Gaya Feldheim Schorr is a vocalist, composer and photographer. Originally from the heart of Tel Aviv, she spent a number of years living and working in Brooklyn, New York, until her recent relocation to Marseille, France.
I Have Considered The Lilies is Gaya’s vibrant reimagination of the music of Connie Converse, an enigmatic singer-songwriter who left behind a staggering archive of music and texts after her disappearance in 1974. Alongside a group of cult-favorite Brooklynite collaborators including Grey Mcmurray (guitar), Tal Yahalom (guitar), and Eva Lawitts (bass), Gaya invites the listener into the intimate world of Converse’s songs, poems, and ontological wrestlings with equal doses of warmth and melancholy. Released April, 2020, on Invisible Planet Records.
Gaya is an active member in bands/projects led by Adam O’Farrill (Bird Blown Out Of Latitude), Lisa Hoppe (Ysop), Florian Herzog (Moon Tree), as well as a member of collectives such as KikiGigiEvorbee, Arroyo and Gésir. As a bandleader and side-woman, she has performed at venues and festivals such as National Sawdust, The Jazz Gallery, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Cornelia Street Cafe, Rockwood Music Hall, Threes Brewing, The Owl Music Parlor, Spectrum, The Bar Next Door, Shapeshifter Lab, Beit Ha’amudim (Tel Aviv), Bird’s Eye Jazz Club (Basel), Jazz des Cinq Continents (Marseille, France), Leipziger Jazztage (Leipzig, Germany), BeJazz Winterfestival (Bern, Switzerland), Rostov Jazz Festival (Russia), EUROPAfest (Bucharest, Romania), and The Red Sea Jazz Festival (Eilat, Israel).
Photo by Alex Joseph
Gaya has been a scholarship recipient at the American-Israel Cultural Foundation since 2007. She graduated with honors from Thelma Yellin High School for the arts in 2011 and continued her studies at the Tel Aviv Conservatory’s academic program.
In 2014, she graduated with honors from The Center for Jazz Studies at The Tel-Aviv Conservatory, received a merit scholarship from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary music and relocated to New York. She received her BFA with honors from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 2016.
As a photographer, she has become a first call in the New York jazz & improvised music community. Her work has been published in Downbeat Magazine, Pitchfork, IMPOSE Magazine, Cliche Magazine and Ha’aretz Newspaper (Israel) to name a few.
She is also a 200-hour Yoga Alliance certified teacher, but she doesn’t like talking about it on the internet that much?