Tal Yahalom - Solo Standards (2023)

Throughout the years I've been constantly fascinated by what the guitar can do acoustically, just by itself, played live without any additions or manipulations. Exploring these possibilities brought me a lot of joy and satisfaction, opening up new musical areas that I'm happy to share with you through this release.

With a huge chunk of free (and alone) time during the you-know-what, arrangements for a record started piling up, with each tune bringing forward a different approach to solo guitar playing as well as a new technique to work through.

Some are textural and classical-like in nature, exploring the use of harmonics, melodic canons and voice-leading, while others are driven by groove and adapt more pianistic or orchestral ideas to the guitar. What unifies all these pieces is how new they were to me, and that putting together these arrangements felt like discovering important seeds of my solo vocabulary.

The history of recorded jazz standards is infinitely rich, and diving into it with an album of my own feels important, scary and very exciting all at once. Standards have been and probably always will be a big part of my musical development, and are the perfect platform to explore new ideas and connections. Also, so many of them are just very pretty... So it's only natural to share new vocabulary and perspectives through a world that many can relate to and have a history with.

I hope you'll check out this collection of songs as a whole as it was intended! Whether you crack open a bottle of wine, get up and dance, drive along listening or just chill in your favorite corner of the earth - enjoy the music, have a good time, and I hope this music might even open up new ideas and possibilities like so many records have done for me.