Oren Neiman Quartet: “Songs of the Valley” at Westchester Collaborative Theater (GPS 21 Water St.) – Ossining, NY

On Saturday, October 11, The Oren Neiman Quartet will perform Songs of the Valley, a collaboration between Oren Neiman and Gilad Ephrat, musicians and childhood friends who started their journey in music together in a small town in Israel and ended up as musicians and composers in different parts of the world.

Songs of the Valley combines the sounds and landscapes of their childhood with their experience as travelling musicians, pushing their instruments to the highest levels of technical and artistic prowess as they interact. Out of the dialog between the instruments, at times exchanging their roles between melody and harmony, a dynamic, provocative soundscape is born, and the listener is swept into the magical world of each composition.

Guitarist/Composer Oren Neiman has been living in New York for the last 20 years leading his own trio, the band Sha’ar, and as a composer for theater. Neiman also works as a sideman and arranger for many singers in the NY area and on projects such as Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish.

Bassist/Composer Gilad Ephrat is the visionary creator of the Gilad Ephrat Ensemble. The ensemble has toured Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Denmark, and the UK where they performed for then Prince Charles at Royal Albert Hall. Gilad also won the John Lennon international song competition for his composition “Murcia”.

The group also features virtuoso violinist Joyce Hamman, a current member of the NY pops who has played with everyone from Paul McCartney to Sting in addition to being the concertmaster for Phantom of the Opera on Broadway for many years, and Nadav Snir-Zelniker, a NY-based drummer/percussionist who has been collaborating with Neiman and

Ephrat for years and is an in-demand sideman on the NY jazz scene.

Paying tribute to the music of their childhoods, the quartet utilizes a variety of folkloric musical traditions into an album that, like many within Middle Eastern jazz, hybridizes various cultural attributes into compositions that reflect the complexities of our modern world.

“Neiman creates intricate and tightly knit melodies…an instrumental virtuoso in his own right,” wrote Jakob Baekgaard in All About Jazz

The Oren Neiman Quartet will perform two sets at 7:30 and 9:00 pm in an evening of Middle Eastern-inspired jazz at WCT’s black box performance space, 23 Water St. in Ossining. Cash bar and refreshments available