Oren Neiman
Musician and Composer—June through August ’21
Website orenneiman.com | Based In Ossining, New YOrk
Q: Your residency took place during the middle of COVID. And yet, your first new album after being in Berkeley was called “Serenity Now.” Can you say more about the title?
A: When I left Berkeley, the first project I was aching to do was a collection of songs I started writing there. I immediately connected with some people and said, “let’s start working” on this. I called it “Serenity Now” in part because that was the aspiration, to find a sense of balance and perspective trying to be a parent and create music during this difficult time. But I realized that Serenity Now is actually a great description of our family’s time at Peleh, an oasis during the craziness. The album should be coming out in the summer of 2023.
Q: How do you find serenity, then, as a working artist and a working parent? And what did you take in terms of life-work balance from the Peleh experience?
A: During the residency I felt an important shift, from wanting the art and family life to be totally separate, to being more comfortable with them bleeding into each other. It changed both my art and my parenting, in a way that is both more healthy and more practical. And that model of integrating them has continued after coming back to New York.
Q: Who did you meet out here, and how did those partnerships develop?
A: For instance, I had a chance to meet [musician, rabbi and cantor] Jessica Kate Meyer, with whom I collaborated on the album Shabbat in the Kitchen. I enjoyed playing with all the musicians at The Kitchen [an innovative synagogue in San Francisco] and had a chance to come back and play with them at their Gala event. Having composer and musician Chris Houston live in the adjacent house gave me a great partner to bounce things off of, which allowed me to write the music for a play with Robin Goldfin, “Flawless,” which will be produced by the Theater for the New City in New York in the fall of 2023.
Oren Neiman is a Guitar/Mandolin player and a composer. His compositions explore a combination of Jazz sensbility with Middle Eastern rhythms and melody.
Oren’s current projects and collaborations include: Oren’s new jazz trio with a forthcoming album “Serenity Now” to be released in the summer of 2023; a collaboration with playwright Robin Goldfin on the play “Flawless” which will be produced by Theater for the New city in NY in fall 2023; The band “Sha’ar” whose most recent project “Jazz and Justice Suite” produced for NJPAC’s James Moody Jazz Festival can be found online; The energetic acoustic duo “Isra-Alien” led by fellow Israeli guitar player Gilad Ben Zvi.
Oren was also the Guitar/Mandolin chair in NYTF’s award winning production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish.
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