Israeli-born and Brooklyn-based, Omer Avital is internationally acclaimed as a virtuoso bassist and as a transformational composer and musical thinker. Avital is a master of the various rhythmic and harmonic vocabularies that underpin 20th and 21st century hardcore jazz expression, which he approaches with a polyphonic attitude and articulates with prodigious technique. He is an avatar of musical multilingualism, as fluent at spinning out an erudite walking bass line as creating gorgeous melodies from percolating North African grooves, elemental vamps and Middle Eastern scales.
Born in 1971, Avital grew up in Givatayim, Israel in a Moroccan-Yemenite family. He studied at a local conservatory before entering the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts in Tel Aviv. Initially a devotee of blues guitar and Jaco Pastorius, he began listening to the music of Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, bought an upright bass, and quickly became a fixture on Tel Aviv’s jazz scene. After a year of mandatory military service, which he spent in the Israeli Air Force Orchestra, Avital flew to New York in 1992.
While studying at the New School’s Jazz and Contemporary Music Program and Mannes College, Avital immersed himself within an emerging downtown Manhattan scene involving a cohort of musicians who would soon be household names. In 1993, he toured and recorded with alto saxophonist Antonio Hart and tenor saxophonist Bill Saxton. In April 1994, he played the first-ever gig at Smalls, the now-iconic Greenwich Village jazz club, with Brad Mehldau and Peter Bernstein. In 1995, Smalls gave Avital a one-night-a-week sinecure, and he began composing for a four-saxophone, bass and drums sextet, using a rotating cast of saxophonists that included masters-in-the-making Mark Turner, Greg Tardy, Myron Walden, Jimmy Greene, Grant Stewart, Joel Frahm, Jay Collins and Charles Owens. In 1997, Impulse! Records included several Avital sextet pieces on Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (Impulse!); in 1998, they sponsored his first studio album, Devil Head, which, due to circumstances beyond Avital’s control, was never released. For this reason, Avital’s bandleader debut was the 2001 studio album Think With Your Heart (Fresh Sound), which received a 4½-star review in Downbeat. The subsequently-issued location dates, Asking No Permission and Room To Grow, both on Smalls Records, reveal the heights Avital’s sextet could reach in live performance.
Avital returned to Israel from 2001 until 2005. Based in a small village near Jerusalem called Ein-Karem, he studied the Oud, and enrolled at Jerusalem’s Rubin Academy of Music, where he taught jazz and earned a degree in classical composition. He studied counterpoint and Schoenberg; played Strauss, Mahler and Mozart in the school orchestra; studied Arabic quarter-tone music in both its classical and folk forms; Israeli pioneering songs known as Zemer Ivry; and North African and Middle Eastern piyyut (Jewish traditions of sacred song).
During these years Avital also toured Israel with several bands, including Third World Love, a collective quartet with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, pianist Yonathan Avishai and drummer Daniel Freedman, that has recorded five CDs, showcasing what Jazz Times described as a “fired-up yet cozy admixture of jazz and global influences, hints of Middle Eastern melodies, Spanish accents and African rhythms.”
Soon after returning to New York, Avital documented the fruits of his investigations with the 18 tunes that comprise Arrival [Fresh Sound] and The Ancient Art of Giving [Smalls], on which he synthesized, as pianist-journalist Ben Waltzer writes, “American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past.” Along these lines, in 2010 he co-founded and music-directed Yemen Blues, a project conceived by singer-composer Ravid Kahalani, documented on the 2011 album Yemen Blues. In 2012, he contributed his oud skills to Avital Meets Avital, a project with Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital (no relation) in which they explore their shared interest in baroque, Moroccan and Israeli folk music.
That jazz remains Avital’s primary vehicle for self-expression is apparent from several albums of original quintet music with trumpeter Cohen and tenor saxophonist Frahm. One is Suite Of The East (Anzic), a 2006 date with pianist Omer Klein and drummer Daniel Freedman that was released in 2012, and earned an “Album Of The Year” designation from TSF Jazz and a “Top Ten Jazz Album’ designation from NPR Music. Another is the 2014 CD New Song (Plus Loin/Motéma), which Jazz Times described as “fresh, sophisticated, authentic and great fun to listen to.”
In 2013, Avital commissioned, composed and performed / recorded “Hazorreem” for the JNO, featuring the amazing Israeli Soprano Haya Smair. While touring extensively through Europe from 2014-2018, he also released a special project Avital Meets Avital on Deutsche Grammophon in 2017 with world-renowned mandolinist Avi Avital, featuring his own original compositions.
Back in Brooklyn in 2018, Omer Avital opened the underground Bushwick jazz club, Wilson Live, where he workshopped new music compositions with a core group of young NYC musicians throughout the pandemic. From 2020 through 2024, he arranged, recorded and performed Tefila - an album of new music for Kabbalat Shabbat services commissioned by Temple Emanu-El in NYC with Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza.
Just recently, Omer Avital completed a new commission for the Ashdod Andalucia Orchestra in Israel to be performed at the Ashdod Jazz Festival in November 2024.
Informed by his experience in the polyglot melting pots of his native and adopted homes, Avital will continue to merge the streams of expression that permeate his unique musical production over the past two decades. Pragmatic and utopian, grounded and visionary, he’s a 21st century lodestar.