Yonatan Gat, Maalem Hassan BenJafaar, Greg Fox

BROOKLYN MARATHON @ BABY’S ALL RIGHT

Saturday, January 13, 2024

Yonatan Gat

Yonatan Gat first gained notoriety as one of the world's top performers as co-founding guitarist of the band Monotonix, hailed by SPIN as "the most exciting live band in rock’n’roll,” their concerts shattered the border between performer and audience and were controversial enough to get them banned from playing venues in their country.

Finding himself unable to perform in his home country, Gat, who refused to take part in its mandatory military service as a conscientious objector, left to New York. He does not readily conform to descriptions as Israeli or American, developing a sound rooted in both these influences while collaborating and adding perspectives from musicians of different spectrums of 21st-century folk music as a part of the Stone Tapes imprint he helped launch in 2022. Stone Tapes also acts as an artist studio and musicians' collective, focused on post-genre collaborations across traditions.

Rolling Stone editor David Fricke celebrated the multiculturalism of Gat's sound, calling him "a citizen of the world", adding that "Gat wields his guitar like a universal translator". His work was profiled by The New York Times, Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Wire, UNCUT, NPR, Vice, The New Yorker, and People. In 2013, the Village Voice named him "Best Guitarist in New York."

Maalem Hassan BenJafaar

Maalem Hassan Benjaafar is a Maalem or Master of Gnawa music.  He is the son of the esteemed Maalem Abdullah Benjaafar of Fes, Morocco.  He was raised and educated in Al Azhar Association for Culture and the Arts, an officially recognized zaouia (Gnawa school) his father founded and ran in the Medina of Fes jdid.  As a youth he travelled throughout Morocco, living, studying and performing with Maalems in every region, including Maalem Sam of Casablanca, Maalem Ahmed Bakbou and Maalem Abdelatif of Marrakesh, Maalem Boujmaa of Fes, Maalem Abdelouahed Stitu and Maalem Mbarek Kasri of Tangier, and Maalem Hmida Boussou of Marrakesh and Casablanca.  He learned the entire Gnawa music and dance repertoire, including regional variations and the Moroccan Jewish repertoire, as well as how to build and repair instruments.

While still a teenager, he was accorded the title of Maalem, which can only be bestowed by a consensus of other Maalems.  He continued to travel and perform extensively as a featured singer, musician and dancer in hotels, private homes and other venues throughout Morocco, Spain and France.  He also performed lilas or ceremonies in which participants are healed through music.

Greg Fox

Any sound, repeated quickly enough, becomes a sustained tone, and any sound slowed down will start to beat. Imagined as a line, music stretches between the endpoints of drumming and singing. Greg Fox is that line. However much technique is displayed in his playing, Fox moves through musical stages in a transformative—rather than a performative—way. Contact is built largely from the work of a person alone in a room, using his body to make sense of the surfaces around him. It was exactly that when it was recorded in November of 2018 at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn. For obvious reasons, it is even more that now. Created in close unison with producer Randall Dunn, Contact makes the acoustic drum set talk and sing and see.

There are washes of triggered keyboards and bells and synthetic tonalities on Contact, but all of it follows the lead of the drums. It’s a record of rhythms that isn’t a beat record. Fox’s drumming is full but considered, like an enormous stone arm pushing slowly through a forest.