Gregory Golub - African And Other Jazz Passions

Jazz

Gregory Golub is an Israeli composer, jazz pianist and songwriter, born in the USSR, and a self-taught pianist from the age of 12. He received a formal musical education in Russia and Ukraine, participated in a Jazz Festival in Russia and received an excellence award for the best original jazz compositions. Gregory has been living in Israel since 1990, where he has written and composed numerous multi-genre musical compositions, songs as well as philosophic and poetic texts.

On this new album, Golub’s compositions have a narrative quality, they take us across continents and borders. Such success requires a double requirement: technical mastery and a keen sense of interpretation. The arrangements reinforce an impression of continuous discovery, guiding the listener through a succession of moods and scenes with discreet assurance.

Gregory Golub’s musical writing, driven by such an obvious vitality, betrays a composer for whom the act of creation is an almost jubilant pleasure.

With its deliberately evocative title, this album evokes throughout its 12 tracks a series of sound postcards: Latin rhythms, African touches, fleeting stylistic digressions à la Paolo Conte (in the voice as well as on the keyboard) which suggest the different stages of a thrilling journey, without ever falling into pastiche. Each piece has its own character, its fragments of culture, memory or imagination, and nothing is forced or excessive.

A form of narration runs through African And Other Jazz Passions, and the result is an album of rare and almost fragile balance, diverse in its conception, but of a natural fluidity in its execution. What at first appears almost too simple and too fluid reveals, with attentive listening, a compositional intelligence of great precision.

Playing the keyboards (piano, keyboards) but also the vocals, and dealing with all the arrangements and the production, Gregory Golub erases the standardization, the too easy low-cost journey, alternating in this album highly structured passages, anchored in clear harmonic frameworks, with others which fragment into freer explorations. The balance between these poles is not arbitrary, it is carefully calibrated, giving the album both coherence and unpredictability. This is the surprise through the whole journey that African And Other Jazz Passions offers us. An album of a very personal, refined form of world jazz, combining free compositions and arrangements and careful production. Subtle, playful and sometimes intimate, this opus seduces through the composer-performer’s communicative pleasure and the balance he offers us between simplicity and sophistication.

What remains, after listening to this opus, is a sensation of beauty and honesty: an album offered by Golub wearing his heart on his sleeve, which does not pretend to be more than it is, which values jazz with clarity, restraint, and endless moments of joy… qualities that are rare and difficult to achieve.

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, April 1st 2026

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Musicians:
Gregory Golub: piano, electric piano, vocals, composer, arranger, music producer

Tracklisting: