** 2026 Repress ** On his debut LP Dybbuk Tse!, Yoni Mayraz pulls a malicious spirit onto the bandstand and dares it to dance. The London‑based, Israeli‑born pianist and producer uses the frame of a dybbuk - the malevolent wandering soul from Jewish folklore that slips into the living - as both narrative and metaphor. In the old stories, a dybbuk is a cursed, restless dead, bound to roam for sins committed in life and quick to occupy the bodies of the young and the vulnerable. Possession can be read literally, as a terrifying hijacking of body and voice, or as a stand‑in for the burdens that younger generations inherit without consent: histories, traumas and expectations that live inside them long before they have words for any of it. The album’s title phrase, Dybbuk tse! (“Dybbuk, get out!”), is the exorcist’s command, and Mayraz treats the record as both a haunting and a ritual for driving it away.
That double perspective shapes the music from the ground up. Recorded live with his band in a dusty wooden studio, Dybbuk Tse! leans into the “darker side of things” without ever collapsing into gloom. There is menace in the harmonies, an unsettled shimmer in the textures, but also a crooked grin to the way the band plays: a lightheartedness that’s become typical of Mayraz’s work. He folds jazz’s harmonic and improvisational language into the swing and crackle of 90s New York hip‑hop and raw old‑school breakbeat, building beats that nod to dusty SP‑1200 loops and park‑jam drums even as they move with the flexibility of a live rhythm section. Over this, unique Middle Eastern melodies snake and coil, sometimes lyrical, sometimes almost chant‑like, giving the tunes the flavour of a ritual unfolding in a club rather than a synagogue.
The compositions are packed with detail but never feel fussy. Sophisticated structures and carefully shaped heads open out into solos that sound as if the musicians are trying to argue the dybbuk out of the room: themes are tugged at, stretched, flipped; motifs reappear in stranger forms, as if the music itself were being possessed and then reclaimed. Mayraz’s piano sits at the centre, switching between knotty, off‑kilter runs, thick chords that hit like MPC stabs, and reflective passages where the room seems to darken around a single melody. Around him, some of the most promising players on today’s scene deliver beautifully crafted solos, locking into the groove one moment and tearing across it the next, underlining the album’s tug‑of‑war between control and surrender.
Dybbuk Tse! builds on the foundation laid by Mayraz’s 2020 EP Rough Cuts, which first set him down in the instrumental music landscape. Since then, he and his band have stress‑tested this material on stage at major venues and festivals - including London institutions like Ronnie Scott’s and The Jazz Cafe - where the tunes expand into dancefloor‑ready forms. Live, melodies and structures get stretched and reconfigured; the dybbuk narrative becomes less about a single exorcism and more about an ongoing practice of shaking off whatever has sunk its claws into you. That energy feeds back into the album versions, which feel tight but never hemmed in, like snapshots of pieces that can (and will) keep mutating.
