Amos Hoffman, guitar & oud
Noam Lemish, piano
Miles Wick, bass
Alex Aspinall drums

$20 cover charge at the door (cash or venmo)
byob
reservations – 415-586-3733

The Amos Hoffman & Noam Lemish Quartet offers an inspired blend of jazz and Jewish folk melodies. Amos Hoffman is an internationally renowned oud virtuoso and innovator; Noam Lemish is a multi-faceted, world-class pianist-composer and professor at York University’s Department of Music in Toronto, Canada. For years, Amos and Noam have been collecting Jewish melodies from different parts of the world including Kurdish, Yemenite, Moroccan, Ladino, Russian and Israeli songs. The quartet’s lyrical and vibrant reimaginings of beloved Jewish melodies have been captivating audiences all across North America. In their work together, Hoffman and Lemish create a refreshing and compelling sound, filled with vibrant sonorities, unique instrument combinations and compelling arrangements. The renditions are simultaneously faithful to the songs’ origins and rooted in African American and Afro-Caribbean musical traditions. The result is a joyous, uplifting celebration, texturally rich music, filled with groove, lyrical melodies and outstanding solos.

Amos Hoffman is an Israeli jazz oudist and guitarist known worldwide as a pioneer in fusing the rhythms and melodic themes of the Middle East with Modern Jazz. Hoffman started playing guitar at the age of 6, and oud a few years later. He studied guitar privately, and later attended the prestigious Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His search for new musical experiences led him first to Amsterdam, and then to New York City, where he played jazz with both established musicians and up and coming talents like Jason Lindner, bassist Avishai Cohen, and Claudia Acuna. To date, Hoffman has recorded multiple albums, The Dreamer (1999), Na’ama (2006), Evolution (2008), Carving (2010), Back to the City (2015), Pardes (2018) and Stories (2020). He has also contributed on dozens more for artists in Israel and worldwide including Avishai Cohen, Kiko Berenguer (Spain), and Jan Mlynarski (Poland). In 2013 Amos was awarded one of Israel’s most prestigious prizes – The Landau Prize for Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in the field of Jazz. Now based in the U.S., Hoffman looks forward to creating new musical adventures and reaching an even larger audience. www.amoshoffman.com

Noam Lemish has never felt inclined to pick a lane. Maybe his hyphenated identity as an Israeli-American-Canadian has helped inspire his multiplicity and general disinclination to follow stylistic guidelines. Whatever the reason, over the course of three decades of intensive musical study and creation he’s always sought to expand the scope of his exploration, often blurring or ignoring deeply etched boundaries between genres, peoples, and traditions. He’s a jazz artist and a classical composer of chamber works, an improviser and an accompanist, an intrepid cross-cultural investigator and an interpreter of contemporary composition. Based for the past decade in Toronto, Lemish is best known for leading or co-leading several celebrated ensembles. In 2022 he released Twelve, a JUNO nominated album of his original works for jazz orchestra featuring many of Canada’s most prominent jazz artists. The critically hailed 2018 album Pardes features the quartet he co-leads with Israeli guitarist and oud expert Amos Hoffman. In December 2023, Lemish published his first book Transcultural Jazz: Israeli Musicians and Multi-Local Music Making with Routledge’s Transnational Studies in Jazz Series. The monograph studies jazz performance and composition through the examination of the transcultural practices of Israeli jazz musicians and their impact globally. Lemish holds a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Jazz Performance and a Masters degree in Composition from the University of Toronto. He joined York University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music in July of 2020. www.noamlemish.com

Video links:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U4k_M-j2XI&ab_channel=NoamLemishhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIjp28SWeOk&ab_channel=NoamLemish

Audio:https://noamlemish.bandcamp.com/album/parde