Shai Maestro interview: "Jazz is a flexible music, everything's open to interpretation and change"

There's a short passage on Human, Shai Maestro's new album for ECM, that tells a long story about the evolution of the 33 year-old Israeli-American musician's identity as a pianist, composer, and bandleader since he struck out on his own path a decade ago.

Following a pensive opening to the fifth track, 'The Thief's Dream' – in top-end piano trickles and a slowly-waltzing trumpet theme – a hurtling drum groove suddenly springs up like an unforeseen tempest. As the drums barge and bustle on, a solemn brass theme drifts above as if in a parallel dimension, until a Maestro improvisation begins to spin off the fast groove instead of the languid melody, pulling the trumpet with it in urgent squalls and boppish gyrations toward a rapturous ensemble finale. It's an astonishing maelstrom of drama, contrast, surprise and spontaneity to squeeze into a few minutes of music-making - and the leader's band – with Lima-born bassist Jorge Roeder, Israeli drummer Ofri Nehemya, and now the sensational New York trumpeter Philip Dizack – sound like one voice on it, and like they could be one of the jazz-poll favourites of the early 2020s too.

"This group is officially my band, but it isn't really," Shai Maestro says down the line from Tel Aviv, having relocated to his birthplace from New York early in the pandemic. "It's four people conversing together. Recording for ECM and Manfred Eicher has taken that process much further. I hear music in a very similar way to Manfred, I think – his values are space and air, and honesty – absolute perfection isn't one of them. The experience of working with him on The Dream Thief and now Human really informed the way we played, and the way I composed the pieces. Much more intimate than before, though for Human we also wanted to bring more energy to it, to get closer to what we do on stage."

Shai Maestro's new music might suggest the distilled wisdom of many thoughtful years on the road, but the evidence suggests he was open to the feelings that spawned it when he was barely out of high school. Maestro's promise was so striking by his late teens that he found himself launching a professional career with one of the most high-profile bandleaders on the circuit – bassist, composer, and former Chick Corea sideman Avishai Cohen, who he was introduced to at 17 by pianist Omri Mor, when Mor and Cohen were playing a small Jerusalem club. Cohen invited the teenager to his house to play, and the relationship blossomed. But if Cohen detected that his protégé was already an old soul as a Jarrett-inspired pianist and a budding composer, perhaps he also sensed the arrival of an artist of remarkable empathy for his age. The young man seemed to have sensed that too, making a decision few jazz students would, when he attended the Berklee College of Music's Summer School in 2007, but turned down the college offer of a four-year scholarship that followed from it.

It was a prescient choice. Cohen called Maestro a few weeks later to suggest that they work together. By September that year, the then 20 year-old was in the Nilento Studios in Sweden with the bassist and Mark Guiliana, the revolutionary drummer who could fluently join the polyrhythmic feel of Elvin Jones to the sounds of machine-music and drum 'n' bass. They recorded nine originals, plus the Israeli folk song 'Lo Baiom Velo Balyla' and the centuries-old Ladino anthem 'Puncha Puncha', an eclectic mix that was released as the critically-lauded Gently Disturbed.

For the next four years, Maestro's work with his mentor would produce three more popular albums, take him all over the world, and eventually overlap with the launch of his solo career. But by 2010, the 23 year-old pianist, now a Brooklyn resident, detected the sounds of a music of his own in a New York practice session with widely-experienced Israeli drummer Ziv Ravitz and Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder, and the three went on to record the album Shai Maestro Trio for the French label Laborie Jazz, with an all-original repertoire save for one wistful Bulgarian folk song 'Kalimankou Denkou'. The set presented a mix of American-inspired jazz and lyrical traditional music (drawn, on subsequent ventures, from Europe and the Middle East) that Maestro would return to again and again. Well received by audiences and the media alike, Shai Maestro Trio soon brought the band a busy touring schedule, sharing concert stages with some of jazz's biggest names.

"Avishai's music was beautiful," Maestro unhesitatingly says, "but I had come to feel it was time to start my own thing. But for a while what we did was quite premeditated and structured, it was a way of playing out of Avishai's world, which of course had been very important in my life. Then sometime in 2013 we were playing a concert in France – Jorge Roeder was on bass and Ziv Ravitz was the drummer at the time – and an interesting thing happened. We started messing around with the music, changing the intros, departing from the structures more. As it was happening, I got scared I had messed up the show. Then afterwards, when people were coming up to us to buy records, we found a lot of them were saying those parts of the concert were the parts they enjoyed most. So we thought, 'OK, let's try that direction'. It felt like we were going in the footsteps of Wayne Shorter, letting the music be looser and more unpredictable."

Shai Maestro [photo: Gabriel Baharlia]

Between 2013 and 2016, the trio albums Road to Ithaca, Untold Stories and The Stone Skipper took the group through a steep learning curve but a growing following joined them on it – from a cinematic postbop inspired by Homer's The Odyssey (to remind his son that the richness of a journey could be more important than the destination, Maestro's father had given him the book when his touring career began), to a more fusion-oriented feel with The Stone Skipper, using electronics, and singers including Gretchen Parlato and the German-born classical/jazz crossover vocalist Theo Bleckmann. And that chance Bleckmann connection opened a door that would lead on to some of Shai Maestro's most subtly eloquent work as a leader. The pianist played alongside drummer John Hollenbeck, guitarist Ben Monder and others on Elegy, Bleckmann's 2017 ECM debut, his soft chordwork and restrained embellishments subtly tracing lines through the singer's broad repertoire – and the session brought Maestro into the orbit of Manfred Eicher and ECM. Eicher soon invited the pianist to make his own music for the iconic label, and in April, 2018 Maestro was in Lugano's Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI concert hall to record The Dream Thief, with his long-time bass alter ego Jorge Roeder, and a virtuosic new young Israeli drummer and former Avishai Cohen sideman, Ofri Nehemya.

"I'd known Ofri for maybe eight or nine years, but I remember the effect he had when he moved to New York four years ago," Maestro observes. "He was joining together a fusion world that came from drummers like Dennis Chambers to an approach that was like a 21st century Tony Williams. It was fascinating to hear the relationship developing between him and Jorge, who hadn't played together before. You hear them discovering parallel processes – 'where do we feel the beat? On top? Behind?' – and then when they're comfortable with that, the energy develops."

For his ECM leadership debut with The Dream Thief, Maestro played the classic 'These Foolish Things' unaccompanied, and imparted a palpably autobiographical tenderness to Israel singer-songwriter Matti Caspi's 'My Second Childhood', while Nehemya drove a showcase for the group's hard-grooving power on the exhilarating 'New River, New Water'. But the most haunting track was 'What Else Needs To Happen', with evocative samples of Barack Obama speeches on gun control threading through a poignant elegy inspired by tragedy in the life of sometime Maestro playing colleague Jimmy Greene, the fine Connecticut saxophonist whose six year-old daughter Ana died in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. The reasons for Maestro's inclusion of that were personal and deep, but the piece also touched on his preccupation with the ways in which a classic jazz-piano trio can be the core of a bigger and more mysterious musical universe.

"I've always thought in a cinematic way in music," Maestro says. "I know that when you add another voice, you open up a whole universe. That happened on The Dream Thief, because we included samples of Barack Obama's voice, and it wasn't just adding another sound to the mix, it was something I felt very strongly about because I knew Jimmy, and could only imagine what he and those parents went through."

On Human Shai Maestro enlists another memorably eloquent voice in trumpeter Philip Dizack – a friend and fellow sideman from countless New York gigs for other leaders over the years, and an obvious choice to augment the trio. Dizack's segues of tranquil melody and multiphonic tone-bends, or rhythm-vaulting free jazz turning to plaintively sombre lyricism crucially contribute to turning Maestro's group into an ensemble that sounds reborn – alongside piano-led pieces like the gospelly 'Hank and Charlie' (a tribute to Hank Jones' and Charlie Haden's duets on the spirituals repertoire of Steal Away), and the rapturous, percussion-driven 'Prayer'.

"When Philip joined the group, I found myself taking more of a back seat in the ensemble sound," Maestro says. "He knows so much more than playing a trumpet improvisation or a melody line alone – he knows how to accompany, he can whisper as well as shout, he can position himself in the foreground, or in the out-of-focus part, like 3D. I'm not a religious person but I am sensitive to when music's no longer only about the notes but the intention behind them, and I've felt that happening with this band. I hear it in Beethoven, Miles, some kinds of hip hop, music written for worship, or inspired by spiritual traditions. I heard it when I made my real transition to jazz after a classical-music background at around 15 - when I was working in the garden with my dad, and some music started coming from the house that made me drop everything and run inside to listen – and it was Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert album, which my mum had put on. It was amazing enough just to hear it, but when I found out it was improvised it completely blew my mind. I thought, 'I've got to figure out how to do this', and every record I bought after that opened up a new universe – Bill Evans, Bud Powell, going back and back into jazz.".

Now, those investigations have taken Shai Maestro to places he could never have imagined on that day in the garden with his parents – to Tokyo's Metropolitan Theatre in August 2019, for instance, where he was invited to premiere jazz/classical composer Miho Hazama’s first piano concerto as well as perform his own music with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra; and in ventures currently in the pipeline, toward a parallel career for the cinematically-imaginative pianist in orchestral writing, and scoring for movies. But jazz always heats the core of Maestro's roving imagination.

"Over the years with jazz groups, I found that relationships in that setting evolve the way all relationships do," Maestro says. "If they work they become mixes of deep stuff, bits of shallow everyday stuff, disagreements, discovering each other's sense of humour, all those things.

"Jazz is a flexible music, everything's open to interpretation and change. That's always what's wonderful about it."

This interview originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today