by Nicholas Stevens
Building on shared qualities, musicians from divergent traditions and genres can achieve synthesis in sound. This is the premise behind Avital Meets Avital, an album and touring program devised by two unrelated holders of the same Moroccan-Jewish surname. The premise of such cross-genre collaborations implies that musical matter fired from opposing directions will fuse, but still generate the hot glow of differences reconciled. In a recent performance in Cleveland, however, no such glimmer of inter-genre friction remained. [Read more…]
Avi Avital remembers meeting Omer Avital — no relation — in the cafeteria at the Jerusalem Music Academy.