Tamar Sagiv - Shades of Mourning (2025)

Tracklist

01. Shades of Mourning
02. Roots
03. Intermezzo
04. And Maybe You Never Used to Be
05. My Clouds of Grief
06. The End of Times
07. Imaginary World
08. Prelude
09. In My Blue

This is the debut album of cellist Tamar Sagiv, who both plays, with an added violinist and violist on four middle tracks (the contrapuntal parts on the final In My Blue are performed by Sagiv), and has composed the nine pieces here. The album's genesis, Sagiv says, began at her grandmother's deathbed, where I didn't realize then that the piece I wrote while she was taking her last breaths would grow into an album, nor did I yet know I was a composer. Some may say that there is more than that to becoming a composer, but the music has the quality of being ripped from personal experience. In addition to personal loss, Sagiv indicates that the grief involved is collective, referring to the ongoing war in the Middle East. The basic structures are tonal and simple, but Sagiv inflects them in various directions, taking ideas from minimalism, jazz, coloristic composition, and more, all without losing her basic voice, and the album as a whole gathers quite a moving effect, with the small jazz accents of the concluding Prelude and In My Blue (her reference is Chet Baker's Almost Blue) taking on a transcendent quality. An impressive debut that fuses performance talents and composition in an unusual and fresh way.

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