| Jazz |
An invitation to the spiced, borderless world of Nadav Remez’s jazz, Summit is a record that refuses to stay within the confines of a single imagination. It is, at once, intricate and unpredictable, a work where a dense, occasionally disorienting rhythmic foundation heightens the shadowy contours of a musical travel diary. These are notes jotted down, it seems, at the corners of countless restaurant tables scattered across the globe.
Remez’s music lives between worlds: modern jazz and Jewish folk, alternative rock and ancient mysticism, cinematic breadth and the urgency of improvisation. Summit crystallizes these disparate elements into a deep, unbroken narrative arc, shaped by memory, culture, and the raw human experience. Though the compositions span two decades, it wasn’t until a live performance three years ago that Remez realized how naturally they belonged together. “They spoke the same language,” he recalls. “I knew they had to coexist on the same album.”
This is the album’s secret strength: songs that have ripened over years, finding their precise place in a framework of finely woven arrangements, as delicate and intricate as lacework, perceptible only to the discerning ear and deeply satisfying to the seasoned jazz listener.
There are no easy resolutions on Summit. Opposites do not reconcile; they coexist. Earthbound grooves share space with weightless textures. Melodies with the patina of history flow into lines that have never existed before. “I didn’t set out to make an album about duality,” Remez admits. “But the album found me. These tensions are part of the emotional landscape.”
The album’s visual narrative mirrors its musical one. Each single reveals a fragment of the mountain, gradually unveiling the summit on the final cover art. This slow, deliberate unfolding reflects Remez’s broader vision: a patient, intentional journey toward clarity, cohesion, and artistic arrival. He has an affinity for composers who step aside from their own egos as instrumentalists, those whose hunger for composition serves the music above all else, and who invite collaborators into that service.
Remez’s artistic journey began at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts, an incubator of internationally recognized jazz talent. There, he absorbed a spectrum of musical traditions, both Western and Eastern, shaping them into his singular vision. In 2005, he earned a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, followed by a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory in 2008. Along the way, he studied under a constellation of modern masters, Joe Lovano, Billy Hart, George Garzone, Miguel Zénon, and Tim Miller among them.
His career since has been marked by collaborations that flirt with the edge of rock, yet it is the perfume of the East that he diffuses most vividly, almost stereoscopically, through his work. Anyone who has spent time in that part of the world will recognize the terrain: the sudden shift from grave, aching depths to passages of pure poetry. This is the territory Remez claims in Summit. Even its title, one suspects, is open to multiple interpretations, as layered, and as resonant, as the music itself.
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, August 9th 2025
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Musicians:
Nadav Remez – Guitar and Composition
Gregory Tardy – Saxophones and Clarinet
Guy Moskovich – Piano
Ben Tiberio – Bass
David Sirkis – Drums