Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

CHRISTIAN MENDOZA GROUP

The Christian Mendoza Group unites several generations: apart from young pianist Mendoza, you’ll recognize woodwind players Ben Sluijs and Joachim Badenhorst and drummer Teun Verbruggen (Jef Neve Trio). The cream of Belgian jazz, really. The band won the 2009 Tremplin Jazz competition in Avignon, which launched their career in Europe.

The Christian Mendoza Group draws inspiration from several genres, such as jazz, pop, world music, crossover, contemporary classical music, free improvisation, and even musicals and dance. Their concerts take many shapes: minimalist landscapes, buzzing chaos, complex rhythms, and the pure simplicity of a subdued song. Fontman Christian Mendoza writes cutomized new pieces, in which the search for the right balance between composition and improvisation are placed centrally.

YARON HERMAN

Yaron Herman is barely thirty, but he’s a rising star of world jazz. You could call him the French Jef Neve. Growing up in Tel Aviv, he was a promising basketball player. But after a knee injury, he was forced to explore other paths and developed his talent on the piano. He moved to Paris where he got the chance to give a series of lectures at the Sorbonne before having reached the age of 25. Herman soon became the talk of the town among jazz musicians. Thanks to his Israeli roots, he has an Eastern heritage, while also being at home in klezmer and traditional Western music. He combines his young enthusiasm with romantic lyricism. Live, his compositions become much more powerful, and he blew away the crowd at the 2009 Gent Jazz festival.