Yotam Silberstein

Standards, Vol. 2
Release Date: April 18, 2025
Label: JoJo Records

Just last year, the marvelous Israeli jazz guitarist Yotam Silberstein — fluent in bebop, blues, and sounds from North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond — released Standards. Therein, he and a top-shelf rhythm section in John Patitucci and Billy Hart — with tenor sax elder George Coleman on two tracks — masterfully interpreted works associated with Miles Davis, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other giants.

A simple, well-worn premise, but far from a simplistic one: Jazz Weekly called the trio “suave,” with the pairing of Silberstein and Coleman particularly “luscious.” “Silberstein is a new name to me, but he's now high on my list of current guitar heroes,” opined Bebop Spoken Here. And Jazz Guitar Today hailed that album of “great songs from the American Songbook,” calling Silberstein “one of the best guitar players on the planet.”

But that didn’t close the book on Silberstein’s Standards project: during that fruitful session at  Samurai Studios in Queens, they recorded an entire second albums’ worth of material. Enter Standards, Vol. 2, where the trio — with Coleman in tow, for “Tenor Madness” — plumbs this terrain one more time, to great reward.

“I’ve always liked to play standards. It’s been something that I’ve been into for many, many years,” Silberstein explains. “I tried to choose the lesser-played ones — some hidden gems. I chose each one very carefully and tried to take it to a little different place.”

Standards, Vol. 2 introduces itself with Lester Lee and Bob Russell’s “Blue Gardenia,” famously performed by Nat King Cole in the 1953 film noir The Blue Gardenia. “He’s one of my big guys who I love — the King of Song, as I call him,” Silberstein says. “Usually, it’s a ballad, but we put a little rhythm to it.”

The guitarist calls John Benson Brooks’ “Just As Though You Were Here” “a beautiful ballad that I learned from my teacher in high school — a very meaningful figure, so it’s kind of a dedication to him.” As for Sonny Rollins’ blues “Tenor Madness,” whose genealogy goes back to drum legend Kenny Clarke: “George just started playing it in the studio, and we said, ‘OK, we’ll go with it,’” Silberstein recalls. “It was spontaneous, unplanned.”

Harry Revel and Mack Gordon’s “Love Thy Neighbor” follows; Silberstein found it through John Coltrane’s version, which appears on 1963’s Stardust. Gerhard Winkler’s “Answer Me My Love,” sung by everyone from Nat King Cole to Joni Mitchell to Bing Crosby, is another simmering ballad; Sonny Red’s “Bluesville” brings a shuffling, hustling energy.

On Victor Young’s “Delilah” — from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 film Samson and Delilah — Silberstein plays the oud, an instrument he’s played on and off for three decades: “That song has kind of a Middle Eastern taste, so I thought it would be appropriate to incorporate it. J. Russel Robinson’s “Portrait of Jennie” is a “tribute to Wes Montgomery — something he played very, very beautifully.” 

Silberstein came to the penultimate song, Harry Barris’s “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” as a result of “trying to find some that are not played very often. A great version was by Bill Evans, from his [1963] record Interplay — so I’ve got to say that influenced my choice.”

Standards, Vol. 2 concludes with “Girl Next Door,” a gender-reversed version of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine’s 1944 popular song “The Boy Next Door,” from the 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis. “It's a beautiful standard in 3/4 — and I was looking for something in 3/4,” he explains.

With that, this second helping of Standards proves as indispensable as the first — a leading guitarist in full command of some of the most revered material in the jazz canon, with a band not to be outmatched. A standard set yet again.

Standards
Release Date: February 23, 2024
Label: JoJo Records

Standards was created by the astonishing jazz guitarist Yotam Silberstein. He expresses a wish to “bear witness to the better angels of human endeavor” via music. And these six selections — associated with heavyweights from Miles Davis to Rodger and Hammerstein, Victor Young, and many more — might just prove their existence.

On Standards, which releases on February 23 via Jojo Records, Silberstein is joined by a straight-ahead legend in tenor saxophonist George Coleman, bassist’s bassist John Patitucci, and Billy Hart, a living legend of the jazz drumming lineage. Throughout, the guitarist channels the bebop and blues that forged him, into some of the most treasured songs in the Western musical canon.

As Silberstein explains, most of his albums — like 2019’s Future Memories, 2016’s The Village, and 2009’s Next Page — have consisted of original music. However, those steeped in his craft know of his tremendous respect for the tradition of Black American music. Which extends to his collegial relationship with the true heavies on the scene.

“A lot of my work here in New York in the last 20 years has been with some of the jazz masters,” Silberstein explains. “So, I wanted to, first of all, play standards because I had never had a chance to record an album of standards. And also, to do it with the real guys, you know? The heroes.”

By any stretch, Silberstein is one of those “real guys.” JazzTimes has declared his output to be “struck through with passion and intimacy. The New York Times described him as a player who “improvises in a cutting tone and writes heady original tunes that seem to tug the straight-ahead jazz tradition in new directions.” Jazziz placed him among “the most acclaimed young string-benders in the genre.”

The opening track, “Serenata,” was composed in 1947 by Leroy Anderson, and the most famous version was one put to lyrics by Mitchell Parish and sung by Nat King Cole, with George Shearing on piano. “The minute I heard this song, I fell in love with it,” Silberstein says. “We kind of took it to a different place, but I’m happy with it.”

“Beija Flor,” composed by Nelson Cavaquinho, is a terrific gateway into Silberstein’s abiding love for Brazilian music, which he has explored extensively in past works. “It’s natural to play that song,” Silberstein says, noting Hart’s long association with Brazilian masters like Joao Gilberto.

Stylistically, Yotam bears the flame of Wes Montgomery in “Lo-Joe.” As T.J. English put it in the liner notes, “for a jazz guitarist, there is no higher calling.” This is a Coleman tune — which should be a standard, and is in Silberstein’s heart and mind: “It’s a great tune that I thought needs more recognition,” he says. “Hopefully, this will shed more light on George’s beautiful compositions.”

“If I Loved You” hails from the songbook of the masters: Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rogers, for the Broadway musical Carousel. Famously, Barbra Streisand gave it a spin in the early 1960s: here, Silberstein picks up a steel-string guitar, to spiritually fold into the material via a sense of folky lyricism.

The towering pianist Tommy Flanagan wrote the swinging calypso “Eclypso”: something of a party tune, one that’s a thrill to blow on. “Never Let Me Go” is a sublime ballad written by Jay Livinston, with lyrics by Ray Evans, and interpreted by the greatest jazz voices of all time, from Dinah Washington to Nancy Wilson.

Naturally, as a standards writer of the highest order, Miles Davis makes an appearance on Standards, by way of “Little Willie Leaps” — a contrafact of “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” that the future Prince of Darkness recorded with Charlie Parker.

Just after that tune displays Silberstein at his bebop best, Standards closes with the mother of them all: “Stella by Starlight.” But where some musicians might merely reheat that old standby, SIlberstein voyages to a completely new place — almost, appropriately for Silberstein, Brazilian.

“I'm just happy that they agreed to play with me,” Silberstein says of Coleman, Patitucci, and Hart. “It all seems like a dream come true to have a record with these guys with these legends.”

These songs have been performed, and performed, and performed, seemingly since time immemorial. But in these hands, the crystal is turned in the light once more, and catches more light than you could imagine. The album doesn’t just contain standards: it sets them.