press

Press for Confession:

  • → Maxi Broecking, Jazz thing, Feb/March 2026, Das Ende Zuerst
    • “The twelve compositions by Zucker...masterfully and impressively combine jazz improvisation with compositions of contemporary music for string quartet, electronics, and art rock.” [translated from German]
  • → Brad Cohan, Treble, 16 February 2026, 11 Great Experimental Albums from Winter 2026
    • “Gabriel Zucker, an ingeniously oddball avant-everything composer and songwriter, dubs himself a ‘musical maximalist’ and is he ever spot-on with that description. The sprawling, jaw-dropping freakout magnum opus that is Confession is evidence of that....Zucker’s art-pop and avant-fucked tunesmithery is a downright brain-scramble with eye-twitching, glitched-out melodies and rhythms of epically herky-jerk magnitude.”
  • → Dee Dee McNeil, Making A Scene, 7 February 2026, Gabriel Zucker CONFESSION
    • “twelve songs that combine electronics, harmonic chants and voices, repetitious hooks and interjected solos.”
  • → John Schaefer, New Sounds, 5 February 2026, New Music for Trumpet, Plus
    • “Confession... is the sound of someone just gleefully rifling through the different musical genres and just picking whatever works for him in that song at that moment.”
  • → mela, Concerto, January 2026, Gabriel Zucker Confession
    • “Extremely inspiring, it resonates immediately on an emotional level.” [translated from German]
  • → Gabriel Aniol, Jazz Podium, January 2026, Gabriel Zucker - Confession
    • “An hour of music that knows no bounds... Those with open ears should listen closely and be amazed” [translated from German]
  • → Jazz Trail, 29 December 2025, Gabriel Zucker - Confession
    “On his sixth studio album as a leader, Confession, the musical polymath fronts a core quintet featuring two drummers, and incorporates a string quartet into a set of demanding compositions, achieving a compelling equilibrium between pathos and intensity. His multifaceted response to disconnected times is marked by radical transitions and conspicuous shifts in mood.”
  • → Bad Alchemy, 27 December 2025
    • “My initial impression: an ethereal Van Dyke Parks, a different Andrew Poppy, with fragile and exalted singing and whispering, at a counterpoint to the manosphere. Zucker's intimate songs transcend into hypersongs.” [translated from German]
  • → Eyal Hareuveni, Salt Peanuts, 13 December 2025, Gabriel Zucker: Confession
    • “Each act showcases too Zucker’s kaleidoscopic treatment of distinct emotional moods, intricate orchestration, and contracting and expanding meters. Surprisingly, it flows in a cohesive, captivating logic of its own, calling for repeated listening to fully unpack Zucker’s fearless, maximalist musical vision.”
  • → John Schaefer, New Sounds, 12 December 2025, Unusual Songs
    • “a blend of intimate songwriting and sweeping compositions”
  • → Steve Smith, Night After Night, 10 December 2025, Get out
    • “intimately grandiloquent... his new album, Confession, is something entirely different, an extravagant art-pop song cycle certain to appeal to fans of baroque acts like Sparks, Cardiacs, and Dirty Projectors, in whose company it demands to be considered.”
  • → Ljubinko Zivkovic, Echoes and Dust, 26 November 2025, Gabriel Zucker - Confession
    • “No wonder it took Zucker six years not only to come up with music like this but to make it actually work, and yes, it surely does.”
  • → Avant Music News, 24 November 2025, AMN Picks of the Week: Analog 2025 / Anna von Hausswolff / The Grey Lake / Duran Vazquez + Kloob / Wolfskin / Gabriel Zucker
  • → Mike Borella, Avant Music News, 23 November 2025, AMN Reviews: Gabriel Zucker - Confession
    • “The diversity of this sound palette is wide-ranging and impossible to pigeonhole into any of the usual categories... It is a thoughtful and emotive recording that is well worth exploring.”
  • → It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, 21 November 2025, Zucker’s ‘Confession’: A Unified Study in Electronic-Acoustic Form
    • “While the claim of genre-blending can often sound trite, Zucker genuinely achieves a unique, compelling synthesis, moving seamlessly between indie songwriting and glitchy electronica.”
  • → George W. Harris, Jazz Weekly, 17 November 2025, Gabriel Zucker: Confession
    • “There are lots of artists that record songs; Gabriel Zucker records musical visions... Bold and brashly reflective.”
  • → Darryl Sterdan, Tinnitist, 14 October 2025, Gabriel Zucker Makes One Simple Request: Listen To Me (I Know You Won’t)
    • “Listen To Me fearlessly fuses a wealth of sonic and stylistic sources and influences into an unclassifiable world all its own”

Press for Leftover Beats:

  • → Vic Albani, All About Jazz, 31 January 2022, Gabriel Zucker: Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time
    • “From the second listening it reveals itself as an immensely coherent work, maniacally accurate, and the result of an internal balancing of artistic skill and attentive world observation... To make it even simpler, we could say Zucker’s work is a fascinating sound installation of the world around us. ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ” [translated from the Italian]
  • → Roger Batty, Musique Machine, 23 February 2022, Gabriel Zucker - Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time
    • “Leftover Beats From The Edge Of Time is daring, often heavily layered and at times chaotic record — which both challenges and entertains. I can’t say it’ll be a record that will work for everyone, due to its blending of the often harmonic and non-harmonic — but I found it a real revelation, that’s primed perfectly for when you want something multi-layered and unpredictable.”
  • → Mike Borella, Avant Music News, 3 January 2022, Avant Music News Best of 2021: Albums of the Year
  • → Dave Sumner, Bandcamp, 11 November 2021, The Best Jazz on Bandcamp: October 2021
    • “a music soundscape that has a massive presence, an eccentric personality, and the heart of a storyteller”
  • → Dee Dee McNeil, Musical Memoirs, 14 November 2021, The Changing Face of Jazz
  • → Mike Borella, Avant Music News, 22 August 2021, AMN Reviews
    • “There is so much to unpack over this album’s 90 minutes, that I can say no more than to grab this one as soon as it is out in late September. This is dense, modern orchestral music on steroids. Two thumbs way up.”

Press for Cities and Deserts:

Press for Weighting:

Press for Spectrum Rzewski Festival 2018

  • → David Wright, New York Classical Review, 24 December 2018, Top Ten Performances of 2018
  • → David Wright, New York Classical Review, 7 November 2018, Composer’s arrows hit the target at Spectrum’s Rzewski Festival
    • “Five pianists participated in the event, instigated and hosted by Gabriel Zucker, who also gave the evening’s standout performance. On a night when technical proficiency and musical insight were in abundance, Zucker’s rendering of Rzewski’s Squares took things to the next level, creating the illusion of the music itself speaking, rather than a player interpreting a score.

    This despite Rzewski’s often-gnarly writing for the instrument, which any pianist would deserve a medal just for wading through. The fistfuls of notes that Zucker flung across the keyboard in this 1978 suite were always driven by the musical impulse, and artfully phrased amid the pandemonium.”
  • → Steve Smith, The New Yorker, November 2018, Rzewski Festival

Press for Evergreen (Canceled World)

Other



Photo credit: Evan Zucker