Current Music Projects

The band Syncope is one of Aris’s most creative projects. Without Aris there basically are 2 other high demanding musicians, Pēteris Liepiņš - bass and Mareks Logins - drums. In concerts and individual recordings, Syncope appears in fuller and varied ways:

Alise Kante - voice,
Raimonds Blisiņš - rap,
Atis Andersons - keyboards,
Deniss Paškevičs, Toms Rudzinskis - sax, flute,
Gatis Gorkuša - trumpet.

The origins of this band started around 2010.gadu, when Mareks - drummer of the band asked Aris as a friend to make a nice backing track for drummer contest. In a year they gathered for the band more musicians and by adding some more compositions they appeared in the festival “Saukrasti jazz”. Achevements are growing year by year – in 2011.g. Syncope performed in Vilnius jazz club (Lithuania), quite regularly in "Saulkrasti Jazz" festivālā, in 2016.g. in Florida "Miami Beach" jazz festival on Miami Olympia theater stage and as an accompanying trio for master classes. In 2017.gadā they recorded first album "Focus". Now they keep on making new arrangements and compositions. In summer 2021 they performed again in “Saulkrasti jazz” festival. From a musical standpoint, it is mostly original music with elements of jazz, funk, rock etnic elements and world music.

The creative collaboration with Alice started already in 2010, when the they played together song covers in the “Semi acoustic band” Later, the collaboration continued successfully in various ensembles (Alise Kante & Wonders, Syncope, etc.), but most often they play as a duo both in various events and regularly on the cruise boat Tallink Isabelle coming and going between Riga and Stockholm. Also now Aris’s most regular performances are directly with Alise. Usually they play popular, Latvian, jazz music in their own arrangements and also their own compositions.

Aris plays with Jolanta since 2014. Since then they perform in 2 different music projects. One of them:

Jolanta Gulbe-Pashkevich duo, sometimes in trio with flute and sax player Deniss Pashkevich. (https://www.denisspashkevich.com/). Here we perform the traditional Brazilian bossa nova genre. Recently, also Latvian music in Aris’s original arrangements.

Their other musical project with completely different music is the fado program "O Amor a Portugal".

Jolanta Gulbe-Paškeviča - vocal,
Ivars Hermanis - acoustic guitar,
Āris Ozols - mandola.

This project with Dagmara has been made as an acoustic band, where you can hear both acoustic guitar and also mandola’s sounds. Since Dagmara is a Polish singer, who lives in Sweden, their creative work is between Riga and Stockholm. In terms of music, in addition to their own compositions, arrangements of hits of recent popular songs can be heard, which are turned to interesting and sophisticated arrangements and often are hardly recognizable.