compose music on the spot that goes with that. And for me, that’s where I live, because I’ve been doing it since the ’60s. And it’s an honour, really!”
Gottlieb—who counts Clayton as a friend, a mentor, and a primary inspiration—will get her own spur-of-the-minute showcase at IronFest. Performing with Bajakian, harpist Elisa Thorn, cellist Peggy Lee, and percussionist Hamin Honari, she’ll set aside her scores and bring out her best antennae.
“It really feels nice to do this set that’s really planned out and thought through, and then go right from there into playing completely free improvised music in a different formation,” she says. “I think that’s going to be a really exciting evening for us, to kind of jump from one mindset to another.”
Gottlieb cautions, however, that the lines between freedom and structure are not as rigid as they might appear. “For me, as a composer, my sensibilities are very much informed by my also being an improviser,” she says. “And also when I’m improvising, my composer self is very activated. I very much think about form, even when I’m improvising. I compose on the spot, and it’s not random; there’s always a compositional inner thread in my improvisation.”
More important, she continues, is creating a safe and playful space where she and her creative partners can flourish, regardless of where they come from. “It feels like I’m practicing making the world that I want to live in,” she says. “And that’s my favourite thing.”
Related Articles
