$25 Cover @ the Door / Start 8pm / Doors 7:30pm / Seated Show
Gabriela Martina and Maxim Lubarsky invite you on a journey through sound exploration and improvisation. This performance is a result of a year-long research and experimentation in the art of duo playing and spontaneous creation.
Maxim Lubarsky
“Here you have a marvelously endowed talent. This is the musicianship and artistic sensitivity at its highest level. Of such ingredients are great musical memories made and lives enriched thereby”
– Joyce Miller (The Item, Sumter, SC)
A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Maxim Lubarsky started his career as a classical pianist. When he was 7 years old, he began his musical education at the
famous Stolyarsky School of Music, where his father, a member of the piano faculty and a renowned pianist, was his teacher and mentor. Later Maxim received a master’s degree from the Odessa State Conservatory, where professor Evilina Kovalenko was his piano instructor.
During his last years in school, Lubarsky acquired a love for jazz music and founded his first group, Art Session, with whom he toured, played numerous venues in the Ukraine, and won first place in several competitions. While playing and touring with Art Session, he continued his classical career, playing solo recitals and performing with the Odessa State Symphony Orchestra. During his years at the conservatory, he was a highly recognized pianist and toured extensively in Israel, France, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece, and the U.S.
After graduating from the conservatory, Lubarsky decided to pursue jazz education, which brought him to Berklee College of Music, where he studied with such renowned musicians as Joanne Brackeen, Danilo Pérez, Charlie Banacos, Hal Crook, and Joe Lovano, to name a few. At Berklee, he was recipient of BEST scholarship and the Berklee Technics Piano Award in 2002.
Maxim has been involved in numerous projects and recordings with performers such as Terry Lynn Carrington, Dave Samuels, Greg Osby, E.J Strickland, Gabrielle Goodman, Dave Liebman and Tiger Okioshi. He co-leads Macayú Jazz Chamber Trio and leads Maxim Lubarsky Quartet. He has also been performing, recording and touring with Gabrielle Goodman as pianist and music director.
Maxim has appeared at number of festivals including St. Petersburg Music Fest (Russia), Spoleto Festival (SC), Beantown Festival (MA), Diacetum Festival (Italy), “Usadba Jazz” Festival (Russia), ArtNaples Festival (FL), “Krivoy Rog” festival (Ukraine), Cambridge Jazz Festival (MA), Salem Jazz and Soul Festival (MA), Bethel Art Festival (PA). He has been a regular at the Spoleto festival in Charleston, S. Carolina where in the summer of 2012 he performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Festival Symphony Orchestra.
Maxim has appeared on many recordings as a leader and sideman including : “I’ll be around”,“The Macayù Trio”, Sandra Aran-Maxim Lubarsky – “Intimately”, Rosalita Agrest/Maxim Lubarsky - Musical Journey, C’est Si Bon - Live at The BPC to name a few.
Maxim continues an active performing career in Boston and New York, as well as touring internationally. He has been invited numerous times with masterclasses to China, South Africa and Russia.
Gabriela Martina
Gabriela Martina is a vocalist, composer, and bandleader who grew up in Switzerland. She spent 13 years living and working in the US (Boston & New York) learning from the people who made Jazz (among many other styles of music originating from the US) as important of an art form as it is today.
Gabriela grew up yodeling with her family and had performances as early as the age of 4. Being raised on a beautiful farm in the heart of Switzerland surrounded by a musical family has influenced her musical path strongly. Martina’s upcoming album ‘Homage to Grämlis’ (2022, delayed by Corona 2020), is a tribute to the farm in the Swiss Alps where she was
raised. In spring of 2019 she won the LABgrant from The Boston Foundation, which gave her great support with her album production of ‘Homage to Grämlis’.
In the fall of 2021, Martina had the great honor to receive the arts & culture award 2020 from the arts and culture commission Horw, her home town in Switzerland. This grant will further help the album release tour with ‘Homage to Grämlis’, that is now rescheduled for March 2022. She also received the DIPLÔME DE MÉDAILLE DE VERMEIL from the lauréats Arts-Sciences-Lettres, 2020, in Paris (France).
During the time of the pandemic, Gabriela Martina has composed nine new compositions for my newest album called ‘STATES’. The word ‘States’ refers to the United States of America, but also to a ‘state of mind’, or simply a ‘state of being’. Sounds created with your voice and percussion/drumming as the first human musical elements. I have used them as the core elements for my compositions. Her works include word play, music with words (spoken word) and words with no meaning (gibberish). The release for this album is slated for fall 2022.
Released in 2016 with a four-star review from DownBeat, her album, No White Shoes, represented a major step in the singer’s sojourn as a 21st-century musician. Martina had the opportunity to perform and collaborate with heavyweights likeMeshell Ndegeocello, Jack DeJohnette,andAngelique Kidjo. She recorded with veteran drummer J.R. Robinson and was a semi-finalist in the Shure Voice Competition at the 2009 Montreux Jazz Festival, performing with guitarist Lee Ritenour’s band. Martina released a critically hailed EP in 2010, Curiosity, which included her original song “Ain’t Nobody,” a finalist in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Foundation Young Jazz Composer Awards in 2012. Martina owns her own booking agency called Red Velvet Sounds and is cofounder and curator of the free improv concert series In Momentum.
In June 2019 she took part in the Central Swiss Yodeling Festival and graduated with top marks. She has also performed in concert venues such as the Berklee Performance Center, Jordan Hall, International Tennis Hall of Fame, State House of Flags and the Scullers Jazz Club. Gabriela has a bachelor's degree from Berklee College of Music and a master's degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Donna McElroy, Jason Moran, Cecil McBee, Miguel Zenon, Frank Carlberg, Dominique Eade, Ken Schaphorst, Jerry Bergonzi among many others.
Martina is passionate about learning more about other cultures, helping to develop a sense for community, and fighting inequality and racism. She is a strong advocate of causes that promote equal human rights independent of religious or political affiliations. From 2009 to 2010, Martina was the founder and president of the Cultural Leaders Club at Berklee College of Music, where students investigated causes and effects in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity issues. Sonic Relief, which Martina cofounded, was awarded the Berklee Urban Service Award 2016 for using music to aid people in need, such as organizing a humanitarian fundraising concert for Syrian refugees, featuring Simon Shaheen and the Lee Swensen Katz Trio in December 2015.
Gabriela Martina has many hidden talents, one of them being cooking which she clearly proved through her cookbook she wrote during the desperate times of the pandemic 2020/2021 called ‘Dinner with My Neighbor’.