Free the Dolphin

Album review

At 40 years old, Maya Dunietz is letting the eclecticism of her work speak for itself. A total artist, she has a back catalogue that includes an installation based on thousands of headphones at the Centre Pompidou; arrangement and editing of scores by the Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou; freelance work for John Zorn, Mike Patton, Evan Parker and the group Cheveu. This Israeli pianist, composer, singer and sound artist is always following her desires and instincts. Free the Dolphin offers a 27-minute summary of her multi-faceted art, in the form of a beautiful, intimate journey through jazz, blues, folk and African music, all in a piano style which owes as much to Thelonious Monk and Erroll Garner as to the old masters of stride jazz. There is also a short musical self-portrait recorded with drummer Amir Bresler and bassist Barak Mori and, on two tracks, Avishai Cohen’s trumpet (Oddata) and the voice of Cheveu's David Lemoine (The Wine of Love). Not to mention the efforts of Yuvi Havkin aka Rejoicer, a producer and delectable musician (part of the Stones Throw Records stable). Havkin, is as comfortable working with hip-hop as he is with drum'n'bass, is the founder of the Tel Aviv label Raw Tapes, on which Free the Dolphin has been released. "I needed his boundless creativity and productive energy to shape these ideas into an album," Dunietz explains. "We recorded it in a day and a half. In the nights prior, I had sketched out a few compositions for the trio: very minimalist things, a melody here, a very simple groove there. I had deliberately left space for Barak and Amir to add their colours and that's exactly what they did. Before the session, Rejoicer and I listened to trio albums, looking for the sound we wanted to recreate for this album. Doctor Adir and Rejoicer did some serious research on how these albums were recorded, what kinds of microphones were used, and so on. This preparatory work allowed this album to have this amazing sound." That "amazing sound" was a hybrid jazz that plays hide-and-seek with tradition, tying improbable links between ragtime and ethio-jazz, slipping in a sepia-toned version of Billie Holiday's Lover Man along the way. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz