Noam Lemish Interview

Below is my interview with Noam Lemish; the podcast and video versions along with the show notes, are linked at this button:

Noam Lemish (00:00:00):

And she approached me and said, when I was there in Bhutan, I met the director of this music school, the only music school in the country, and they need a teacher. Do you want to go to Bhutan? It's, I think you'd be perfect for it. She said, it's in the Himalayas. Google it. It's the most beautiful place on the planet. I said, okay, well, I'll Google it. Anyway, I Googled it and three months later I was in Thimphu in Bhutan.

Leah Roseman (00:00:35):

Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. How did Noam Lemish’s experience living in Bhutan influence his outlook? A lot of Noam’s creative life is inspired by bridging cultures and being open to possibility, and you’ll be hearing some music from some of his many projects as well as hear his reflections on teaching and learning. It was fascinating to learn about his mentors including George Marsh and W.A. Mathieu, and how he started collaborating with so many incredible artists including the oud player and guitarist Amos Hoffman. I really wanted to shine a light as well on his fantastic Juno-nominated album Twelve, which is comprised of six original compositions for chamber jazz orchestra, and all the music you’ll be hearing is linked in the show notes. Dr. Lemish is a Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada and you can learn more about him on his website. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including timestamps and different ways to support this podcast!

(00:01:52):

Hey, Noam, thanks so much for joining me here today.

Noam Lemish (00:01:55):

It's really my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Leah Roseman (00:01:58):

It's been such an interesting journey listening to your many albums and such interesting contrasts of conception and style, and I hope to dive into several of your musical strands. There's a lot there.

Noam Lemish (00:02:11):

Sounds great. I look forward to it.

Leah Roseman (00:02:14):

I did become somewhat obsessed with your Juno nominated album Twelve, which is kind of a departure for you too, and I believe the title, I couldn't figure it out, and then I read a reference. It's actually the first jazz composition you ever wrote was named that or something, or?

Noam Lemish (00:02:30):

Yeah, well, the title, okay, so this is an interesting story because titles are sometimes difficult to come up with, especially album titles. Sometimes it's obvious if you have a piece in your album that works great as an album title, but in this case, I really didn't, none of the pieces themself had the title that I thought would work for the record. And so the producer of the album, Terry Proma, my co-producer said, why don't you just call the album Twelve? The orchestra is a twelvetet. And so I thought, oh yeah, okay. I mean the best, it's not the most romantic or beautiful title, but we could go with that. But then in the absence of something else, I decided to go with it, and once I decided to go with it, all of a sudden these other extra layers of meaning personally emerged. The first of which is that I realized that the first piece I ever wrote, I was aged 12, I was 12 years old, and that this album, this record Twelve, was really in some ways, a kind of point, I don't want to say a culmination, but a very important marker in my development and the establishment of my voice as a composer.

(00:03:57):

So this was a kind of watershed moment in my career, and so it was poetic that it referred to the beginning of that journey. And then the other aspect of it is that all the pieces in the album and the project itself was really rooted in my experiences in Toronto, moving to Toronto in 2010, connecting with Terry Proma at the University of Toronto and writing for the 12th Tet that he formed at the University of Toronto. It just so happened that when the album was released, it had been 12 years since I moved to Toronto, so there was that other nice little layer.

Leah Roseman (00:04:41):

Yeah, it's such a great album and beautiful orchestration. Just really appreciate that. And the use of the voice in Song for Lia, I noticed that at first. No lyrics. I love that. Not that lyrics are bad, but

Noam Lemish (00:04:55):

Yeah, lyrics are great if you have them. But yeah, no, I love using the voice as an instrument as part of the ensemble in that way.

Leah Roseman (00:05:09):

There's many different things we can talk about in terms of this album. I mean, this Song for Lia was written for your niece, I believe.

Noam Lemish (00:05:14):

That's right. That's right. My niece, Lia, who was born in 2014, and when she was born, she's the first in among my siblings, the first kind of child in that generation. So anyway, I was already in Toronto and I decided to just drive down to upstate New York where she was born, where my brother and sister-in-law live. And so I went there, basically got to see Lia a day after she was born, drove back home to Toronto and wrote this piece right away, eventually orchestrated it for the ensemble, and so that's the tribute there. And then my other niece, Millie, was born in 2018, so now there's a precedent. So I wrote Song for Millie, which actually we just recorded in an album that is forthcoming, and that was another daughter of my brothers. And then my sister had a daughter a year and a half ago named Rona. So there's now a song for Rona as well. Unfortunately, my dogs don't have any songs, but I feel like that's going to come at some point.

Leah Roseman (00:06:32):

This is a clip from Song for Lia on the album Twelve.(Music)

(00:06:35):

So this upcoming album, what kind of band is it? Is it a small ensemble or,

Noam Lemish (00:07:36):

Yeah, so this next album that's coming up is actually a quartet, so it's a saxophone and piano bass in drums, and very excited about it. We went into the studio in December and recorded all original music of mine, and it's going to come out within a year. Yeah, so

Leah Roseman (00:07:59):

Fantastic.

Noam Lemish (00:07:59):

Looking forward to that.

Leah Roseman (00:08:00):

So there's so much to talk about. I did want to ask you about an early experience when you went to Bhutan.

Noam Lemish (00:08:06):

Okay.

Leah Roseman (00:08:07):

Because that's just fascinating and there's so many aspects to that I'm curious about.

Noam Lemish (00:08:12):

Well, the story is that I was, at the time, I was living in San Francisco in California and had been a few years removed from completing my undergraduate degree. I was in the city as a freelance jazz pianist and composer and working, and by way of some acquaintances, I was approached by someone who had just been to Bhutan. Actually, there was an exhibit opening at that time in 2009 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco that showcased some artwork from Bhutan. And this person was a philanthropist, and she had just been to Bhutan for something connected to that exhibit. And she approached me and said, when I was there in Bhutan, I met the director of this music school, the only music school in the country, and they need a teacher.

(00:09:22):

Do you want to go to Bhutan? I think you'd be perfect for it. And I said, well, I didn't know anything about Bhutan, to be honest. I knew that it was in Southeast Asia, but that was about it. In fact, in my head, I thought it was somewhere closer to Thailand, Vietnam. She said, it's in the Himalayas. Google it. It's the most beautiful place on the planet. I said, okay, well, I'll Google it. Anyway, I googled it and three months later I was in Thimphu in Bhutan to teach to be a volunteer music teacher at this community music school in the capital, which at the time had about 60,000 people in it, the capital city, the capital town. It's a country that at the time had about 600,000 people in its entire country. It's about the size of Switzerland in the Himalayas, and it was an incredible, really transformative life experience for me. I was there for a year, 2009, 2010, that calendar year, and I taught about 70 children aged five to 18, both private lessons in piano as well as choir and theory and whatnot. It was interesting because it's a school that basically in many respects was the children of middle and upper middle class children that we're interested in studying piano in a country where piano is not an indigenous instrument.

(00:11:12):

So that's an interesting cultural negotiation there. But the kids were really, really excited to learn the music, and it was wonderful to work with them. And I tried to, in the choir and in other settings, actually work on songs that they taught me from Bhutan, and that was wonderful. And of course, when I got there, I got to know people in the community. And really the highlight for me in Bhutan were the people that I met, such a hospitable and warm and generous and filled with humor, I think I would say that I had not seen to that point, I've still not seen a place that is so filled with laughter and smiles on the regular basis. Interactions are so warm and lots of interesting opportunities came about during that time. Shortly after my arrival, one of the parents of the children that I taught was the owner of a small radio station in the Capitol, and she approached me and said, oh, would you be interested and willing to host a weekly radio program on music?

(00:12:39):

And I said, sure. So I decided to host this program where I played music that would not normally be played in the airwaves in Bhutan, primarily European classical music, jazz and music from world music from different places, traditional folk music from different places in the world. And so that was the program, and I had some interviews as well. I love doing that, by the way. It was really fun. And I met several local artists, including a singer-songwriter named Tshering Dorji, and we performed a bunch of his songs in some arrangements of traditional Bhutanese folk music in various contexts, including including on this national TV program that was called Spotlight. And I'm told that reruns of that program are still airing 15 years later, and everybody knows me as the, there's a word for foreigner, it's chillip. So everybody knows me as the chillip that plays piano.

(00:13:46):

And finally, a big honor was when, again, it was actually one of the parents of a child that I taught who was the press secretary for the King of Bhutan. And the king was approaching his 30th birthday at the time, and the press secretary came to me after, when he came to pick up his daughter one day and said, the King's birthday is coming up in February. It's his 30th birthday. Perhaps you would consider writing a piece in his birthday for his birthday. And I said, sure, okay. I did my best to, I had a few months, I studied some Bhutanese folk music that I could, and my goal was to write something that honored. I utilized the traditional Bhutanese instruments. So I formed a small ensemble and I myself on piano and wrote this cross-cultural suite that had five movements and combined Bhutanese folk motifs and ideas with jazz and my background.

(00:14:55):

And it was a really interesting experience to write something like that, and we got to record it and deliver it to the king. So got to perform some excerpts from the piece in front of the king and hand him a handwritten score. And all I know is that he told me he liked it. The press secretary said he downloaded it, it's on his laptop, and he likes listening to it. So I'm happy with that, but it was really a way for me to pay my respects to the people in Bhutan that welcomed me with open arms and really to the culture itself in a humble way. So it was a great experience.

Leah Roseman (00:15:43):

Yeah, yeah. I listened, it's on YouTube, people can listen to that music

Noam Lemish (00:15:47):

To a little bit of it, just snippets. Yeah,

Leah Roseman (00:15:50):

Excerpts,

Noam Lemish (00:15:51):

Yeah.

Leah Roseman (00:15:51):

But the album, I couldn't find the album.

Noam Lemish (00:15:54):

No,

(00:15:56):

It a private, it's a gift that is not, I've not released it. It's not, I mean, small segments I've posted and yeah, so originally it was composed for the four traditional Bhutanese instruments and piano. Then after I got back to North America, I rearranged it for a jazz ensemble and I performed it again as a quartet. But again, I haven't actually recorded it. And the other thing that I failed to mention that I think if you go online, you listen to one of the excerpts it's there, is that Bhutan is a 90% Buddhist country, and Buddhism is all pervasive in terms of how life is lived. And I wanted to also incorporate that. And I went, so the King sponsors many different monasteries and including ones for kids and teenagers and basically supports them with his sponsorship. And so I went to one of these monasteries near the capital city and recorded, I got permission to record the monks chanting the Long life prayer, a mantra, and I captured that and incorporated it as a bookend effect for the piece.

(00:17:34):

In a way, this is the King's birthday and a way of wishing him a long life. So one thing that's worth noting about Bhutan, because I suspect many of your listeners don't know this, it's an interesting case. The country was a monarchy. It still is a monarchy, but it was a monarchy in the sense that up until 2008, the king who was the fourth king, the one before the current king, was still alive, still in good health and decided that, now pause. I should pause that and say this king, the fourth king created something called gross national happiness as a measurement of a society's success and way of flourishing as a way of an alternative to gross national product. In other words, measuring a society's wellbeing, not just through economic measurements, but through other indexes. And so this was very innovative and started to be studied by other places around the world as a model for, and so Bhutan, even when it was still a full throated monarchy was already a leader in the region in bringing education to its people, bringing healthcare even to the most remote places, again, universal healthcare coverage, et cetera, all these ways of lifting people up.

(00:19:06):

But in 2008, the fourth king decided that it was time for Bhutan to become a democracy. So he simply unilaterally gave up power and said to the people who at the time were actually resistant. We need to form a democracy, and here's how we're going to do it. He abdicated the throne in favor of his son, the fifth King who became king at the age of 28 and started to have regular elections and became a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, with a prime minister, et cetera. It's really transitioning the direction of the way that the country is run. So it's a very interesting, and Bhutan has been a leader in environmental sustainability laws and in all sorts of, they have something called the mindfulness, mindfulness city, which is this really interesting project of connecting these Buddhist values of mindfulness with economic and environmental sustainability.

Leah Roseman (00:20:06):

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for outlining that.

(00:20:08):

Well, yeah, in terms of your orchestration skills on this album, Rebirth really struck me,

Noam Lemish (00:20:15):

The twelvetet. The ensemble is really, it's a nice, a chamber sized jazz orchestra. That is to say it's not a big band, which has traditionally five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones. It's a much, it's reduced in that it has three saxophones, two trumpets, two trombones, and then of course I have vibraphone guitar, piano based drums. In some pieces, like you said, there's actually a voice as well, but in Rebirth, actually, there isn't a voice. This ensemble is pretty nimble. It can function really in some respects, like a small jazz ensemble, but it also has a lot of different voices that you can use to highlight different orchestrational dimensions. I mean, from my perspective, I just try to utilize the tools that I have at my disposal in that piece. There are sections that are very, I would say orchestrationally pretty traditional in how you would write for a large jazz ensemble. And then there are sections that really lean in more to the small jazz ensemble option and configuration. One thing that I really, most of the pieces in that album take advantage of a compositional approach and structure that I really am interested in, which is to write through composed music, which in jazz, again, typically is less common by any stretch.

(00:21:59):

I'm not saying that I invented the wheel or anything, but rather just that it's typically what you associate with Western European classical music that you start at the beginning and you end at the end. Jazz oftentimes is a cyclical structure where you start at the top of the song, you go to the end, you go back to the top, and so on and so forth. And it's 32 bars or whatever number of bars. So many of the pieces in the album are through composed. Therefore, my thinking is that I want to weave in the improvisations and as part of the development of the piece, rather than state the melody at the beginning of the piece, have a bunch of improvisations, state the melody again at the end, which is the conventional approach to a jazz piece. But again, I mean, that convention is broken all the time in all sorts of ways by jazz musicians and has been for a long time.

(00:22:58):

But nonetheless, this has to do with my interest in structure development and in the exciting ways in which you can take advantage of the individual voices that you have in your band, but also to support them with written material, with interludes, et cetera, et cetera. So the final thing that I'll say about orchestration is that I really obviously had an ensemble of Canadian jazz all stars. So my thinking all along was really about how can I utilize these amazing talents and let them speak and make sure that I'm taking advantage of all the voices that I have that I'm giving opportunity to these amazing musicians to express themselves.

Leah Roseman (00:23:51):

Yeah. This is an excerpt from Rebirth on the album Twelve.(Music)

(00:23:56):

I saw some of the video footage of the recording scene, and people are in their booth with their headphones, so physically a little bit separate. Do you find that a little rough as a player?

Noam Lemish (00:25:13):

No, especially not in a record of this sort. I was very comfortable with my headset. You hear everything quite clearly. You spend time to make sure that everything is just right in the headset. Thankfully, in this particular recording session, I did all the work of getting the music together. The band was prepared, but then in the studio itself, I was the pianist, right?

(00:25:40):

For the days that we were recording, I was concentrating on being the pianist in the band, and I had Terry Promane as the co-producer and musical director, conductor in the room to really take care of all of that. And that really helped for me. I would say that if I was playing in a smaller ensemble where interaction is a lot more important in the context, like when you're playing in a small jazz ensemble, what I mean by that is that not as much as written on the page in this project, most of it was written out, and there are improvisations, but they're very structured and fairly controlled by the composer. In a smaller jazz configuration, there's going to be a lot more maneuverability. And in that context, you really do need better sight lines and a situation that allows greater interaction. And even in those situations, which I've been in the studio, life kind of takes its own. It takes a moment to get used to it, but then once you're there, you get acclimated. I think you start, you get into the work and you start to feel comfortable.

Leah Roseman (00:27:03):

Yeah. Well, let's talk about your mentor, W. A. Mathieu, 10 years you worked with him.

Noam Lemish (00:27:09):

Yes. W. A. Matieu is this amazing composer, pianist, teacher, music philosopher who lives out in Sebastopol, California. And I studied with him between the ages of 20 and, well almost 10 years, really more like between the ages of 19 or 20 till about the age of 27 out in California, taking private lessons. And really, truly has been a teacher for me with a capital letter T not just musically, but really important mentor in the years since we've become music collaborators. And since 2014, he kind of has entrusted me with premiering and recording a bunch of his new works for piano. And so we've recorded, two albums have been released. The Magic Klavier book one and two. Two more albums have already been recorded, are in the process of being released. And I'm going back there this summer to record a fifth, and there's still more work. He's writing, he's continuing, he's as prolific as ever.

(00:28:27):

He's, I think soon to be 88 years old and writing more music and better music all the time. And so in fact, just a few weeks ago I got a call where he was telling me that he was calling to ask, he said, I am writing this piano sonata. Would you play it? Would you record it? And I said, of course, anytime and any and everything that you want. And so it's been such an amazing experience for me because this is really my teacher and someone that I owe so much to. And that has been such a huge and important influence, not only on my development as a musician, but as a person in the way that I think about the world, and to have really the privilege of for me, of living inside his music, spending this time learning his music, and then also the gift of being able to work with him in this way.

(00:29:36):

So I go to California and whenever I'm on tour, I go and visit him and we work on the music, and then when it's time to record, we spend time in his studio and we're recording, and it's a wonderful experience, basically. I'm constantly learning through the process. And so anyway, and his music is wonderful, and he's a fascinating kind of multicultural musician and composer in that he was born in the United States and has lived in the States, and his early training was as a jazz musician. He was very young already when he was still 17, he played in the Stan Kenton big band, and quickly before he was 21, wrote music for the Stan Kenton. And Duke Ellington Orchestras was the first musical director of the Second city, the famous improvisational music troupe in Chicago, and started to create also these improvisational games, taking the idea of theater improv and bringing it into music.

(00:30:47):

And that has been a big influence on my life and pedagogy as well. And then he also, when he was in Chicago, studied classical composition and delved into that, studied for a long time with Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and collaborated with Hamza El Din, this Nubian amazing Nubian musician, and all these experiences shaped his way of thinking about music. So anyway, anyone that's interested, I highly recommend some of his books. The Listening Book, Bridge of Waves is another amazing book of music philosophy. And then there's his kind of treatise on harmony called Harmonic Experience, which really I think is a groundbreaking way of thinking about equal temperament and its connection to just intonation and the way in which equal temperament represents pure tuning in this beguiling and incredible way that gives its power and gives us composers, the tools to work with it.

Leah Roseman (00:31:58):

He also wrote a book called The Musical Life.

Noam Lemish (00:32:00):

Yes, the Musical Life is a book that really delves into, in a way, all of his books are so filled with amazing insights and in a way advice. It's not a self-help book, but if you read it with the mind of a student or someone who is thinking about how this can apply to my life, there's always incredible, incredible advice there the reader.

Leah Roseman (00:32:30):

You mentioned some of his improvisation games that you use with your students. Do you have a favorite one you could share?

Noam Lemish (00:32:37):

Well, the games come from different people and different sources. I've also been inspired by Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, so I don't want to mistakenly name a game that belongs to one or the other, but I'll say there's this game that I really love, which is that thinking of the entire ensemble as a single organism. So you tell the ensemble members that you have to start and end your note at exactly the same time. And so you have to literally be like this organism that's like playing when we practice it, I say, close your eyes. So you can't look for cues. It's about just feeling your way and playing together. So you can start with a single note and then you can move to a phrase, can you play together as a phrase? Now, of course, everyone is improvising, so there's no agreement about what you're going to play. Anyway, that's just one example. But there's so many amazing examples, and I use a lot of the things that I learned from him all the time, all the time when I think about teaching and in my own music making,

Leah Roseman (00:34:00):

It must have really evolved over time. Your work with him,

Noam Lemish (00:34:04):

I mean, yes, I came to his doorstep as a 20-year-old, and now I'm 42. So things have changed, and our relationship has evolved. Of course, for me, he's always going to be my teacher. But of course, there's a different kind of relational dimension now where we're relating to one another as musical collaborators on these projects and where we share our life in a different context. It's not the student coming to the teacher and telling the teacher what's going on in his life and wanting some input or advice or direction, but rather just, here's what I'm doing, here's how things are going, here are the challenges. And he likewise tells me about his life. So I mean, really, what a privilege. Yeah.

Leah Roseman (00:35:07):

So you wrote a book that I have not read, but I'm curious about it, Transcultural Jazz.

Noam Lemish (00:35:13):

Yes, I did.

Leah Roseman (00:35:17):

So you interviewed many Israeli jazz musicians, and I was really curious about these interviews and your scholarly work.

Noam Lemish (00:35:26):

Yeah, thanks. When I did my doctorate at the University of Toronto, this book is actually the product of it's building on my dissertation, which, so yeah, in 2014, 15, 16, 17, I conducted field work both in New York City and in Israel, and interviewed around 45 to 45 musicians and industry professionals with the idea of learning and gaining insight about the work of this generation of Israeli musicians, jazz musicians who since the 1990s have really emerged on the international scene, performing all over the world, creating music that combines jazz, this American art form, this African-American art form with elements of Middle Eastern Jewish Israeli influences. And I was fascinated in this I a case study for what I call transcultural jazz in my book, which is basically this idea of this meeting place between cultures. But the thing that's really interesting here is that of course, jazz in and of itself is a transcultural music, and so are the other music styles that these Israeli musicians are borrowing and utilizing their transcultural in and of themself.

(00:36:57):

So in my book, I conceptualize this as a blend of blends, like a mixture of things that are already mixed in of themselves. And I look at this as a case study for really a phenomenon that's happening all over the world and has been for a long time with jazz. And so that's the audience for this book is really jazz studies audience and also an audience that might be interested in Israeli music or Jewish music. And that's kind of the, so while there's an element of jazz scholarship, obviously here in terms of talking about the way in which the work that these artists do connects to the kind of discourse that's going on in jazz field, it also provides insight into Israeli society, into these Israeli musicians and their work.

Leah Roseman (00:37:56):

Now, one of your frequent collaborators, and I want to pronounce his name correctly, is it Amos?

Noam Lemish (00:38:02):

Yeah,

Leah Roseman (00:38:02):

Amos Hoffman.

Noam Lemish (00:38:03):

Yeah.

Leah Roseman (00:38:04):

So such a beautiful album, Pardes.

Noam Lemish (00:38:06):

Thank you. Thank you.

Leah Roseman (00:38:09):

So you guys collected melodies?

Noam Lemish (00:38:13):

Yes. Interestingly enough, getting to collaborate with Amos Hoffman is an interesting product of doing this research, actually, because it was through interviewing him for this project that we actually ended up starting to play music together. And so yeah, our first album, Pardes, which came out in 2018, presents a collection of melodies from different Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, north Africa, and kind of our own jazz arrangements. And many of the melodies on that album actually are melodies that Amos himself has known and loved for many years. Some of them I brought a few as well. We were really interested in breathing new life to these melodies in our own way. And that is, in some ways, what a lot of the time jazz musicians do. And it's part of what I write about in the book is that in the search for new repertoire and new ways for individuals to express themself and their culture, new source material is drawn upon, and this is just a small example of that. We actually recorded a second album that's tentatively titled Red Sky that features some original compositions and a few more arrangements, and this one is coming out also later this year. So that's coming out as well.

Leah Roseman (00:39:44):

So could we include something from Pardes in this podcast?

Noam Lemish (00:39:49):

Absolutely,

Leah Roseman (00:39:50):

Yeah. Okay.

Noam Lemish (00:39:51):

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Leah Roseman (00:39:53):

I thought maybe Ishal Elohay, because it's featuring the oud and it's on the short side.

Noam Lemish (00:39:59):

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great song. I don't know if you want me to say anything about it.

Leah Roseman (00:40:03):

Sure, please.

Noam Lemish (00:40:04):

Yeah.Ishal Elohay is a Yemenite song, and it's a liturgical song originally means I will ask my God or I'll ask, yeah, my God, Alohay. I mean, every time I hear this song, and even when we were recording it, I'm just so stunned by Amos' incredible playing on the uod, and it's really worth mentioning that he's really a pioneer in bringing the oud into the jazz context. So what he can do with that instrument in a jazz idiom is really unmatched

Leah Roseman (00:40:46):

From the album Pardes with Amos Hoffman, this is Ishal Alohay. (Music)

(00:43:38):

So I was surprised to learn that you actually started your musical studies in high school. Is that true?

Noam Lemish (00:43:43):

No, I studied my musical studies when I was 10 years old.

Leah Roseman (00:43:47):

Oh, okay. So maybe jazz was in high school. I dunno where I read that.

Noam Lemish (00:43:52):

Maybe there's reference to my time in high school. I actually started with jazz pretty young in that quickly after I started playing piano. So I started playing piano at 10, and I started jazz at age 13. So this is a couple of years before high school. And then, because in Israel, high school starts in grade 10 when you're 15 years old. So anyway, I got into high school a jazz program. So there's arts high schools in Israel, and jazz is one of the options in some of these schools, so maybe that's what it's referencing. I went to this high school where for two days a week, we basically only did music, and the other four days you study for six days in Israel in high school, well, in all schools. So for four days we did all the other subjects that everybody else did in five days.

(00:44:52):

So that was the way that it worked. But it was an incredible experience to immerse myself in music studies and to have some of my peers have gone on to have incredible careers. And so I had the fortune of being able to be in the same combos with them and play with them. And we had some amazing teachers. Part of what I write about in the book is that this infrastructure of these arts high schools with these jazz programs is part of the reason that these Israeli jazz musicians come to the United States when they're to start university, but they're already quite advanced in their playing because the high school approach actually basically does a lot of the things that are done in North America at the university level. And the teachers who teach in the high schools, in the music programs are basically the professionals in the scene economically.

(00:45:49):

They need to teach a great deal to survive in Israel economically as jazz musicians. So someone like Amos Hofman, he told me in his interviews, and it's in my book, so I'm not saying anything that I shouldn't, that he taught, I think at three or four institutions at the same time to make ends meet. So basically everyone who came of age at a certain period when he was living in Israel studied with Amos Hofman, right, in some way, shape or form. And there are many others who did the same thing. So I was a lucky beneficiary of that kind of knowledge being shared and imparted.

Leah Roseman (00:46:27):

Yeah. Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Tal Yahalom, Rachel Eckroth and John Hadfield, Steve Boudreau and Peter Hum, and Ariel Bart, among so many. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mubs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.

(00:47:19):

Now, you're a professor at York University.

Noam Lemish (00:47:22):

Yes.

Leah Roseman (00:47:22):

And you are involved with some community engagement and accessibility. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?

Noam Lemish (00:47:27):

Absolutely. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, I do. I teach it in the Department of Music at York University, and very proud of the work that we're doing at York. York really is a place that, one of the things that I think that I'm very proud of and that we pride ourselves as a department is that we're a very inclusive minded program in the sense that we are very, York was a pioneer in being open-minded about genres in a way that now, thankfully, other institutions are catching up, but York was first place in Canada to offer post-secondary instruction in gospel music, for example. Ethnomusicology was a huge world, music was a huge aspect that York brought into the Canadian landscape, and equally jazz, actually, York was the first place. But in any case, we continue in that legacy of being a place that is non-hierarchical in its approach about music making.

(00:48:30):

That is to say that all music has value, equal value, and is worthy of study, and therefore, students who come with non-traditional sets of skills are embraced and supported in their musical journey. So that's something that we are very proud of. And yes, I've been lucky enough to be able to lead an initiative called Jewish Music at York, which is supported by the Israeli Foundation. And this is really a project now in its third year that presents free concerts and lectures to the community at York University. We do about five, approximately five in-person events in our concert halls. And I bring artists not just from Canada, but from the United States. And my goal is to present the diversity of musical expression of Jewish musical expression that really also, that really presents this diversity because Jewish music is not one thing. And so both in terms of genre and in terms of culture, so that's a real goal for me with the series.

(00:49:57):

We're actually in the middle right now of an online series that's part of this initiative, a collaboration with the Jerusalem Orchestra, east West, which is an incredible orchestra that combines Middle Eastern traditional instruments with Western orchestral instruments to create this hybrid orchestra that performs beautiful repertoire from the Middle East and North Africa. And the musicians in the orchestra come from the three faiths in Israel. There are Jews and Arabs in the orchestra, both Christian and Muslim. And so it's a really beautiful intercultural project, and we're presenting a 10 episode webinar series that presents these prerecorded, almost like tv, like episodes with the orchestra recorded and never released during the pandemic. And these are incredible of the highest level kind of performances. Each episode is dedicated to a different musical tradition. We've had the music of Moroccan Jews. Each episode is prefaced by an introduction that contextualizes the episode we're going to watch by a scholar who's a specialist in the field. And then there's a Q&A following the episode. Anyway, so all of these events are free and are intended to be for the community at large. So that's a big part of what we're doing.

Leah Roseman (00:51:34):

Wonderful. Actually, if we could go back to your album Twelve that we were talking about at the beginning. You have this between Utopia and Destruction, and I believe one of the melodies on there scholar Anna Shternshis. No, I'm not pronouncing that right, Anna Shternshis?

Noam Lemish (00:51:51):

That's right, that's right.

Leah Roseman (00:51:52):

Yeah. She shared this with you.

Noam Lemish (00:51:54):

Yes, yes. Between Utopia and Destruction was initially actually called, when I first wrote it, I titled it Jazz Rhapsody on Soviet Jewish Themes, because it takes these two themes from Soviet Jewry and manipulates them and works them into this piece. One of them is this piece, Der werter un die stern, which is a piece that Professor Anna Stern from the University of Toronto discovered when she was doing archival research, I believe in the Ukraine of these songs that were actually written in various documents and were collected right after World War ii. These were all songs from the period of the war, but that had been buried and repressed by the Soviet regime. And anyway, she went and discovered this music, much of which was not actually musically notated. They were more like letters that included lyrics of songs. And so her project, which is this amazing project that was Grammy nominated called Yiddish Glory, which brought these songs to life musically, really was about excavating these lost songs when I was a graduate student at the U of T and studying with her, she shared some of this research that she was doing, and this was one of the songs that she shared with me.

(00:53:21):

And actually, the piece came about initially as a end of semester project for that class that I took on Soviet Jewish history. And so eventually I developed it into this piece that combined that piece along with a song by Alexander Dunayevsky, who is this pianist, I think he was a jazz pianist. But anyway, a jazz musician and composer in the Soviet Union, a Jewish composer who wrote music for several famous films, including Circus, this really incredible historical document. And there's a melody in there called Lullaby, and I use that melody as well. And my piece between Utopia and Destruction is really a piece about the dialogue. Well, it's a kind of discursive dialogue as the title suggests. I mean, the Dunayevsky song in the piece in the film Circus is really about the Soviet at the time. This is, I think a film from 36, the Soviet utopian Multi-ethnic Multicultural Society.

(00:54:37):

So as it's a propaganda film, I mean, obviously, but in the film, the culminating scene of the movie, the song is sung, and each verse is sung by a different ethnic group in the Soviet Union, including the famous Jewish actor, Solomon Mikhoels, who sings, he sings in Yiddish, the kind of Jewish verse, if you will. The irony, of course, is that this was in 36, 2 years later, the anti cosmopolitan persecution happens, and Mikhoels is executed as part of that, right? As what transpires. So one moment, he's on a propaganda film. This is the fickle nature of the Soviet ideology at the time. So anyway, that's one. And the other one, Der werter under Stern, is this song by Jews during World War II, during the Holocaust. So it's really about this gap between the utopian ideals and the realities of the horror and the destruction, both of life, but of culture, the destruction of culture that transpired during this period in Europe.

Leah Roseman (00:55:50):

Yeah, I heard Anna speak in Ottawa, I think a couple of years ago in a concert with Yiddish Glory. It was really moving and interesting.

Noam Lemish (00:55:58):

Yeah, yeah. Fascinating work.

Leah Roseman (00:56:00):

Yeah. This is a clip from Between Utopia and Destruction.(Music)

(00:56:06):

So you put out a beautiful album in 2021, which is your first album of just solo piano music, and it's fully improvised.

Noam Lemish (00:58:10):

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Could

Leah Roseman (00:58:12):

You say the title, please?

Noam Lemish (00:58:13):

I can try, Erlebnis or Erlebnisse I don't know. It's a word that I read, and I'm not a German speaker. I just love the word. Since I came across it over 20 years ago, it was a word that was written in the letters that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre exchanged with one another. And they would use it to refer to deeply felt experiences like these experiences that are almost aha experiences, that are truly like you feel them in your bones. They're these transformative experiences. I've always loved that word. And so the album is a set of these improvisations. And to be completely transparent, I don't improvise with anything in my mind. There is no experience. There's no extra musical story going on at all. It's just about pure sound. It's just about what am I feeling and hearing right now in this moment. But I thought that the title speaks to the kind of impermanent nature of experience and the way in which, I mean, I think music has this power of evoking deeply felt experiences, even ones that are not verbal, that is to say even just experiences internally that we can't actually put into words.

(01:00:06):

And that are not really about anything verbal or any story. There doesn't have to be a story with it. There doesn't have to be any meaning to it, except maybe we've heard a piece of music and somehow we feel as though maybe we've gotten a glimpse into understanding something about what it means to be alive. Or maybe we just feel more alive. I mean, I recently had that experience hearing the Schumann piano quintet live in a concert, and it's just like you hear that piece, and on some level you feel like Schumann captures something about the beauty and the poignancy and the sadness and all of it, of what it means to be alive. And if you can connect to that when you're hearing this music, then you're connecting to something really deep. So anyway, I dunno, these are just some thoughts right in this moment about what the title kind of refers to. But I also just needed something abstract enough because I didn't want, I know a lot. I have colleagues and friends who had then after improvising would call their pieces something. And I didn't want that because there isn't anything about it. Just this is this experience, this is the experience of that particular piece. And it's that non nonverbal experience.

Leah Roseman (01:01:52):

This is Erlebnis 16, the final improvisation on Noam's album Erlebnisse. (Music)

(01:04:55):

Yeah. I see both points, and I've been guilty of putting titles on improvisations, but I think there's the way of bridging to the audience, maybe getting people maybe interested in listening. Maybe you could, the next album you put out, you could reconsider.

Noam Lemish (01:05:10):

Well, it's funny. Oh, you mean, yeah, when you have titles, The listener might able to better relate. But yeah, it's true. I guess I'll afford myself this one self-indulgence of, in a way, not really concerning myself too much with that in the context of I wanting the music to just stand to speak for itself. However, I will say maybe if I was better at coming up with titles, I'd have a different feeling about it. There's an album coming out that includes a set of my improvisations, actually, it's one of the albums that's coming out with W.A. Matieu where we pair seven of his composed works that I've played with seven of my improvisations. He listened to my improvisations and he just titled them all easily without any problem. And I love his titles. So we're going to keep those titles there. So

Leah Roseman (01:06:11):

In this short conversation, you've mentioned several upcoming albums this year. It's fantastic.

Noam Lemish (01:06:17):

Yeah. There are a bunch that are going to be coming out soon, so I'm looking forward to that.

Leah Roseman (01:06:22):

Well, I'll mention one more. I listened to Nightfall. You've done many collaborations with George Marsh.

Noam Lemish (01:06:28):

Yes.

Leah Roseman (01:06:30):

Very important in your life and for music. You want to speak

Noam Lemish (01:06:32):

Yes

Leah Roseman (01:06:33):

about him?

Noam Lemish (01:06:33):

Yes! Absolutely. George is this incredible percussionist out also in California where I lived between 2002 and 2009, and forged a lot of these relationships. And again, George is this just incredible drum, incredible teacher, incredible person that I got to know when I was a student there in California. And then we developed this musical collaboration, and my first album came out with George in 2008 called Yes, And. We actually do a lot of improvisation, free improvisation together, and also some composed works. So yes, and was the first album. And then Nightfall is the second one. And that one also features mostly, I think, improvisations with a few composed works. Again, they're all titled, but again, I think that's mostly thanks to George's ability to title improvisations. And this music emerged from a time where I would go over to George's studio and we would once or twice a week, and we would just play and work on material and work on music and improvise.

(01:07:50):

And then after a while, we would go to the recording studio and capture over the course of a day or two capture where a snapshot of where we are in our journey of improvising together. But I will say, every time I go to California, now, I live in Toronto, and I've lived here for 15 years. And so I don't get to go and play with George every week, something that I dearly, dearly miss. But when I do go to California and I always try to visit him, and I sit down at the piano and he's sitting down on his drums and we play, it's as though it's like meeting a good friend that you haven't talked to in two years, but you pick up exactly from where you left things off. And musically, it's actually miraculous. It feels miraculous for both of us because we just sit down, we don't need to talk about it, we don't need to think about it. We start playing, and it's as though we never stopped and it only gets better, which is truly surprising in a sense that we haven't practiced, we haven't worked on it together, but I guess there's enough built up, enough understanding of one another, and that connection is there that so it, it's really a treasure. And again, George, like Allaudin Mathieu is now in his eighties, and I've been so fortunate to be able to be surrounded by these mentors who have this wealth of experience and have been generous, really generous with me.

Leah Roseman (01:09:31):

And the drums are much more than rhythmic. That's sort of melodic. There's different,

Noam Lemish (01:09:37):

One of the things that characterizes George is just how melodic of a drummer he really is. Yeah. He's just a brilliant, brilliant musical mind.

Leah Roseman (01:09:48):

And he wrote this book, Inner Drumming, talking about internal awareness, which I'm very interested in as a violinist. I was curious if he talked to you about any of that.

Noam Lemish (01:09:56):

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a huge part of his life and of his teaching. And it's really a book that's actually influenced, it was only recently published with a publisher, but it had been in circulation unofficially through his teaching, and has affected and influenced many drummers all over the world, really. And it's really about, yeah, as you say, it's about connecting mindful awareness of your body, of your limbs for drummers right, of your limbs, of your four limbs, and with a deep intentionality connecting that to the instrument. And through his book is very methodical and through kind of methodical exploration of this process that he calls inner drumming. You develop your skill and your control and your command of the instrument. Again, through various forms of slow practice and deeply mindful kind of with visualization practice with, it's really quite inspiring, and I think it is translatable to other instruments, but obviously it's going to be up to other people to do that work of taking what he's put together for the drums and translating it to other instruments.

Leah Roseman (01:11:16):

We had started this conversation with your album Twelve. You have this wonderful Beethoven 7th Visit to Romania, which I thought was interesting. It ties your relationships with classical music and all kinds of things together.

Noam Lemish (01:11:29):

Yeah. And Seventh Symphony, the second movement, it's interesting because that piece came about. I mean, my piece, Beethoven 7th visit to Romania, the seed for this piece came about in my mid twenties actually when I was in California. And we were studying, I think I heard Beethoven 7th Symphony in some class or another. And it hit me that I knew this piece extremely well, even though I had not consciously gone to listen to it for many years. And that's because my dad had this record collection, and he would play music as we would wake up in the morning when I was a child. And so as soon as I heard it in my mid twenties, I was like, oh, this is one of my favorites. But anyway, I mean, I certainly checked out a lot of Beethoven, but mostly for piano purposes. A lot of his piano works.

(01:12:32):

So in my early to mid twenties, I wasn't as intensely aware of all of his symphonic works. And so I was led me to discover, rediscover this piece. And as it so happens with me, I guess I am very interested in what I call a kind of non deliberate or non-conscious create creation, which is to say I wasn't actively trying to draw upon Beethoven 7th, but I was out for a drive in the back roads of Sonoma County, California. And this mistranslation, let's call it like a musical misunderstanding of this theme from Beethoven 7th emerged in a much peppier version. And I was just singing it along to myself as I was driving. And I thought, okay, this is kind of cool. And of course, I knew that I realized that it was connected to that theme, and I thought, oh, this is fun. It's like if Beethoven's theme was like a folk song,

Leah Roseman (01:13:49):

This is an excerpt from Beethoven's 7th Visit to Romania from the album Twelve.(Music)

Noam Lemish (01:15:18):

The part of the story is that around the same time, without getting into too deep, around the same time, I discovered through someone that approached that called me out of the blue, I discovered that Lemish my last name, my dad's side of the family, that Lemish was connected, that I was basically a descendant of this clan of klezmer musicians who were one of the three main clans of klezmer musicians in Romania up until World War II. And that a lot of research had actually been done on these Lemish Klezmers. And so all of a sudden, I mean, I didn't know any of this, and I just thought, this is fascinating, that my chosen profession, my vocation, my calling somehow connects to my ancestors unknowingly. So it was really cool. And so I playfully, when I wrote the piece, I playfully thought of it as Beethoven going to Romania and hearing a Klezmer, a Klezmers song. And so my reinterpretation, this is all entirely fictional and fabricated. It's just my interpretation of Beethoven's made up interpretation of a Klezmer song, which is obviously just my contemporary mistranslation of that beautiful theme from the seventh Symphony. But yeah, it goes on a journey and it's transformed in a kind of jazz inflected way, and I have, that's why the piece has this choir singing this theme every time the choir sings. That's the theme that I'm referring to in the back roads of Sonoma County. And I specifically wanted the choir to be a non-professional choir. I wanted them to have a kind of more folky sound that was just as though the song was being sung in a village somewhere. That's the idea that I wanted to impart.

Leah Roseman (01:17:18):

Yeah. Really interesting background on that. Thank you.

Noam Lemish (01:17:20):

You're welcome. Well, it's been really fun talking to you.

Leah Roseman (01:17:24):

Thanks for this.

Noam Lemish (01:17:25):

It's been a pleasure.

Leah Roseman (01:17:28):

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.