An Israeli Jazz Musician In New York: Guy Mintus
“New York is the place where people connect in the most unexpected way,” said Guy Mintus, sitting in a Szechuan restaurant on the Upper West Side, eating boiled fish.
He has curly hair and dark eyes, and smiles shyly when talking to others. Wearing a grey jacket, with a backpack beside him, he looked like any college student — until a guy walking out of the restaurant spotted him.
“Mr. Mintus! Oh my God, I can’t believe I can see you in person here. You played beautifully…”
An Israeli-born jazz pianist and composer, Mintus has played throughout Europe, North America and the Middle East, sharing the stage with Grammy winners and jazz greats including Jon Hendricks, Jimmy Cobb, Johnny O’Neal and Jimmy Owens. He started the Guy Mintus Trio three years ago, and it has performed around New York City and recorded an album. Downbeat Magazine has praised him as a rising star in New York’s jazz circles, though he’s only 24.
Peter Hum, a jazz writer for the Ottawa Citizen, called him a “talented young musical emissar who expertly blend the folkloric sound of his homeland with the improvising aesthetic of jazz.”
Mintus’s parents are both lawyers, but Mintus’s father, Zeev Mintus, owned a large record collection. “They don’t play any instrument but they are very musical,” Guy Mintus said.
He learned to play the keyboard at 10, but what drew him to jazz was the Thelonious Monk song, “‘Round Midnight.” “I bought all the albums with the song on them,” said Mintus. “This was the only jazz song I knew.”
Exploring jazz through those albums, Mintus became interested in improvisation. A teacher at Mintus’s music high school began to teach him jazz privately at 14. “I fell in love with it thanks to him,” Mintus said.
After the obligatory three years in the Israeli army, he got a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music. His music career in New York began with a battered piano in Bettolona, an Italian restaurant in Harlem.
“It was the first month I moved to New York, ” Mintus recalled. “I was having pizza with my friends there, and saw a piano in the corner of the restaurant. And I thought I had to come back.”
He returned to the restaurant during lunchtime another day, pointed at the piano, and asked the staff, “Can I play a little bit?”
“Sure…but it’s very old,” workers replied.
“You can tell no one ever played it and no one will play it,” Mintus said. “I had enough stubbornness.”
He earned a free pizza for his first performance and kept returning to Bettolona to enjoy himself until, one Sunday, someone approached and asked if he’d like to play with Big Band on Monday.
“I didn’t even have a suit,” Mintus said. “I got the suit, practiced all the pieces, and went to the Garage, a restaurant and jazz bar in SoHo. It was great fun. From there I came to know many musicians.”
Since Mintus graduated almost two years ago, he has remained based in New York, living on the Upper West Side with three roommates. He tours about a quarter of every year.
On a winter morning, Mintus came downtown to practice with Spanish flamenco singer Alfonso Mogaburo Cid, who would appear with his trio on Sunday. A mutual friend connected them, but they’d never met.
In Cid’s apartment near First Avenue, Mintus took out his music; Cid then printed out the lyrics he had written. As Mintus sat down at the piano and started playing, Cid clapped along with the melody, singing his new song about love — “If It Were The Moon.”
After the music stopped, they stood up, shook hands and hugged. “Ole!” Cid said. “Let’s do a deal. Would you be willing to not pay me for the Sunday performance, but help me compose some charts?”
Mintus replied joyfully, “I’d love to. I love doing music with you.”
“You say ‘Ole’ when you see or hear something beautiful,” Cid explained later. That morning, Cid said “ole” many times, and Mintus began adopting the word as they practiced.
Two days later, at the Williamsburg Music Center in Brooklyn, a performance called “Many Voices of Love: Guy Mintus Trio & Guest Vocalists” would start in an hour and half. Mintus wore a white shirt and black vest. His bassist and drummer were rehearsing and testing microphones.
“We didn’t earn a lot money,” Mintus said later. “If we go outside New York City, we can earn a lot more. But it’s essential to keep playing in New York.”
They love this cozy venue. “I like the wooden ceiling, it’s like a floor,” said the drummer Philippe Lemm, a fellow Manhattan School of Music graduate.
Bassist Dan Pappalardo recently moved to New York from Ohio because “in New York you can meet so many musicians.”
The guest vocalists gradually arrived: Cid, Sivan Arbel and Indian singer Roopa Mahadevan. Arbel and Mahadevan had performed with Mintus many times. “We have such amazing connection when we play,” said Arbel. “The moment I thought of something, we always said the same thing at the same time.”
Mintus — who though he grew up in Israel is half Iraqi, a quarter Moroccan and a quarter Polish — embraces many cultures and incorporates them into his music. “All kinds of music, it’s great,” he said after the Sunday performance.
He also tries to make that point through his music. After the Gaza conflict in Israel in 2014, Mintus composed a piece “Our Journey Together.” “The idea was to show co-existence and peace,” he said. “Right now there are more boundaries than we need and they are separating us.”
