Noa Fort Releases a Calm, Optimistic, Gorgeously Purposeful Piano Jazz Album

Over the past decade or so, pianist/singer Noa Fort has built a distinctive, individualistic body of jazz that embraces both avant garde surprise and classical melodicism. Her latest album Everyday Actions – streaming at Bandcamp – is the high point in her career so far. The world may have been plagued by unprecedented horrors since March of last year, but Fort’s gentle, irrepressible optimism pervades this record, even in moments of darkness.

The opening number, Endless Tea Party is a nocturne, just Fort’s calm, airy vocalese and a solo piano theme that she builds to a rather solemn neoromantic minimalism, a recurrent dynamic throughout the rest of the record. The band – trumpeter Josh Deutsch, bassist Dan Loomis and drummer Ronen Itzik – join Fort in The Stories We Tell, a coyly circling, shuffling number with one of her funniest lyrics and some wry piano/trumpet jousting, Deutsch playing good cop to Fort’s devious sprite.

She returns to the serene/somber dichotomy in Tunnels, an expansive solo number grounded by murky piano modalities: Sara Serpa‘s work comes to mind. The optimistic bounce in Fort’s piano matches the cheer in her vocalese in another solo number, the brief Home Search.

Fort and the band slowly waft through the album’s title track, a tone poem of sorts, Itzik patrolling the perimeter with his mallets. Rovno, a steady, stately, rising and falling solo piano rainy-day tableau, has echoes of both Erik Satie and Keith Jarrett as well as a Broadway tune that John Coltrane made famous.

Song For a New Year, a jazz waltz, is literally a song without words, Fort and Deutsch handing off to each other through its klezmer-tinged phrasing. Deutsch’s spare resonance lingers over Fort’s brooding cascades and the rhythm section’s, muted rumbling ambience in a second tone poem, Deeping. Fort winds up the record solo with the unhurried, optimistically lilting Natures

Fun fact: Fort comes from a talented family which includes another individualistic jazz pianist, her sister Anat Fort.

Advertisement

An Uneasy Treat From Noa Fort and Vinnie Sperrazza

The new short album Small Cities by multi-keyboardist Noa Fort and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza – streaming at Bandcamp – is a real change of pace for both of them because it’s so minimalist. The centerpiece, Only Happy When I’m Haunted, is the real showstopper here. Bookended by a wry drum solo, and a final, playful vocal-and drum-tune, it features Fort on what sounds like an old Yamaha organ instead of her usual piano. And it’s creepy, with an almost-unhinged tension similar to Serena Jost’s improvisational work in a completely diffferent context.

All proceeds of purchases go to Planned Parenthood.

Twin Peaks Chorales and a Mysterious Ritual From Mary Prescott at Roulette

A jubilant howl emanated from the dressing room last night at Roulette seconds before the nine members of Mary Prescott’s ensemble took the stage for her hauntingly immersive performance piece Loup Lunaire. It began rather coyly but quickly took a much darker turn. Part choral suite, part dance performance, the choreography was every bit as compelling yet as enigmatic as the music, to the point where it wouldn’t be fair to spoil the plot. Inspired by the wolf mother archetype – depicted here as responsible yet more or less alone – along with behavioral cycles in nature, the piece is a precursor to another work, Mother Me, which Prescott and Cara Search will perform on May 6 as part of a semi-monthly Roulette residency.

Luisa Muhr was the first to let loose a howl onstage, but it wasn’t long before the responding round of wolven voices from the rest of the group – Prescott herself stage left, joined by Search, Noa Fort, Ariadne Greif, Joy Havens, Nina Dante and the lone man in the cast, Chanan Ben Simon – had reached a peak and then scattered downward.

Prescott’s strikingly translucent, distamtly disquieting themes gave the singers plenty of room to join in increasingly intricate webs of counterpoint, and sometimes back from there. The compositions evoked styles as diverse as rapturous Hildegard hymns, wistful Appalachian folk, Caroline Shaw’s maze-like work with Roomful of Teeth, Angelo Badelamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtracks, and Indian canatic music. What was consistent was a pervasive unease, amplified by how surealistically one segment would overlap into another.

Meanwhile, onstage behind the dancers, guitarist David Torn added extra levels of angst, or menace, or outright dread, with airy washes of sound as well as several long, majestically mournful Pink Floyd interludes. Nobody does David Gilmour in lingering cumulo-nimbus mode better than this guy.

The series of narratives among the dancers were similarly somber, much of the action in elegant slo-mo. Their buoyantly simple, flowing costumes were sometimes augmented by a little onstage dressup – Prescott’s expression as she was tidied and prepared for the next stage was priceless, and too good to give away. Purification, or at least forgiveness for some unnamed (or unnamable) sin seems to be part of the picture – no spoilers. It’s impossible to find fault with this piece. The dancers are all strong singers, individual role-playing was sharp, choreography briskly executed, lighting a thoughtful enhancement, and the guitar was as vivid as the vocals. Roulette hit a bullseye in commissioning this.

Pianist Noa Fort’s Darkly Pensive, Catchy Tunes Transcend Category

Over the past few years, pianist/singer Noa Fort has been concretizing a remarkably terse, succinct, purposefully pensive sound that draws on her jazz background as well as western classical music and her own Israeli heritage. Her debut album No World Between Us is just out and therefore not yet at any of the usual places. She’s playing the album release show this Jan 23 at 7 PM a the big room at the Rockwood; cover is $10.

Fort sings in a bright, clear, expressive voice, backed by Zack Lober on bass and Ronen Itzik on drums. The opening track, Now Is Our Time is a trip-hop song built around a central, mantra-like chorus, the point being that all we have is the present moment. As Itzik builds momentum, Fort expands into the darkly lyrical, neoromantically glittering terrain that’s become her signature sound over the past few years.

“Will I become what I should be, or will I just be?” she ponders in Traveling (In Time and Space), again building intensity with a catchy, rising three-chord pattern. Over a swinging One For My Baby-style bass riff, Fort considers “a kiss that never came, the touch without the shame” in the similarly crescendoing Variations on Longing.

A tone poem of sorts awash in swooshy cymbals and tumbling tom-toms, Mirrors is more or less rubato. “Don’t let the mirrors haunt you…don’t be a stranger,” Fort cautions, over lingering and then slowly cascading piano phrases. With its menacing chromatics, tricky metrics and torrential lyrics, the album’s most striking track is Unwritten Signs – it could be a standout anthem by unpredictable art-rockers Changing Modes.

With its eerie, Satie-esque harmonies and brooding Hebrew lyrics, Empty Space (Halal Paur) is just as dark. Fort maintains that ambience as Winter Requiem opens, but rising from a dirge to a resolute drive, to weather the emotional wasteland til spring.

“Shut your mouth and tell me what you feel, I don’t need ears to hear,” Fort instructs as the album’s playfully surreal, tango-inflected title track opens, building through a darkly lustrous series of ripples with Josh Deutsch’s steady trumpet riffs at the center.

The message of The Guest House, a English translation of a Rumi poem, is carpe diem, set to jaunty, dancing variations on a hypnotic, emphatic piano riff, with more trumpet and a spring-loaded bass solo. The album winds up on a similarly upbeat note with its longest track, the oldschool soul-inspired Just Wait. Whatever you call this, don’t call it jazz-pop: there’s nothing whatsoever cheesy about Fort’s translucent tunes and lyricism.

Fun fact: Fort is the younger sister of another eclectic, lyrical pianist, Anat Fort.

Rapturous Musical Cross-Pollination at Women Between Arts at the New School

Yesterday was the fourth installment of Luisa Muhr’s new interdisciplinary series Women Between Arts at the New School. One would think that there would be several series in this city devoted to women whose work crosses the line between different artistic disciplines, but this appears to be the only one at present. What’s new with Muhr’s series is that it isn’t just a place for women artists who defy categorization: it’s also a space where adventurous established artists can branch out beyond their usual practice.

Case in point: Jean Rohe. She’s known as a songwriter and a strong, distinctive acoustic guitarist (to call her a folksinger would be reductionistic). Throughout her tantalizingly brief performance yesterday’s show, she did a lot of storytelling.

This narrative was harrowing. Rohe was named after her paternal grandmother, who killed herself on December 9, 1961. Tragically, just like her father, Rohe didn’t find out about the suicide until years later. That revelation springboarded an “odyssey,” as she termed it, to find out the truth and what pushed the woman over the edge.

Like many of the projects that find their way to Women Between Arts, it’s a work in progress, and a hauntingly captivating one. Rohe’s fingerpicking channeled distant delta blues grimness with her opening number, then she referenced the Penelope myth with a more expansive, anthemic tune. Her final song, she told the crowd, was set in Hades: “In New Jersey, as we all know,” she mused, drawing a handful of chuckles. The narrative saw her climbing into her grandmother’s old black Buick at a stoplight, to find her crying and incommunicado, a ghost before her time.

Noa Fort is known as a composer of translucent piano jazz informed by classical music as well as her own Israeli heritage. After guiding the crowd through a brief meditation, she had them write down their innermost feelings on slips of paper so she could channel and maybe exorcise those issues. As it turned out, this was a very  uneasy crowd. Fort plucked around inside the piano gingerly, George Crumb style before launching into a series of eerie belltones, close harmonies and finally a woundedly descending anthem. She closed with a somewhat elegaic but ultimately optimistic ballad where a calmly participatory crowd carried the melody upwards. 

Trina Basu, one of the great violinists in Indian classical music, leads the pioneering carnatic string band Karavika. This time out, she played a rapturous homage to 16th century mystic Meera Bai, joined by Orakel tabla player Roshni Samlal and singer Priya Darshini. Basu explained that she’d discovered the controversial, pioneering proto-feminist poet via the work of 1960s singer Lakshmi Shankar.

Basu opened the trio’s first epic number with elegant spirals that spun off into sepulchral harmonics, then built steam, rising up and down in a series of graceful pizzicato exchanges with the tabla. Darshini sang the second long piece, Basu and Samlal matching its poignancy, an ancient raga theme sliced and diced through the prism of progressive jazz. 

 The next installment of Women Between Arts is Jan 21 at 3 PM at the New School’s Glass Box Theatre (i.e. the new Stone) at 55 W 13th St., with Meredith Monk collaborator Ellen Fisher, lustrously haunting singer/composer Sara Serpa with cellist Erik Friedlander and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and Appalachian music maven Anna Roberts-Gevalt.