Amelia Ya’el is an American, Chicago-based baritone sax player and composer, who approaches her instrument not as a singular tone generator but explores it as a most physical and highly resonant body, with the keys, metal, breath, and vibration functioning as equal partners in expression. She employs extended breathing technique, and especially circular breathing as an expressive device, timbral density, and long-form improvisational narrative, determined to transform her instrument’s physical intensity into resonant, socially aware sound.
Voices I is Ya’el’s debut solo album, recorded at Harold Washington University in Chicago in April 2022. Yael’s playing on this impressive album is intense, overblown, and deeply embodied, channeling physical exertion into bold and raw sound. The album offers four fiery and urgent architectures of complex distortions and layered textures that convey anger (listen to the opening piece, «Mechanics of Anger»), joy (in «Song of Peace»), and resilience (in «No Evil but Ignorance» and «Beneath the Waves»), reflecting Ya’el’s possessed approach and and powerful emotional impact, that brings to mind the seminal voices of Hamiet Bluiett and Colin Stetson.
In Voices I, breath becomes endurance, distortion becomes truth, and silence becomes charged with implication. Ya’el’s uncompromising voice leaves nothing withheld with a powerful performance that is as vulnerable as it is virtuosic, as intellectual as it is visceral. Clearly, Ya’el is a sonic force to reckon with.
Eyal Hareuveni
Amelia Ya’el (baritone saxophone)
