Jazz Articles about Anat Fort

Anat Fort: Swimming in a Sea of Motian

by Paul Olson
July 23, 2007

While her discography as a leader consisted, until this year, of only one self-released album (Peel, 1999), New York-based, Israeli-born composer/pianist Anat Fort has been working steadily for years. Few contemporary jazz pianists have as graceful and developed a playing style as Fort--her use of rests, her love of space, and her classically-imbued phrasing are, once you've encountered her, immediately recognizable. She's just as good a composer, however, and it's the songs on her 2007 ECM debut A Long Story ...

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by J Hunter
April 18, 2007

My first exposure to the ECM milieu--the singular look, the sharp sound, the hypnotic music--was with Keith Jarrett's 1975 opus The Köln Concert. After longtime immersion in my parents' West Coast-intensive record collection, this amazing work of crystalline beauty hit me like French New Wave hits an American movie buff. Some guy named Manfred Eicher was telling me, in effect, “We don't have to do this music the same old way! Free your ears and your mind will follow!

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by Martin Gladu
April 17, 2007

Notes twirl with thrilling beauty in Anat Fort's hands. Infused of the free jazz and 20th Century classical music aesthetics (especially the Second Viennese school), A Long Story, her first effort for ECM, successfully captures a talent of rare profundity and breadth. Her innate sense of textures, as well as her free-flowing lines and dramatic use of the sustain pedal, makes her a poetess of the ivories.

The peaceful solemnity of “Just Now, a recurrent theme of disarmingly ...

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by Budd Kopman
March 24, 2007

From the first notes of “Just Now," an attentive listener will recognize that A Long Story is going to be something special. The seemingly simple, Middle-Eastern tinged melody is treated with odd phrase lengths, keeping the listener decidedly off-balance, despite the direct harmonic progressions. Pianist Anat Fort's improvisations on the tune float around the barely felt pulse creating an atmosphere of calm, serene beauty, which nevertheless is quite taut beneath the surface. The rest of the album ...

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by Dan McClenaghan
March 22, 2007

Solemnity and reverence are two characteristics that come to mind on hearing the opening tune on Tel Aviv-born pianist Anat Fort's ECM Records debut, A Long Story. The simple, straightforward melody of “Just Now, Var. I" sounds biblically old, like music tapped from humanity's collective marrow; and it--and the entire set--fits well into the atmosphere of a good percentage of the material released on the prestigious German label, sounds that are spare, spacious, understated and mesmerizingly beautiful. All of the ...

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by Elliott Simon
March 22, 2007

A Long Story is a most satisfying chronicle that carefully explores pianist Anat Fort's delicate compositions. Fort has been provoking praise with a worldly style that blends Mid-Eastern hues into pieces that prominently feature her classical/jazz training. Like her playing, her compositions can straddle diverse worlds and impress with a sensitivity that is comfortable with tales that veer into free verse or melodies that may brush up against popular idioms. Admittedly influenced by the works of pianists ...

Anat Fort: A Long Story

by John Kelman
March 3, 2007

There are those who dream of the perfect group, but it's rare for an artist to get it so right the first time. A Long Story isn't exactly Anat Fort's first record (which was her self-released 1999 album Peel), but it's the Israeli expat's first to reach an international audience. Most people will find it their first exposure to this talented pianist, and it's notable for a number of reasons.

It marks the return to ECM of two intrepid players ...