Atar Trio / Chamber Jazz

chamber jazz

jazz & blues in chamber music

Is there such thing as "high" music, as opposed to "low" music? Is "classical" music always high? And is light, popular music always low? And where does the wide world of jazz fit into all that? Does the new cultural era blur the distinction between high and low, and is that distinction still legitimate?

This program by the Atar Trio chamber ensemble explores these and other questions in an innovative musical performance. Many composers, mainly in the 20th century, work simultaneously in different, and sometimes distant, genres creating music for the concert hall light music for cabarets, musical theater and even scoring films. For example, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein and Dimitri Shostakovich, with his "Jazz Suite" and the music that he wrote for films after immigrating to the United States. Many jazz ensembles adopt classical music as musical material for jazz improvisation. The Atar Piano Trio, a classical chamber ensemble, is rising to the challenge and presents an entire program of music for the concert stage, written in the spirit of light music, jazz and blues.

The meeting point between chamber music and jazz is the real-time dialogue between the performers during live concerts. In chamber music, improvisation is reflected by the exchange of ideas, expression and interpretation, whereas in jazz musical materials are invented during the performance, and always in dialogue between the musicians.

In honor of this program launch, we commissioned a new piece from the Israeli composer and Landau Prize laureate Yitzhak Yedid. The piece, dedicated to the Atar Trio, will present contemporary original jazz and has its premiere performance during the upcoming season.

At the center of the program is Paul Schoenfield's colorful "Café Music, "a piano trio that presents "high" and "low" musical material side-by-side and explores the relationship between them. The piece was influenced by the light music of the 1940s and 50s, jazz, blues and klezmer music, all within a traditional classical form. Also on the program is a piece by Israeli composer Daniel Shalit ,"Divertimento," a trio by Jan Freidlin including improvisation segments and music by Chick Corea, George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel.