BIO:
Alex Kontorovich is one of the young rising stars on the NYC and international klezmer, classical and jazz scenes. Born in Russia before Glasnost, Kontorovich brings to his music early vivid memories of Jewish repression and scarcity of necessities. Perhaps these recollections are partly responsible for his ability to blend the freedom of jazz with klezmer's Eastern European identity in such an elegant way. In addition, his overall persona differentiates him from the stereotypical "twenty-something." A martial arts black belt, math professor at Brown University, and classically trained musician, Kontorovich represents the best of his cohorts diversity. Add to that stunning credentials in klezmer and modern jazz (the Klezmatics, Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars, Jamie Begian's Big Band, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Toronto Philharmonia, the Waterloo Symphony, SoCalled, Aaron Alexander's Midrash Mish Mosh, King Django's Roots and Culture Band, KlezSka, the Brellochs Saxophone Quartet, founding member of the Klez Dispensers) and it is no accident that this music is an exciting and positive reflection of the next Jewish and jazz generation coming of age amidst a myriad of multicultural influences.
Twenty seven year-old clarinetist and saxophonist Kontorovich has worked alongside musicians such as Frank London, Brad Shepik, Steven Bernstein, Mike Sarin, Theodore Bikel, Paul Shapiro, Paul Brody, Peter Apfelbaum, Reuben Radding, Chris Washburne, Curtis Hasselbring, Dan Weiss, Aaron Alexander, Brandon Seabrook, Matt Darriau, David Krakauer, Margot Leverett, Alan Bern, Christian Dawid, Sanne Moricke, Michael Alpert, Henry Sapoznik, Peter Sokolow, Fima Efron, J Granelli, Alicia Svigals, and many others.
He has performed all over the world at venues such as the Lincoln Center and Birdland in New York; the Royal National Theatre in London; the National Arts Centre in Ottawa; Planet Music in Vienna; the Hackesches Hoftheatre in Berlin; the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow; and the Beer Festival in Tel Aviv.
Alex is on the faculty of the KlezKamp, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Westchester Klezmer Program, the Klezmer Heritage Cruise and International Klezmer Festival Furth, and produced a recording of the late legendary Moldavian clarinetist German Goldenshteyn.
PRESS:
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From Time Out NY:
Russian saxist-clarinetist Alex Kontorovich celebrates the release of his new Deep Minor disc, an exuberant if not groundbreaking slice of downtown klez-jazz. The plinking banjo of Brandon Seabrook serves as an excellent foil for the leader’s supple, swinging lines.
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From AllAboutJazz-NY, by Eyal Hareuveni:
Twenty-six year-old, Russia-born/New York-based clarinetist/saxophonist Alex Kontorovich is a phenomenon. He's a martial arts black belt, math professor at Brown University, "Bird-head" by his own definition, but one that is also well versed with John Coltrane's legacy. He's also a key member of Klezmer and Ska bands including Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars, The Klez Dispensers, Aaron Alexander's Midrash Mish Mosh, KlezSka and King Django's Roots and Culture band. A resourceful and disciplined musician, he integrates his Jewish musical heritage with the vocabulary of bebop in a creative and persuasive manner on his debut as a leader, Deep Minor, while avoiding obvious cliché, but with tons of passion and integrity.
For this recording Kontorovich—who wrote all the compositions—has assembled a tight and aggressive rhythm section. Drummer Aaron Alexander is also a member of the Klezmer Brass All-Stars and the Hasidic New Wave. Free jazz bassist Reuben Radding and the brilliant banjoist/guitarist Brandon Seabrock from the alt-Klezmer Naftule's Dream round out the line-up.
The quartet blasts off on the opening "Transit Strike Blues." Kontorovich cleverly transforms the Klezmer misheberach mode into an infectious and frantic minor blues form, alternating searing solos with Seabrock, who demonstrates his percussive banjo playing. "Kandels Burning" is tongue-in-cheek tribute to Klezmer bandleader and clarinetist Harry Kandel from the beginning of the 20th century, and here Kontorovich plays in and out the Romanian hora dance form, referencing Kandel as much as he does Trane, pushed by the fractured and frantic rhythms that Alexander produces. "New Orleans Funeral March" is a bluesy tribute to the birthplace of jazz that slowly boils around the articulate bass playing of Radding until its ecstatic free jazz climax. On "Waltz for Piazzolla," Kontorovich and his band mates present a much more reserved and sensual approach, especially Kontorovich on clarinet.
"Sirba" is a fast and exhausting dance form, and the quartet pushes it joyfully, with Kontorovich and Seabrock alternating solos on clarinet and electric guitar, while Radding and Alexander supply inspired stop-time rhythms. "Hora Nossim" is a testimony to the way Kontorovich plays with an East European traditional dance form, coloring it as a bluegrass song, courtesy of Seabrock's banjo, and adding Monk-esque improvisation while still managing to keep things organic and natural. "AfroJewBan Suite" marries a bebop scale with a Cuban/Klezmer rhythm in the same celebratory manner that the Hassidic New Wave explored "the Afro-Semitic Diaspora" on From the Belly of Abraham (Knitting Factory, 2001). Kontorovich concludes with a propulsive and inspired tribute to Charlie Parker's "Chi Chi," transformed here into an exhilarating Klezmer "Tzitit."
Warmly recommended.
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"Whither Klezmer?" By Alexander Gelfand in The Forward:
Every generation of artists faces its own peculiar set of challenges. When the first klezmer revivalists began breathing fresh life into Jewish music in the early 1970s, their task was not a simple one. They had few role models, their audience was undeveloped and many were in the position of having to learn their instruments (cimbalom, clarinet, fiddle) on the fly.
The current wave of Jewish music makers faces a very different scene. After 30 years of renewal, the contemporary klezmer community has its own band of seasoned veterans, its own festival and concert circuit, and its own cohort of virtuosos.
In other words, the revival succeeded. Now, the question facing the current crop of practitioners is no longer where to begin, but rather where to go next.
A 26-year-old saxophonist and composer, Alex Kontorovich, is attacking this problem from two directions at once. A self-confessed "jazz-head" who first encountered klezmer in college, Kontorovich is forging connections between modern jazz and Jewish music that are both subtle and deep.
Kontorovich has had plenty of practice crossing borders and ignoring boundaries. Born in the Russian town of Voronezh, he came to the United States as a child, arriving in Brooklyn and later settling in New Jersey. And he is successfully juggling parallel careers as a musician and as a mathematician: He recently earned his doctorate from Columbia University (he specializes in number theory) and began a three-year teaching appointment at Brown (this semester's offering: multivariable calculus).
His mother, a gifted mathematician who was denied entry to graduate school under the old Soviet system of Jewish quotas, made sure that Kontorovich got math early and often. "We'd be on the way to [Six Flags] Great Adventure, and my mom would say, 'Okay, you can go on the Scream Machine if you solve this puzzle,'" he recalled in an interview with the Forward.
Music came later, with studies in classical saxophone in middle school and then jazz in high school and college. While an undergraduate at Princeton University, Kontorovich also formed a klezmer ensemble, The Klez Dispensers, with singer Inna Barmash and trumpeter Ben Holmes. Barmash was the only one who'd had any experience with Jewish music. Not surprisingly, she was also the one who proposed forming a group.
"So Ben and I said: 'Yeah, that's great. What's klezmer?'" Kontorovich recalled. "The band began before I knew what klezmer was."
Apparently, that wasn't much of an impediment. In 1999, Kontorovich, Holmes and Barmash all attended KlezKamp in the Catskills. "That's what got us started studying klezmer seriously," he said. Within a few years, Kontorovich was on KlezKamp's faculty and on that of its northern cousin, KlezKanada. And he had begun playing with such high-profile acts as the Klezmatics and Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars.
London's drummer, Aaron Alexander, in turn invited Kontorovich to join his Midrash Mish Mosh ensemble — an association that provided a turning point in Kontorovich's development as a musician.
While on tour in Krakow, Poland, Kontorovich participated in a series of late-night jam sessions with Alexander, banjoist and guitarist Brandon Seabrook, and other musicians interested in fusing klezmer with contemporary improvised music. Those sessions were a revelation for Kontorovich, who had begun to feel somewhat stifled by the strictures of conventional jazz education.
"It wasn't until those jam sessions in Krakow that I realized there's so much more to explore in music," he said.
Three years later, the results of that epiphany can be heard on "Deep Minor" (Chamsa), Kontorovich's debut as a leader. The compositions, all Kontorovich originals, exploit the common modal features of jazz and Jewish music, using each system to enrich the other. The album's very first track, "Transit Strike Blues," inscribes the leaping intervals of modern jazz in the traditional mi sheberach mode, and lays the resulting melody atop a bed of altered blues harmonies. Its last, "Tzitzit," is a variation on Charlie Parker's "Chi-Chi" set in freygish mode.
Similar feats of transmogrification are scattered throughout the CD, as are long stretches of improvisation that combine Jewish and jazzish elements without any of the awkwardness that sometimes afflicts klez-jazz hybrids. Kontorovich's solos combine jazz-oriented harmonic and timbral effects with melodic fillips straight out of the Jewish canon; Alexander and bassist Reuben Radding punctuate their loping grooves with flashes of klezmer rhythm, and Seabrook — a man who seems determined to rescue the banjo from decades of neglect in both jazz and Jewish music — adds color galore.
Mathematicians are famous for doing their best work early in life. Musicians, on the other hand, typically improve with age. It's hard to see how Kontorovich, who already has nearly enough material for another album, could top "Deep Minor." But it'll be fun to see him try.
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From AllAboutJazz-NY, by Jim Santella:
With his program of eight original compositions,
clarinetist and alto saxophonist Alex Kontorovich
combines klezmer with modern jazz on Deep Minor, his
debut as leader. While expressing the exotic nature of
his quartet's unique sound, the title also reflects the
spiritual feelings evident in the music.
Progressive in concept, the album soars with
genuine emotion, a sincere combination of the acoustic
tradition and more contemporary textures. The
leader's clarinet floats aloft like a human voice and his
alto saxophone, while bright and high-stepping, wraps
up the quartet in a warm coat of everyday
conversation. Kontorovich makes you feel as though
you're talking to a friend.
Brandon Seabrook adds electric guitar, banjo and
electronics to the session, while bassist Reuben
Radding and drummer Aaron Alexander maintain a
solid rhythmic foundation. The solo work from bass
and guitar prove particularly emphatic, though
Kontorovich ensures that his ensemble maintains a
cohesive front.
The cultural ties Kontorovich brings in from his
native Russia are never far from reach, as impressions
embedded in his program range from mournful prayer
to joyous celebration. "AfroJewban Suite" takes off
like "A Night in Tunisia" while "New Orleans Funeral
March" goes over the top with an alto tirade. Much of
the album concentrates on klezmer however, the
leader's clarinet making a particularly strong
impression. Deep Minor has the kind of irresistible
appeal that makes us cry out for more.
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From George Robinson, Jewish Week:
Featured Recording:
Alex Kontorovich: "Deep Minor" (Chamsa)
Back in the day, horn players moved easily between klezmer and big-band jazz gigs. In the '40s guys like Ziggy Elman and the aptly named Musiker brothers could play with Benny Goodman or Gene Krupa, then turn up alongside Dave Tarras (Sam Musiker's father-in-law) or Mickey Katz. Today there are still plenty of Jewish instrumentalists who are comfortable in both genres, and this CD makes it clear that you will have to add another name to the list. Alex Kontorovich may be familiar to klezmerphiles from KlezKanada and KlezKamp, he plays frequently with Frank London and is a member of the Klez Dispensers. But the Russian émigré is also an accomplished post-bop reedman. This is uncompromisingly radical stuff, with Brandon Seabrook providing some very Oriental-sounding banjo and Kontorovich moving easily between romantic modal playing, some fractured klezmer, and high-energy shrieking. He's an imaginative, thoughtful improviser and this is a highly intelligent, fiery album.
Rating: 4 1/2 stars.
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From AllAboutJazz-NY, by Troy Collins:
The Radical Jewish Cultural movement, spurred into existence by avant-garde composer John Zorn, is already in its second decade and steadily progressing into the future. Russian-born saxophonist/clarinetist Alex Kontorovich is part of a new generation embracing the wild and wooly rhythms and primal harmonic inflections of an ancient ethnic subculture.
Co-founder of the Klez Dispensers, Kontorovich is a well-regarded member of the Klezmatics and Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars. This solo outing features a slightly different side of the in-demand multi-instrumentalist, drawing equally from classic jazz traditions and Yiddish folk conventions.
Assembling an all-star Downtown unit, Kontorovich is joined by drummer Aaron Alexander (Hasidic New Wave, Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars) and versatile Downtown luminary, bassist Reuben Radding. A tireless and versatile rhythm section, Alexander and Radding navigate ebullient bop patterns, shifting meters and pneumatic dance rhythms with an elastic sense of swing.
Guitarist Brandon Seabrook serves as Kontorovich's front-line foil. Long-time member of experimental Klezmer pioneers Naftule's Dream (and their traditional alter-ego, Shirim) Seabrook is one of the most influential guitarists in the genre, rivaled only by John Madof (Rashanim) and Marc Ribot (Masada). From percolating junk-yard banjo plucking to searing peals of distorted electric guitar feedback, he covers every texture and tone in-between, almost stealing the show from the leader with his innovative approach.
Kontorovich's hybrid of Yiddish themes and jazz improvisation relies as much on advanced harmony as it does intricate rhythms and attentive group dynamics. Avoiding rote klezmer clichés, Kontorovich integrates the two worlds seamlessly, creating a unique hybrid of buoyant Hassidic melodies, modern jazz harmonies and experimental structural dynamics punctuated by dramatic interjections of free jazz dissonance and throttling metal-tinged outbursts.
Miles removed from such early efforts as vibraphonist Terry Gibbs well-intentioned pastiche of West-Coast jazz and Hassidic themes, Plays Jewish Melodies In Jazztime (Verve, 1963), Deep Minor expands the concept of Radical Jewish Culture into the 21st Century.
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From Midwest Records:
ALEX KONTOROVICH/Deep Minor: A sax man that's deep into the klezmer scene but can run with the downtown hipsters as well as the retro cool cats, Kontorovich melds his various passions on this jazzy klezmer date that swings with a gusto that makes world beat often intriguing enough to make you stop what you're doing and pay attention. Surrounding himself on this date with some like minded downtown hipsters, this is a next wave jazz/world date that is heavy on klez but the in demand klez session ace doesn't let it overwhelm the proceedings. This date let's you approach the middle from almost any point of the curve and makes you feel welcome where ever you jump in. Tasty stuff the open eared will dig.
10 (Chamsa)