| Jazz |
What We Are Made Of: Shalosh and the Sound of Restless Humanity
The lights dim. A single piano figure, measured, almost austere, floats into the room, recalling the disciplined clarity of a conservatory recital. Then, gradually, something shifts. The pulse deepens. The bass begins to prowl. Drums gather force. Within minutes, what began as chamber music has transformed into something urgent and physical, a groove that feels closer to late-1990s rock than to any jazz club orthodoxy. This is not a rupture; it is a metamorphosis. And it is the natural habitat of Shalosh.
Few contemporary trios move so fluidly across stylistic borders. Jazz is the foundation, but it is only one element in a vocabulary that also embraces Western classical composition, Arabic musical modalities, pop melody and the visceral charge of rock. Over more than a decade together, the ensemble has developed a musical language that feels at once searching and assured, restless in its curiosity, yet unified in its purpose.
“From the very beginning of SHALOSH, we’ve always said that we would never confine ourselves to any one genre, and that we would keep our music as open as possible,” drummer Matan Assayag explains. “It’s the best way for us to fully commit to every piece, and the only way to remain authentic.”
That philosophy animates What We Are Made Of, the trio’s sixth album and fourth with the Munich-based ACT Music. Recorded in Berlin, the project captures a band that has grown increasingly sophisticated in its architecture. Where earlier releases leaned more heavily on raw propulsion, this one feels more sculpted, its dynamic arcs carefully shaped, its contrasts more deliberate. The tension between fragility and force has rarely sounded so finely calibrated.
Pianist Gadi Stern brings a concert-hall precision to his touch, clean voicings, luminous upper-register lines, yet he is equally comfortable destabilizing a passage with rhythmic displacement or percussive attack. Bassist David Michaeli provides not just harmonic grounding but narrative counterpoint, often introducing motifs that subtly redirect a composition’s emotional trajectory. Assayag’s drumming, by turns explosive and restrained, binds the music together; even in its quietest moments, there is a sense of coiled energy.
Shalosh’s approach to reinterpretation reveals their analytical bent. When Stern revisits familiar material, he does so with the instinct of a composer rather than a nostalgic revivalist.
“When I approach a cover, I’m always searching for what’s missing from the original interpretation,” he says. “Take Barbie Girl. It’s a brilliantly cynical song, with excellent lyrics, in a minor key and built around a melancholy melody, but the performance is very much in the mold of 1990s Europop. I analyzed all the elements to see how they could be reassembled and brought closer to the essence of the song.”
In their hands, the familiar hook is refracted through harmonic tension and rhythmic elasticity, the irony sharpened rather than softened.
The trio’s version of Don’t Look Back in Anger emerged more spontaneously. “I was walking during a trip to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, and the rhythm just came to me,” Stern recalls. “I recorded it on my phone, and the idea took shape in about fifteen minutes.” What results is not a straightforward homage but a reinvention: the anthem’s Britpop sweep recast as a surging, syncopated meditation.
Other transformations required patience. The group’s modernist reimagining of Torn had an earlier, sprawling 12-minute incarnation that felt, in Michaeli’s words, “unfocused.” Guidance during the Berlin sessions clarified the structure, what to subtract, what to preserve, until the piece revealed its internal logic. The new version unfolds with cinematic pacing, its thematic fragments introduced, dismantled and reassembled with architectural clarity.
The album’s defining quality, however, may be the palpable sense of collective trust. Even in slow-tempo pieces—where space and silence demand vulnerability, the trio maintains a remarkable unity of intention. Micro-gestures matter: a brushed cymbal swell answering a piano sigh; a bass harmonic echoing a melodic fragment. These details create the impression of three musicians not merely performing together but listening in real time, adjusting and responding with instinctive precision.
“The group is, above all, a refuge where we can express ourselves freely and share our ideas and opinions,” Assayag says. “We accept one another as we are, and every song is the result of collective work. You can hear that in the music, the diversity of influences and experiences that define us. That’s why we titled the album What We Are Made Of. SHALOSH celebrates freedom, the beauty of contrasts, the importance of listening to one another, and the profoundly human process of creative searching and discovery, qualities that feel especially important right now.”
That emphasis on shared humanity resonates beyond a single release. Another recent project on ACT, from trumpeter Peter Somuah, similarly foregrounds lyrical warmth and cross-cultural dialogue. If there is a thematic through-line emerging from the label’s 2026 catalog, it may be an insistence on music as connective tissue, an antidote to fragmentation.
To encounter Shalosh in concert is to experience that connective impulse in real time. A passage that begins with near-scholastic restraint can, without warning, surge into a driving backbeat reminiscent of turn-of-the-millennium alternative rock. Heads nod. Shoulders move. Then, just as suddenly, the energy recedes into a whisper, leaving a solitary melodic line suspended in the air.
When the final notes fade, what lingers is not merely the memory of stylistic dexterity, but the sensation of having witnessed a conversation, three voices, distinct yet interwoven, constructing something larger than themselves.
In an era eager to categorize, Shalosh offers something rarer: music that resists confinement, insists on dialogue and reminds listeners, with quiet conviction, what they too might be made of.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, February 14th 2026
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To buy this album (March 27, 2026)
Musicians :
Gadi Stern – piano
David Michaeli – double bass
Matan Assayag – drums
Track Listing:
01 Ella Plays (Shalosh) 04:28
02 Hysteria (M. Bellamy, D. Howard, C. Wolstenholme) 03:47
03 Once Upon a Melody (Shalosh) 03:51
04 Don’t Look Back in Anger (N. T. Gallagher) 04:20
05 Point of Gravity (Shalosh) 04:25
06 Valley Song (D. Samborsky) 05:25
07 Torn (S. Cutler, A. Preven, P. Thornalley) 03:08
08 Barbie Girl (S. Rasted, C. Norreen, R. Dif, L. Nystrøm) 04:11
09 Circle (Shalosh) 04:55
Recorded on September 10 – 11, 2025
Recorded by Klaus Scheuermann
Mixed and mastered by Klaus Scheuermann
Produced by Andreas Brandis