Noa Fort - Everyday Actions (2021)

Israeli-born vocalist, pianist, composer, and music therapist Noa Fort is blurring the lines between written and improvised, group and individual, inner and outer soundscape, giving and receiving; all on the path to healing, with music.

In 2018 Fort released her debut album as a bandleader and composer, ‘No World Between Us’. Critically acclaimed, its release led to bookings at the DC Jazz Festival and BRIC Jazz Festival. All About Jazz called it “an album of comforting originality on all fronts… lyrics brimming with timeless themes”.

In this new release, Everyday Actions, her second album as a leader and composer, Fort is using her voice and piano to draw abstract musical pictures. Abandoning lyrics almost completely, it is the timbre, tone, and emotion in her voice that bring about the lyrical depth of the songs. Borrowing from her work as a therapist, Fort is giving space to the listener to bring his or her own meaning and interpretation to each piece.

Recording began on March 16, 2020, moments before NYC went into months-long lockdown. The uncertainty and wariness were in the air as the quartet recorded their takes. Later in the pandemic, Fort decided to continue the project with solo pieces, expressing in sound the solitude that was the characteristic of the past year. Eventually, these became the bulk of the album.

The music celebrates the mundane and the historical, the big and the small. Nature’s evokes the walks in urban nature that kept her sane during months of lockdown; Rovno is a piece inspired by the historic Jewish town of Rovno, now in Ukraine, her ancestor’s hometown and the site of a horrific WWII massacre of Jewish families. Tunnels and Everyday Actions explore the ways repetition with tiny variations can bring about big change. Endless Tea Party starts with a single melodic phrase, sung time and time again into the piano’s soundboard and strings; within the soundscape that is created the tune evolves. Deeping is an epic twist and turn over a mysterious pedal point. Home Scratch, written originally for a group of improvisers, evokes the need to move around while being bound at home. The Stories We Tell captures the frustration and anger experienced in an unbalanced relationship. Song For a New Year, written while Fort was a composer-in-residence at a small town in Minnesota as the Jewish New Year was celebrated, captures the optimism of a fresh start in sound.

The wide experience Fort has with the human experience informs her work as a composer/performer; the minute shifts in mood, attention, and color are all taken in as important information. This is her work as a composer and improviser; listening to her bandmates, tuned into the soundscape of the other person, of herself. It is in everyday actions that healing can take place, not in the big resolutions that are made and forgotten; changes of pattern, slow attention to daily actions, tiny moments of clarity.

Personnel:
Noa Fort - voice, piano, compositions
Josh Deutsch - trumpet
Dan Loomis - bass
Ronen Itzik - drums