🎙🎶 Shai Maestro: “This album is about welcoming people”

Released in March, The Guesthouse is the most ambitious project of the jazz pianist Shai Maestro to date. An album based on collaboration and musical exploration, it features guests like MARO, Immanuel Wilkins, or Michael Mayo. An acclaimed figure in contemporary jazz, Shai Maestro welcomes new musical forms and sounds in his latest album, crafting compositions that are both introspective and expansive. The Guesthouse also includes the pianist’s first lyric writing. Before his recent concert in Rotterdam, Shai Maestro gave an interview to BRAM Radio.

Listen back On Demand to the full interview, including several tracks from ‘The Guesthouse’, via the Mixcloud player above. Transcript summary below.

📻 Additionally, the interview’s broadcast premiere is on BRAM RADIO online radio station: Thursday 7 May, 15:00 + reruns in the following weeks. 

… every time we come here, the music really blossoms because of the way that people listen.

BRAM: On this album tour, you’re making stops in Rotterdam today, also Utrecht, and last November you performed in Amsterdam. What do you enjoy about coming to perform here in the Netherlands?

Shai Maestro: I have a long relationship with the Dutch audience. I come frequently to the North Sea Jazz Festival and the BIMHUIS. My booking agent is from here, and I love playing for the Dutch people. You guys are big culture lovers. I feel like there’s deep listening happening here, and a lot of respect for the music, and every time we come here, the music really blossoms because of the way that people listen. Audience is not judged only with the volume of the applause, but also with the quality of listening. That’s something that I really, really appreciate about the local audience.

BRAM: You’re going to be performing your new album, The Guesthouse. The name comes from a poem by Rumi. How does the journey to making an album usually start for you? Is The Guesthouse any different?

Shai Maestro: This was a long, long process that I started six years ago. The idea for Rumi’s poem came like two or one-and-a-half years ago, and that’s when the entire album kind of came together. But before that, there was the preparation of dealing with musical production. The record was really built around the guests. When I had the identity of the guests, and when I received the gifts that they gave me, I changed all of the pre-written material to accommodate what they gave me. This album, much like Rumi’s poem, is about welcoming people and about letting the guests change the house.

BRAM: You have several outstanding musicians on the record. What kind of influence did they have on you, either before making the album or during the process?

Shai Maestro: A lot. I’m a huge fan of all the musicians on the album, really. And when you have a deep admiration for the people that you work with, their style kind of rubs off on you, you know? And for example, with MARO, with the amazing singer, I got stuck with writing the lyrics for that song. But when I knew that she would be the one singing the song, and I imagined her voice singing that melody, that’s when the lyrics came out. Her influence and my admiration to her sound – it was almost like transcribing something from the future. Like a song that existed in the future, and I transcribed it. And that’s because of how much I admire her, for example.

Interview by Dominik Kucera for BRAM RADIO.