A SHORT CHAT WITH YUVAL RON

The Yuval Ron Trio is taking the final slot at the Zappanale Festival.
They'll perform Sunday evening, around 20h30.
Time for a Short Chat with Yval Ron.

UniMuta: Hi Yuval,
It has been a while since we’ve been in touch. Must have been pre-covid. I did see that you did gigs in Germany, The Netherlands, The U.K. and even Israel the last couple of years.
And it looks like you’ve got a tour scheduled for 2025/2026.
So, how are you? What have you been up to, lately?
If I’m not mistaken, you were scheduled to perform at last year’s edition of the Zappanale festival. What happened?

YR: That's right, during Covid there wasn't much going on except "Live Against The Virus", a live streaming show we did, the online edition of Fusion festival and some small features here and there. However, ever since then, we've been touring extensively in Europe and played some incredible venues, including our own Prog Nights series which got some serious audience love, especially in Berlin. We even got to play in the Faroe Islands a few months ago. Unfortunately our Israel show was cancelled because of the war.

Indeed, we were supposed to play Zappanale last year. Honestly I'm not sure what happened, but from my understanding some weeks before the show the Bad Doberan municipality decided that it was scheduled for too late as there's some kind of noise curfew there, so the festival team had to postpone our show to this year. Oh well, at least this time Zappanale isn't happening in parallel to Night Of The Prog so there might be some more audience coming to Bad Doberan.

UniMuta: Your music is a beautiful eclectic mix of progressive rock, fusion and jazz. Beautiful, but not easy to perform. Who will accompany you on stage?

YR: Thank you! I very much agree that it's not easy to perform, haha. If we don't play it live for even a couple of weeks I always have to warm up the engines and practice my own parts to find and "reload" whatever small bits I forgot.

With me on stage will perform my regular trio of astronauts: Commander Victor Nissim on bass and Mission Specialist Yatziv Caspi on drums.

UniMuta: You will be playing the closing concert at Zappanale. Usually, this is sort of an after-party concert at a smaller stage. This year it will be at the main stage. That can only add to the joy.
Will you be performing music from “Somewhere In This Universe, Somebody Hits A Drum”? Or will it be newer material?
Are there plans for a new album?

YR: Yes, most of the stuff will be from "Somewhere In This Universe, Somebody Hits a Drum" plus a couple of newly arranged tunes from previous albums, as I felt that I want to give our audiences the opportunity to experience the complete album live before moving on. Our 2025 shows will pretty much be the last ones where we play it in its entirety. There are new tunes I'm working on and the plan is to record them into a new album in 2026 and play them live then.

In addition, there is a special new single and video coming up August 1st with bassist Bryan Beller from the Aristocrats and drummer Simon Schröder. It's a really cool tune in which I add one of my newest passions, virtual orchestration, to the mix, so stay tuned for its coming release!

UniMuta: Something to look forward to ! Thank you, Yuval.

The Yuval Ron Trio will be performing at the Zappanale main stage on 20h30 on Sunday.
A not-to-be-missed concert in my book !