Noemi Liba Biography
Freefall, the remarkable debut album from Australian singing sensation Noemi Liba, is testimony to an eclectic musical apprenticeship, a life at the edge of the musical frontier. More an epiphany than a collection of songs, Freefall is the realization of Noemi’s relentless search for music that comes from within. “Through body and soul, music is an art and communication tool, a sensual and connected experience,” she says. “I wanted this album to be faithful to that.”
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Noemi has been performing solo and in ensemble since 1992, delivering an enthralling, inimitable mix of pop, jazz and Middle Eastern-flavoured music in six languages across Australia, the U.S.A, Canada, Asia and the Middle East.
Early in her career, armed with a guitar, a bag of songs, and her beguiling, honeyed voice, Noemi roamed the Australian festival circuit (Port Fairy Folk Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival), garnering popular and critical acclaim as a distinctive and gifted singer-songwriter. She has since undertaken formal jazz training, completing the Advanced Diploma of Music Performance (Jazz and Contemporary) at NMIT, Melbourne in 2002 – in addition to a Bachelor Arts in Literature and Philosophy - and has studied with Iraqi master Oud player, violinist and composer Yair Dalal, and Frank Zappa pianist Allan Zavod, who has described Noemi as “One of Australia’s true innovative talents”.
This formal training has complemented Noemi’s deeper musical odyssey, a decade of inner searching for her muse. Born into a Jewish family – her grandfather was a classical tenor singer, her mother a manager for jazz bands, her father a doctor and intellectual – Noemi wandered the Middle East (Israel, Jordan, Egypt) from an early age in search of her heritage, and her future, both culturally and musically.
Her former band Kesh, with its Middle Eastern, drum and bass, and jazz-tinged influences - a precursor to her current eclectic sound - wooed new audiences with their infectious grooves and exotic arrangements whilst providing a forum for some of Australia’s most accomplished and innovative musicians (including Svetlana Bunic, accordionist with award-winning gypsy crossover act Monsieur Camembert). Noemi also fronted the highly acclaimed Hadassa, described as a “perfumed Middle Eastern art music ensemble” blending Middle Eastern and Turkish songs and rhythms with improvised, contemporary sounds. Noemi has also fronted jazz big bands in performances around Melbourne, performed with Doug de Vries as a soloist in the Borboleta, a Brasilian music ensemble, in addition to continuing solo and ensemble shows of her original compositions.
By 2004, having performed everywhere from concert halls to music festivals, intimate clubs and bars and on radio and TV at home and internationally (including Melbourne Concert Hall; solo shows at Melbourne’s premier jazz venue, Bennetts Lane; the Vodaphone Arena Melbourne for the International Music Festival; the David Citadel Hilton Hotel, Jerusalem) Noemi believed her music had reached a ceiling, and that it was time to find new ways to express herself.
Aiming to give coherency to her diverse musical oeuvre, Noemi recruited some of Australia’s hottest musicians - including former Frank Zappa pianist Allan Zavod, and producer Dorian West (formerly of hit 90s pop act Boom Crash Opera, and composer for the TV series X factor) - and hit the studio to record her debut album. The result was one of the most inventive yet accessible records of recent years. Malcolm Fielding, of ABC Radio in Melbourne, described the “Wonderfully crafted songs... ‘Too Late’ and ‘Rain’ are intricate mini masterpieces”; while John Carver of PBS Radio called it “extraordinary, spectacular... leaves you wanting more.”
On Freefall, Noemi’s plaintive, soulful vocal flourishes caress the lush soundscapes - soaring string arrangements, intricate eastern percussion, loops, samples and electronic beats – to create a musical hybrid unique yet identifiable, a contemporary sound wrought from the global, cross-cultural milieu. “I consider myself a music ethnologist,” says Noemi. “In America I learnt music from native Americans…In Jordan I drew musicians from everywhere. I’ve spent my life exploring music’s different colours and spaces.”
Attempts to define Freefall as jazz, eastern, world or trance hint at the eclectic and complex nature of the songs. But this very personal musical vision defies easy comparison. Among her broad influences, Noemi counts female vocalists Bjork, Kate Bush and Billy Holiday, punk and new wave bands of her youth such as the Cure and The Ramones, local Melbourne underground acts like The Moffs and Kim Salmon, contemporary instrumentalist/composer Trilok Gurtu, and the jazz instrumentations of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. Indeed, jazz horn lines undeniably influence the string lines arranged by Noemi for the album.
Noemi is a natural lyricist, having studied philosophy and literature in addition to publishing a book of poetry. Her songs convey, not narratives, but “snatches and moments”, employing minimal, elliptical lyrics to “illuminate rather than communicate. They frame the moment rather than describe it,” she says.
Freefall has affirmed Noemi’s musical depth and sophistication, establishing her as one of Australia’s truly cosmopolitan singer-songwriters. It has also catapulted Noemi to the world stage, with her music in high demand as she embarks on collaborations with other performers internationally. World-renowned Indonesian performance artist Heri Dono, a veteran of Biennale exhibitions in Venice, Shanghai, Sydney, Havana and Singapore (he will present Christo with an award at the Florence Biennale later this year) co-opted Noemi to accompany a performance in Byron Bay in 2005; while Noemi compiled string arrangements for Yair Dalal and the Chicago Oriental Orchestra, joining them on a North America tour (New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles) in August and September 2005, after which she will decamp to Montreal, Europe and the UK to pursue her solo projects, in addition to giving a seminar on “Music and the Core Self” at the Genesis Festival in the U.S.
Noemi’s evocative, spectral soundscapes, while marked in recent times by the languages and sounds of the Middle East, are ultimately a conduit for the “the music that is inside me,” she says. On this she is uncompromising, because only in this way can “my music be beautiful,” she continues. In the coming months Noemi will take her music, derived from around the world, back out into the world. She will be in freefall.
Stuart Braun
