Watch: Dean Tsur Live Jazz Performance in Tel Aviv

Saxophonist, composer, and Thelonious Monk Competition semi-finalist Dean Tsur, had – like many musicians – felt the wear of quarantines, lockdowns, and social distancing.

 

“Jazz is a style of music that is so free, communicative, and spontaneous,” Dean says. “It’s the antithesis of lockdowns.” Weary of video conferencing and virtual recordings, and itching for a creative outlet with a live audience, Dean teamed up with Israeli Jazz Society Director Barak Weiss to create a concert that combined Dean’s jazz quartet, The Songbirds, with a chamber string ensemble in a way that utilized this unique timbre blend beyond merely performing ballads. “Having the strings enriches the musical scope of this band a lot,” Dean says. “It also takes all of us out of our comfort zone and lets us go into making music from a more open state of mind.”

 

The performance was recorded in Nov ‘20 at Terminal 4 in Tel Aviv, with a full film and audio crew and featured a blended audience: in-person technicians with an online audience. Dean, an AICF scholarship recipient, describes the former as “the first real audience we’ve performed in front of in a long time” and that their encouragement was “incredibly uplifting for us.”  Click below to watch a preview of Dean’s new album, “Live from Lockdown”:

 

 

“Live from Lockdown” features Dean’s quartet of Yonatan Riklis (piano), Gasper Bertoncelj (drums), and Tal Ronen (bass), with special guests Yael Shapira (cello) and Hagar Maoz (violin).

Watch: Dean Tsur Live Jazz Performance in Tel Aviv

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