Anat Fort
Leader Anat Fort was born near Tel Aviv and studied classical piano as a child. Also improvising and writing her own tunes from an early age she naturally gravitated toward jazz, although her pieces were also steeped, from the outset, in the colours and atmospheres of the Middle East. Formative influences included Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and “very much of the music on ECM” which she heard first as a teenager in the late 1980s. In the mid-1990s she came to the USA to study jazz, wanting to balance a natural tendency towards freer playing with a proper understanding of the tradition. Her teachers have included jazz greats Rufus Reid and Harold Mabern. She also studied briefly with Paul Bley. In the last several years she has become an influential figure on NYC’s alternative jazz scene, but is also a highly regarded player in her homeland. She now splits her time between Israel and the US.