Eyal Lovett
Eyal Lovett
Eyal Lovett – WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Eyal Lovett’s new album WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? is released by BERTHOLD records on December 3rd, 2024. The line up: Eyal Lovett (piano and composer), Jan Sedlak (bass) and Yogev Shetrit (drums).
Lovett’s beautiful and melodious music takes on poignant significance in his new album. Many of the tracks were written or re-arranged just days after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. “It was a spontaneous attempt to deal with and process what had happened,” recalls the Israeli pianist, now living in Denmark. “I was experiencing some kind of dissociation. Where I live it was all peaceful and in Israel a nightmare. Our families are there. I think my personal reaction is just a part of the bigger social response of Israeli society now at a loss, feeling overwhelmed and losing direction.”
Lovett, through his music, is a consummate storyteller and this is reflected in the order of the tracks. The album begins with Childhood Games which has a light, almost dancelike quality. It was written with more positive thoughts – about his close friendship with the Israeli guitarist Eran Har Even, with whom the composer worked on previous albums. “I thought, let’s first do something simple, something playful,” recalls the composer.
By contrast Dark Days, originally composed by Lovett in the summer of 2023, has more sombre tones. “I had the feeling even then that there were clouds hanging over me, that something terrible would happen,” he says. “It’s a song about my own difficulties, going through some personal pain and trouble. But it does reflect the general feeling that everywhere in the world things were going in the wrong direction, not least with Netanyahu’s disastrous government.” Lovett conveys his feelings musically through a subtle, but here menacing interplay between the three instruments.
The track Where do we go from here? – also the album title – was written shortly after the Hamas attack. “I’m usually really good at finding a direction, where to go, but I was feeling lost and not seeing a way out of it,” he says. The piece begins with his quiet, reflective piano playing, accompanied by light sensitive drumming and bass notes in dialogue. The music changes pace, again and again, as if looking for answers.
The Children begins with a tremulous, echoing solo by the Israeli drummer Yogev Shetrit, leading to a funereal, heart-rendingly simple melody on the piano. “It is an elegy for all the lost children’s lives,” says Lovett. “When we recorded it, we could only do one tape, because we were both crying at the end.”
A Prayer for Healing “is Yogev’s composition, being a sort of mantra. It was made in two or three days of very intense recording. It was very emotional.”
The Wheat Grows Again was originally composed after the 1973 war by Haim Barkani and mourns those that died. “The title and the lyrics are using this metaphor of life continuing while so many are gone forever from our lives,” says Lovett, “but the sad beauty of the song says there are still things to live for and believe in – the wheat grows again.”
Yogi, also Yogev Shetrit’s nickname, was especially written by the composer for the drummer. “Yogev is a master of north African music as his family originally comes from Morocco, and this is my interpretation of those sounds and rhythms,” says Lovett, “We use a special 6/8 Gnawa groove.”
Under Mediterranean Skies, written by Shlomo Artzi in the 1980s, is about, “the paradox of life in Israel. It’s so beautiful and so crazy and everyone’s warm, but everyone’s fighting with each other.”
Lovett’s main influences include: J.S. Bach, Bill Evans, Daniel Barenboim, Israeli, Arab, Mediterranean and African sounds, plus songwriters and bands from the 60s and the 70s. The soundscape though of WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? is very much his own. Whilst the tragic circumstances in Israel and the Gaza strip clearly underpin the album, Lovett says that primarily, through his music, he is exploring, “the mix of pain and hope, and a future that is really unknown to us, hence the question the album presents is always relevant.”
Above all Lovett’s musicality, and that of his fellow musicians, shines through with impressive delicacy.
Ian Bild, February 2024
