{"id":20002,"date":"2012-06-21T02:14:36","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T09:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=20002"},"modified":"2012-07-01T13:23:03","modified_gmt":"2012-07-01T20:23:03","slug":"jonathan-greenstein-friends-to-perform-levontin-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=20002","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Greenstein & Friends to Perform @ Levontin 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Greenstein<\/a> is in Israel to jazz up the scene with friends Ronen Shmueli<\/a> (piano), Tal Ronen (bass) and Yonatan Rosen (drums) at Levontin 7 on Sunday, June 24, 2012. The NY based saxophonist will be performing songs from his album Thinking<\/em>, as well as new material. Jonathan took a break from the frenetic pace of his visit home (he\u2019s performed at the Tel Aviv Museum, the Dancing Camel with Gilad Chatsav, and at Radio EPGB with Or Gurfinkel) to chat with Midnight East about the upcoming performance, where there will be at least one surprise guest, and with jazz on the agenda, as Jonathan said, \u201canything can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jonathan Greenstein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thinking was recorded with Jonathan\u2019s NY ensemble – Ilan Bar-Lavi (Guitar), Victor Gould (Piano), Dan Carpel (Bass), and Jeff Fajardo (Drums) \u2013 all friends from Berklee School of Music. The friendships in Israeli ensemble that will play at Levontin go way back to high school, and will be a reunion of sorts as it\u2019s been a while since all four have performed together.
\nAsked to describe his sound in a single sentence, Jonathan says: \u201cContemporary jazz with catchy melodies.\u201d What does that really mean? The best way to find out is to come to the show at Levontin, but in the meantime, talking to Jonathan about his process of composing provided some insight into his music.<\/p>\n

Jonathan: \u201cIt starts with a melody played on the piano. I drive my friends crazy because I don\u2019t write it down. If I can\u2019t remember the melody, then it must not be strong enough. I may write down a few words, describe the atmosphere of the song. I\u2019ll play for an hour or two until it stays in my head. I\u2019ll expand it, turn it around, play with it\u2026until I break down and say ok, it\u2019s finished\u2026or until it really is complete. There are some songs I was stuck with for so long\u2026sometimes you don\u2019t reach a full stop, with a period at the end, sometimes you end up with a question mark.<\/p>\n

I sing a lot. In the physical sense the voice is like the sax, it\u2019s almost the same action. Singing is the role of the sax in a jazz ensemble. We are the singers of the jazz world. We play the melody. I shout at the top of my lungs, you can\u2019t really say that I know how to sing. I like to keep the sense of song in my music. Sometimes jazz becomes so complex that you can\u2019t sing it anymore, with lots of information, lots of sounds. Singing helps me narrow it down.<\/p>\n

The people I play with are in my head from the start, they are the first to hear the songs. I may come in with 8 bars I just wrote the day before. Sometimes I want something specific to happen, for example one of the new songs was written after I had a strange dream and woke up really angry. I\u2019d been reading too many newspapers and was in a rage. And we [the ensemble] talk a lot too, politics etc. So that one started out as an angry song. It may change as it develops.<\/p>\n

Putting the album together was a long and painstaking process, in which each song arrived at the final structure that Jonathan envisioned. \u201cPerformances,\u201d he said, \u201care much more organic. Sometimes we may take a song apart completely. From the moment we begin performing, it\u2019s a lot looser. It\u2019s a question of trust. If I trust the musicians, then as far as I\u2019m concerned, anything can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

“Benacotish I” from the June 24th concert at Levontin 7:
\n<\/object>
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Jonathan Greenstein is in Israel to jazz up the scene with friends Ronen Shmueli (piano), Tal Ronen (bass) and Yonatan Rosen (drums) at Levontin 7 on Sunday, June 24, 2012. The NY based saxophonist will be performing songs from his album Thinking, as well as new material. Jonathan took a break from the frenetic pace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}