Today’s guest first came to my attention for his sizzling covers of Tigran Hamasyan songs in the 20-teens. Ever the master of precision, Yogev Gabay made a name for himself as one of the “go-tos” for music in the borderlands between prog and jazz that drummers like Arthur Hnatek made famous.
Asked what he’d tell his teenage self about career expectations, Yogev muses that he needed to be brave enough to “disappoint” his younger self (because the studio work he’d pictured ceased to exist as a career path), but adds that playing gigs for money can be a sort of prison, and that he’s glad he made the choice to pursue the music he dreamed of playing, consequences-be-damned. (I suspect Young Yogev would be impressed.)
I was also very curious to learn Yogev’s approach to learning to improvise, and how it tracks with my own experience. And we did a decent deep-dive on that topic.
But we also talked hand technique, metronome practice, and memorizing angular odd-meter rhythms so well you forget them.
I feel we illuminated some new ground extrapolating from the process of learning to improvise over an odd-meter prog-jazz vamp to how it feels to learn to improvise writ large, i.e. learning “benchmarks” for when something is “medium rare” vs “well done”. (In drums, you want well-done ;)
Above all, Yogev’s enthusiasm for learning is inspiring and disarming. I suspect many of us will practice more this week after listening to this interview.
Hope you enjoy!