At International Guitar Night, Israeli-Canadian musician Itamar Erez joins three other superpickers on-stage
Australian classical virtuoso Stephanie Jones, Spanish flamenco master Jesus Guerrero, and Montreal-based jazz performer Jocelyn Gould also featured in the guitar showcase
Itamar Erez.
Massey Theatre presents International Guitar Night 2023 on January 28 from 7:30 to 9:30 pm
IT’S HARD TO locate Itamar Erez’s music in any particular place or time, other than here and now. May Song, his most recent CD, opens with the Israeli-Canadian musician’s unaccompanied piano, first “prepared” to sound like mysterious bells, and then playing an enigmatic phrase that could be from the Middle East or perhaps from Eastern Europe. The work’s title, “Chant”, points toward some kind of connection to cantorial singing, but once Jeff Gammon’s upright bass and Kevin Romain’s drums come in we’re obviously in jazz terrain. Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans are the first names that came to this listener’s mind: Evans for Erez’s elegant articulation, Jarrett for his use of an almost folksong-like chord progression. And yet there are neo-Baroque trills and flourishes that suggest more than a casual acquaintance with early music and the classical repertoire.
Four minutes into the record, the ears are intensely engaged—and what follows rewards that initial attention.
Up next is “Hourglass”, which introduces guest musician François Houle on clarinet, but just as soon as the track slips into a familiar modern-jazz sound Erez introduces a circular ostinato in his left hand, over which he and Houle trace an elegantly ascending melody. “Catch Me If You Can”, with its relatively simple left-hand harmonies and upbeat right-hand tune, splits the difference between the Brazilian Tropicália movement and Vince Guaraldi’s pop-jazz; “March” is moody and grey enough, in a subtle way, for any ECM release. And then the title song returns us to the world of folk music or perhaps Northern European church music; it’s almost a secular hymn, crying out for lyrics about faith and endurance. Downbeat though it might be, it’s simultaneously lovely and uplifting.
Throughout, Erez shows himself to be a sensitive and intuitive pianist, always free of showy excess and careful to allow space in which his bandmates can shine equally brightly.
But wait! Piano, piano, piano. Aren’t we talking about the Itamar Erez who’s one of the four superpickers showcased in this year’s edition of the annual International Guitar Night tour coming to Massey Theatre?
Well, yes, we are. And that’s just one more sign of the diversity of Erez’s interests and abilities. Although it’s undeniably ironic that an International Guitar Night invitee doesn’t play a note of guitar on his most recent recording, Erez is soon going to change that. His next recording, due for release this spring, is an entirely piano-free undertaking, consisting purely of improvised duets with Persian-Canadian percussionist Hamin Honari.
Erez doesn’t deny that it’s unusual for any musician to be equally skilled on two separate instruments, especially instruments that make such radically different demands on a performer’s physicality.
“I think I’m a different musician on both instruments,” he says in a telephone interview from his Vancouver home. “There is something about the piano, because it’s such a… Everything is possible on that instrument! You can play so many notes. The guitar is kind of more limited, which is also the beauty of the instrument. You know, on the piano I sound different. I feel like I’m more free improvising on the piano than on the guitar, and there’s more harmony in my music when I play the piano. But, yes, if I don’t play the piano for a week, or the guitar, I’m really suffering. It’s pretty hard.”
Erez doesn’t see his two modes of musical expression as incompatible. “I feel a bit freer on the piano, or have a little bit more expression on the piano,” he notes. “But I also take things from the piano for the guitar. I try to play things on the guitar that I wrote on the piano. The music that I write on the piano tends to be more harmonic, more jazzy; on the guitar it’s more modal and maybe more influenced by world music than jazz.”
As earlier, more guitar-centric records like 2019’s Mi Alegria make clear, Erez’s music for six-string is, naturally enough, rooted in a Mediterranean sensibility—if, that is, one extends the boundaries of the Mediterranean world to include the whole of the Iberian peninsula, the Caribbean, and the Portuguese-speaking parts of South America. Echoes of bossa nova, flamenco, Portuguese fado, Cuban music, and the North African oud can be heard in his compositions for guitar, and he has a marked preference for the nylon-string instrument, a Spanish invention, over its steel-strung North American cousin.
Stephanie Jones.
Jesus Guerrero.
In the context of his International Guitar Night performance, this puts him in good company. So, too, do Australian classical virtuoso Stephanie Jones and Spanish flamenco master Jesus Guerrero; only Montreal-based jazz performer Jocelyn Gould will opt for both amplification and metal strings. The four have already discussed ways to bridge their stylistic differences in the duo and quartet performances that normally mark the long-running guitar showcase, as Erez explains.
Jocelyn Gould. Photo by Simeon Rusnak
“We’ve been in touch mostly in Zoom and WhatsApp, so we will meet a day before our first show, in Victoria, and we’ll finalize things then,” he says. “But we’ve already discussed it. There will be some duets, combinations of all the duets. I’ll play a tune with Jocelyn, a jazz tune; with Jesus, the flamenco player, we’ll do a Jobim tune; and with Stephanie, we’ll do something by Marco Pereira, the Brazilian guitarist-composer. And as a quartet we’ll do one of my pieces from Mi Alegria: the opening track, ‘Requinto’. The guys are learning that, and we’ll do a Stevie Wonder tune, and probably a couple more if the audience wants an encore.”
With so much talent on-stage, there’s no doubt listeners will.
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