NEW RELEASE !
World - September 2006

Harel Shachal & Anistar
Esh (Fire)

Harel Shachal & Anistar plays an innovative blend of Jazz, Gypsy, Balkan, Mediterranean and Traditional Middle-Eastern music.
By mixing traditional instruments, forms and harmonies together with a modern Jazz conception, 'Esh' is melding the sounds of the desert with the contemporary urban landscape of New York City & Tel Aviv.
Harel Shachal launched the Anistar group in spring of 2002 with the mission of using music to overcome fear and break down boundaries between historically estranged cultures.
Assembling its own unique sound from the various musical traditions of the Middle-East, Mediterranean, Africa, and America, Anistar at once inviting and challenging, familiar and exotic, ancient and modern.

Harel Shachal & Anistar are based in New York. The members of the band are originally from the USA and from the Middle East.
Harel Shachal plays Middle Eastern Saxophone and Clarinet. Harel takes his inspiration from the foremost iconoclasts and innovators in each idiom he has explored -- from Jazz and Be-Bop to Klezmer, Gypsy, Mediterranean, North African and Middle-Eastern music; from Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy and Henry Thredgill to Samir Srour (the Egyptian saxophonist) and the great Turkish clarinetists, Mustafa Kandirali, Sukru Tunar and Suffet Gundeger. Harel incorporates quartertones and Middle Eastern mellisma into his approach to the saxophone and the G Clarinet with a fluidity that demonstrates the depth of his exploration of the style. The freedom and driving sense of narrative in his improvisations evince an equal command of the Jazz aesthetic.

Enjoy the energy and craziness of gypsy music merged with the warmth and rhythm of the Middle East.

'Esh' (fire) by Harel Shachal & Anistar
Catalogue: MGD082 Barcode: 616892659822
Release Date: 15 September 2006

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