The Absolute Sound
Issue #168 / January 2007

Omer Avital / The Ancient Art of Giving / Smalls 14
Avital and Luke Kaven producers

**** four stars – music
**** four stars - sonics

Despite releasing only a handful of albums, Omer Avital is already being mentioned in the same sentence with Charles Mingus and William Parker. Like the latter, Avital is a jazz bassist who leads his own groups and composes his own music. His force-of-nature attack on this instrument combines power, articulation and musicality.

Avital’s 2005 Asking No Permission was recorded at Smalls in New York City in 1996 and featured four saxophonists blowing against Avital’s bass and Ali Jackson’s drums. Jackson and tenor saxist Mark Turner are the only holdovers the The Ancient Art Of Giving, recorded at New York’s Fat Cat in January 2005. Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen completes this quintet’s front line, and pianist Aaron Goldberg (Avital’s collaborator in the OAM Trio with drummer/percussionist Marc Miralta_ enriches the rhythm section. Avital’s originals are informed by American blues as well as Middle Eastern, North African, and Spanish motifs, bringing a contemporary, globally conscious sensibility to a classic form that others wear like straightjackets.

The bassist’s solo chops stand out on the absorbing 15-minute centerpiece “Ras Abu-Galum” (for Elvin Jones)” and the two-minute “Bass Introduction” to the closer, “Yes!” Avital’s playing is riveting throughout, and so is that of every member of this exciting ensemble. As strong as the individual personalities may be, what impresses most are the written and spontaneously generated harmonies reminiscent of mid-1950s Mingus and early 60’s Oliver Nelson.

Luke Kaven is a wizard at location recording. The music has a warm, intimate live ambience (you can hear the audience at a respectable distance), the instruments have clearly defined physical presences in realistic relationship to one another, and the lows, mids, and highs are democratically and robustly represented, without an artificial exaggeration.

Although Avital’s itinerary has been mostly confined to his native Israel, New York City, and European festivals, if he keeps putting out recordings like this, he will soon be a household name.

-- Derk Richardson