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Israeli Musicians in the International Scene: A Case Study of Musical Transculturation in Contemporary Jazz Performance and Composition

by

Noam Lemish

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Performance Faculty of Music University of Toronto

© 2018 Copyright by Noam Lemish

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Israeli Jazz Musicians in the International Scene: A Case Study of Musical Transculturation in Contemporary Jazz Performance and Composition

Noam Lemish

Doctor of Musical Arts in Performance

Faculty of Music University of Toronto

2018

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a case study of musical transculturation in jazz performance and composition through the examination of the practices of Israeli jazz musicians who began to operate on the international jazz scene starting in the 1990s.

An impressive number of Israeli jazz performers have received widespread exposure and acclaim over the last twenty years. Artists such as (bass),

(woodwinds), (bass) among many others have successfully established themselves on a global scale, creating music that melds various aspects of American jazz with an array of Israeli, Jewish and Middle-Eastern influences and those from numerous other non-

Western musical traditions. While each musician is developing his or her own approach to musical transculturation, common threads connect them all. Unraveling these entangled sounds and related discourses lies at the center of my study.

While this is the first comprehensive study of the contributions of Israeli musicians in the international jazz scene, it is also intended to engage with the “global” phenomenon of transcultural jazz practice more broadly. By considering the performers discussed in the study iii as multi-local musicians, I offer an alternative to both American exceptionalist views of jazz, for instance, jazz as America’s gift to the world, and to “jazz nationalism”, a scholarly outlook that emphasizes the localization of “jazz” in (non-American) nation-states, and that continues to hold sway around the world, especially in Europe. In so doing, I also aim to invite explorations of the multi-local music making practices of jazz musicians worldwide. Thus, this project simultaneously provides insight into the nature and role of transcultural music making in contemporary jazz practice while enhancing knowledge of modern Israeli society and culture.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Completing this project would not have been possible without the mentorship, support and generosity of many wonderful people. First, my deepest gratitude to professor Jeff

Packman, my dissertation advisor, who shepherded me through this lengthy journey with constant enthusiasm, encouragement, expertise and inspiration. Jeff’s sharp intellect, broad based knowledge, timely and poignant advice, were invaluable. His engaging and engaged approach, humour and positivity also made the process greatly enjoyable and uplifted me when things were challenging. I always looked forward to our meetings, not only because I knew that

I would gain greater clarity about the project but because I relished every opportunity I had to

“talk shop” with Jeff and “pick his brain” about matters relating to my dissertation and beyond.

Without fail, I left my meetings with Jeff with my batteries replenished, feeling galvanized and motivated to push forward, clear about what I needed to do next.

My gratitude also goes to my two other dissertation committee members, professors

Farzaneh Hemmasi and Terry Promane. They too provided illuminating feedback and valuable insights that helped me tremendously as I advanced this project forward. I want to also thank

University of Toronto professors Midori Koga, Jim Lewis, Mike Murley, Alexander (Sasha)

Rapoport, Chase Sanborn, for their mentorship and support for the entire duration of my doctoral studies. Many thanks also to Professor Evan Rapport, my external examiner, for his careful reading and thoughtful feedback about my dissertation.

I want to thank the faculty and staff at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, particularly Galina Vaisman and professors Doris Bergen and

Anna Shternshis for providing crucial financial support for my fieldwork in the US and . I am grateful for their commitment to sustaining and shaping the interdisciplinary collaborative v graduate program in Jewish studies. This invaluable program broadened my understandings and engagement with Jewish studies and offered me a community of colleagues and friends whose own research provided inspiration and education.

I am also very grateful to several scholars outside of the University of Toronto who gave of their time to discuss my ideas and provided valuable insights, advice and feedback about my project at various points along the way including E. Taylor Atkins, Ofer Gazit, Tomie

Hahn, Motti Regev, Alona Sagee-Keren and Edwin Seroussi.

I often shared with friends and colleagues that the most enjoyable part of this project was my fieldwork. Life is pretty good when you get to spend your days sitting at cafes in NYC and Israel talking about music with fantastic musicians who are thoughtful about their life and work. I am grateful to all of my interlocutors for so graciously lending their time and energy to our conversations and for their generosity of spirit. Thank you also to Shira Senesh for her meticulous, precise and expeditious interview transcriptions.

My thanks to my dear friend Miles Wick for hosting me in Brooklyn during my first round of fieldwork in winter of 2014 and to my brother Leeshai Lemish and sister-in-law,

Sarah Cook for hosting me during of my second visit to NY in spring of 2015. My thanks to my sister Erga for her support and uplifting humor! As I write these words, I think it is finally fair to say that I’ve reached the yeshoret: now it’s your turn. To Yehonatan Vardi and Ofer

Globerman, for their friendship and generous hospitality during my fieldwork in Israel. In

1998, when we were classmates in high school, Ofer and I created IJO-Israeli Jazz Online. We never would have imagined that twenty years later, our modest website would serve as a resource for my dissertation on Israeli jazz. vi

My profound thankfulness to my aunt and uncle Hadas and Amos Gershony for so lovingly opening their home at Galed and hosting me for the duration of my fieldwork in summer of 2015. My time in the kibbutz, my first extended stay in Israel in nearly a decade, was richly productive, deeply meaningful and indeed critical for the success of this project.

Between busy and joyful days of interviews and concerts across the country, I was blessed to have the opportunity to spend many wonderful hours visiting with my family in the kibbutz

(which included, aside from my aunt and uncle, cousins and their children), and reconnected with sights, sounds, flavours and memories from my childhood and youth.

Perhaps, most significantly, amidst the summer in the kibbutz, I had the great fortune of being able to spend much quality time with my maternal grandmother Chaya (Mishkov)

Barkai (1925-2016) by way of daily visits, conversations and meals together. Back in Toronto,

I spoke with her by phone for the last time in late November of 2016, only a week or so before she passed away. During our conversation, she asked me, as she almost always did during our trans-Atlantic conversations in recent years, “are you able to find time to write?” Indeed, after her passing, during the months of intense writing this past year I called on her kind and gentle nudge, hearing her echoing in my ear’s memory as a motivation to keep pushing towards the finish line.

My parents, both professors and scholars, traveled a fair bit for work during my childhood and they would always bring back souvenirs from their travels. After I started to get serious about music, jazz in particular, they began to bring back CDs of local jazz artists from those countries. My father traveled to Capetown, South Africa when I was 13 and returned with a pile of CDs by Abdullah Ibrahim and many other artists who created a style of music known as “Cape-jazz”. He and my mother also brought back jazz CDs from vii

Canada, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and many other places. The sounds I heard on those CDs excited me and planted the seeds for my interest in transcultural jazz, which eventually led me to pursue this project.

My love and my unending gratitude to my parents, Peter and Dafna Lemish, whose own lives, work and values have so inspired and influenced mine. I am forever grateful for growing up in a household that valued intellectual inquiry, critical thinking and to having parents who modeled what passion and dedication for their chosen craft looks like. I feel immensely fortunate to have parents who themselves had gone through the process of writing dissertations and were able to provide me with such valuable insights, advice and support. I am particularly grateful to my father for our many enjoyable and engaging conversations about my research and for his feedback about my work.

Finally, my boundless love and gratitude to Marie: for the still points and for all the points in between. For her unending encouragement, constant support, and always sound advice. Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

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DEDICATION

To my parents

Dafna and Peter

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES……………………………………………………. xii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: “ISRAELI JAZZ”, MUSICAL

TRANSCULTURATION AND THE MULTI-LOCAL

MUSICIAN……………………………………………………………………………... 1

“ISRAELI JAZZ” AS A CASE STUDY FOR MUSICAL TRANSCULTURATION………………… 4

PERFORMING ISRAELINESS………………………………………………………………………... 6

PROBLEMATIZING ESSENTIALIST CONCEPTUALIZATIONS………………………………….. 9

AUDIOTOPIAS OF THE MULTI-LOCAL MUSICIAN……………………………………………… 14

PERSONAL BACKGROUND…………………………………………………………………………. 17

METHODOLOGY……………………………………………………………………………………… 22

DISSERTATION OUTLINE…………………………………………………………………………… 23

CHAPTER TWO: VOICING JAZZ NARRATIVES: INDIVIDUAL

AND COLLECTIVE VOICES OF JAZZ IN GLOBAL CONTEXT……………… 27

STANDARD VOICINGS……………………………………………………………………………… 29

COMPLEX VOICINGS: THE “NEW JAZZ STUDIES”……………………………………………... 33

GLOBAL VOICINGS: JAZZ DIALECTS AND THE EMERGENCE OF “GLOBAL JAZZ

STUDIES”……………………………………………………………………………………………… 34

PERSONAL VOICINGS: TRANSGENERIC, MULTI-LOCAL MUSIC-MAKING………………… 51

MULTI-LAYERED VOICINGS: JAZZ POLYPHONY AND THE SIMULTANEITY OF

NARRATIVE…………………………………………………………………………………………... 54

CHAPTER THREE: “ISRAELI JAZZ”: HISTORY AND OVERVIEW………… 58

ISRAELI JAZZ MUSICIANS IN THE WORLD TODAY…………………………………………… 60

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAZZ IN ISRAEL: 1930-1990……………………………………………… 72

THE INSTITUIONALIZATION OF JAZZ IN ISRAEL………………………………………………. 77 x

THE WAVE OF RETURN, AND THE BACK AND FORTH………………………………………… 90

“KFAR” NEW YORK: TONS OF HUMMUS IN THE BIG APPLE………………………………….. 97

CHAPTER FOUR: “ISRAELI JAZZ”: BLEND OF BLENDS…………………….. 105

THE COMPLEX “GLOBAL” PART I: THE JAZZ TRADITION……………………………………. 107

THE COMPLEX “LOCAL”…………………………………………………………………………… 117

THE COMPLEX “GLOBAL” PART II: “WORLD” MUSIC…………………………………………. 148

SUMMARY BY WAY OF A CASE STUDY: AMOS HOFFMAN AND MULTI-LOCAL

MUSICIANSHIP……………………………………………………………………………………….. 154

CHAPTER FIVE: THE SAND AND THE SEA: NAVIGATING THE

ARRANGEMENTS OF ISRAELI JAZZ MUSICIANS…………………………….. 163

INDIGENOUS JAZZ STANDARDS: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS………………………….. 164

ISRAELI SOURCES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM: KEY REPERTOIRE

RESERVOIRS………………………………………………………………………………………… 168

THE POLITICAL-ECONOMY OF JAZZ IN HEBREW…………………………………………….. 172

ISRAELI STANDARDS?...... 177

ANALYSIS OF REPERTOIRE EXAMPLES………………………………………………………... 183

SUMMARY…………………………………………………………………………………………… 199

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION: “FALAFEL JAZZ”, AND THE POLITICS OF

GENRE AND CULTURE…………………………………………………………….. 202

THE POLITICS OF GENRE: THE CASE OF “FALAFEL JAZZ”………………………………… 205

FALAFEL, MUSIC, AND CULTURAL POLITICS………………………………………………... 212

THE FUTURE OF “ISRAELI JAZZ”………………………………………………………………… 216

AN AUDIOTOPIA FOR THE MIDDLE-EAST……………………………………………………… 220

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REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………. 222

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………... 222

DISCOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………… 227

WEB RESOURCES…………………………………………………………………………………... 228

ONLINE VIDEO CLIPS……………………………………………………………………………… 230

INTERVIEWS………………………………………………………………………………………… 230

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LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

FIGURE 4.1 Head In from “The Archeologist” by Amit Friedman ………………………….. 127

FIGURE 4.2 Excerpt from Head In of “Elli” by Avishai Cohen……………………………… 132

FIGURE 4.3 D Section from Head In of the “Archeologist” by Amit Friedman……………... 133

FIGURE 4.4 Malfouf Rhythm………………………………………………………………… 141

FIGURE 4.5 Call and response interlude from “New Middle East” by Omer Avital………… 145

FIGURE 4.6 Excerpt from Head In of “Bgida” by Itamar Borochov…………………………. 147

FIGURE 4.7 Melody excerpt from “Sahadi’s Serenade” by Itai Kriss……………………….. 147

FIGURE 4.8 “Sahadi’s Serenade” excerpt with silsulim…………………………………….... 148

FIGURE 4.9 Figure 4.9 Ostinato from “Dreaming” by Avishai Cohen………………………. 151

FIGURE 5.1 Head In for “Zameru”, arranged by Ilan Salem………………………………..... 185

FIGURE 5.2 “Zameru” Rhythmic Feel………………………………………………………... 187

FIGURE 5.3 “Eli, Eli” Lead Sheet…………………………………………………………….. 191

FIGURE 5.4 “Eli, Eli”: first three measures transposed to C minor…………………………... 191

FIGURE 5.5 “Eli, Eli” melody transformed by Yuval Cohen to 13/4……………………….... 192

FIGURE 5.6 “Eli, Eli” - Yuval Cohen’s bass opening…………………………... 193

FIGURE 5.7 “Eli, Eli” tenor saxophone entrance……………………………………………... 193

FIGURE 5.8 “Eli, Eli” and bass counterpoint…………………………………………... 194

FIGURE 5.9 “Eli, Eli” first blowing section…………………………………………………... 194

FIGURE 5.10 “Eli, Eli” piano and bass ostinato for drum solo……………………………….. 195

FIGURE 5.11 “Eli, Eli” melody quote in bass part…………………………………………..... 196

FIGURE 5.12 “Eli, Eli” three horn contrapunctal loop………………………………………... 196

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: “ISRAELI JAZZ”, MUSICAL TRANSCULTURATION AND THE MULTI-LOCAL MUSICIAN

It was a beautiful summer evening at the Shuni Fortress, situated near Binyamina, an agricultural center moshava in northern Israel.1 The sun had set, and the ancient Roman outdoor theater was packed to the brim and buzzing with the audience members’ anticipation of the coming performance by Israeli jazz icon, bassist Avishai Cohen. Cohen was in Israel for a single show to introduce his new band, New York Division, before heading off on a European tour. The stars began to sparkle under darkening skies, conjuring vivid memories of my youth, when I attended concerts at the renowned (RSJF) in the southern Israeli city, . In fact, the last time I had heard Avishai Cohen play live was during the 1998 RSJF, when he was the bassist in ’s Origin band. Now, seventeen years later, I was back in Israel for six weeks of fieldwork for my research on Israeli jazz.

As I sat and waited for the concert to begin, I recalled the thunderous ovation Cohen received back in 1998 when he was introduced by Corea in front of an adoring “home” crowd.

Cohen’s appearance as a sideman for an American jazz great was a landmark moment in Israeli jazz history: one of our very own jazz musicians had “made it”. As an Israeli teenager who aspired to become a jazz pianist myself, witnessing this event first hand was a profound experience. Not only did it fill me with local pride, but it also bolstered my optimism for my future, effectively signaling that the door for international success had been opened to all Israeli jazz musicians.

1 The fortress itself is an Ottoman structure. A Moshava is a village located in an agricultural region that serves as a service center for the surrounding farming settlements. 2

Back at Shuni fortress, Cohen’s new band was a sextet featuring an ensemble of Israeli and New York-based musicians. One half of the ensemble included Cohen’s touring trio at that time, featuring Israelis Nitai Hershkovitz on piano and Daniel Dor on drums. The other half was comprised of three celebrated New York-based musicians with whom Cohen had a long history of collaboration dating back to the early 1990s and his initial entry into the New York

City jazz scene. The New York division of the New York Division consisted of guitarist Kurt

Rosenwinkel, trombonist Steve Davis and trumpeter Diego Urcola.

The band members’ journey to the stage was lengthy and public, as their green room was situated in the adjacent fortress. They descended multiple narrow stairs along the side of the building in order to reach the theater’s main floor. They then climbed several more stairs to reach the stage. As audience members spotted Cohen, along with the rest of the musicians, a mounting applause washed over the theater. Cohen took in the applause like a seasoned celebrity accustomed to receiving such adoring treatment. He displayed gratitude while also owning the stage and the moment, as if to say: “Yes, I know, I am this loved!”

The concert started with the sextet performing three pieces, all in the vein of late 1990s cutting-edge New York jazz, replete with Afro-Cuban influences and sparkling solos from

Rosenwinkel and Urcola. The music harkened back to Cohen’s early as a band leader, particularly his 2001 release Unity by his International Vamp Band. After these three pieces, a revelatory moment occurred: The “New York” portion of the band left the stage leaving the

Israeli trio. Then, within two seconds, as the first few lyrical minor triads were played by pianist Hershkovitz, the crowd started clapping ecstatically: Were they clapping because they recognized the tune? Did they welcome these “Israeli” sounding passages or was their applause 3 for the familiar “Avishai” sound? Though it is hard to decide, the significance was clear: This was the Avishai Cohen they have grown to love and had come to see and hear.

For many Israelis and non-Israelis, musicians and critics alike, Avishai Cohen’s original music is synonymous with the “Israeli jazz” sound. He remains the most well-known, commercially successful Israeli jazz musician active in the international scene today. His compositions present his own unique blend and integration of several distinct influences: modern jazz, Afro-Cuban, ladino songs, popular songs from Israel and Arab music, both classical and folk.

But Cohen is not alone, and his sound, though highly influential, is not the only “Israeli jazz” sound. Starting in the 1990s, Cohen was one of several Israeli jazz musicians who arrived in New York and pioneered a musical direction that explored the fusion of “American” jazz with an array of influences from Israel and the Middle-East. Now, more than twenty years after this first wave of Israeli jazz musicians began creating this kind of fused music, which would only later come to be nicknamed “Israeli jazz”, the international jazz scene is filled with successful Israeli jazz musicians who continue to explore such blending through their performances, compositions and recordings.

This dissertation is about the sounds and discourses of “Israeli jazz”. Having said that, an important caveat is that, as my research progressed, and despite the towering presence of musicians like Cohen, there is not and likely never has been one “Israeli jazz” sound. Rather there are as many sounds as there are Israeli jazz musicians. What is fundamentally shared among the musicians who create this music is that each of them, grounded in their own jazz training and vocabulary, explores and develops through their own individual processes, a musical blend of an array of already blended influences. These influences include but are not 4 limited to musical traditions associated with Israel, the Jewish world and/or the Middle-East,

North Africa and Central Asia. Furthermore, many Israeli jazz musicians also incorporate additional musical influences and traditions that extend beyond those cited above. While the influence of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian musical genres is especially pronounced, each artist has his or her own particular threads of influence, and these include Western Art Music, North

Indian , Bulgarian choir music and much more.

“ISRAELI JAZZ” AS A CASE STUDY FOR MUSICAL TRANSCULTURATION

The dominant narrative about jazz today maintains the music’s strict ties to its birthplace in the and its origins as an African-American practice. Often situated as exemplary of American exceptionalism, jazz has been widely celebrated as America’s unique gift to the world by an array of voices within and outside the academy.2 For a little over a decade now, however, a growing number of scholars (including many from outside the

United States) have begun to highlight different narratives that build on the history of jazz as an

African-American music, but situate it as an agent for cultural hybridity in various national contexts. In these alternative formulations, jazz is viewed as one of the means through which various cultures worldwide create new subgenres of music that incorporate American jazz with local musical traditions, creating their own jazz variants (e.g., Atkins 2001, 2003; Nicholson

2005; Cerchiari 2012; Whyton 2012; Bohlman & Plastino 2016).

In many ways, the processes described by these scholars resonate with what Margaret

Kartomi has called “musical transculturation”, the “complete cycle of positive musical

2 James Lincoln Collier’s 1993 book Jazz: The American Theme Song is one good example of this as is Ken Burns’s influential documentary series, Jazz (2000). 5 processes set in motion by culture contact” (1981:233).3 Kartomi is writing about culture contact within the colonial encounter and the meeting of two musical traditions. Yet, she also notes that no musicial tradition is completely discreet: “First, it is highly doubtful that any completely isolated cultures exist in the world today. Thus, there is a strong likelihood that all musics are syntheses of more than one cultural (and, in some cases, class) influence …

Intercultural musical synthesis is not the exception but the rule” (1981:230). Building on

Kartomi’s understanding of transculturation, this study explores Israeli jazz as a practice rooted in the blending of influences from multiple musical traditions that are already transcultural in nature even if they are viewed by many, including scholars, audiences, and the musicians themselves, as distinct and even pure.

As a case study of this emergent trend toward understanding the roles of transculturation in jazz performance and composition, and thus a contribution to newer, alternative directions in jazz scholarship, this dissertation focuses on the rich, multi-layered and transcultural musical practices of Israeli jazz musicians who began to operate on the international jazz scene starting in the 1990s.

An impressive number of Israeli jazz performers have received widespread exposure and acclaim over the last twenty years. Artists such as Omer Avital (bass), Anat Cohen

(woodwinds), Avishai Cohen (bass), Avishai Cohen (trumpet), (sax), Anat Fort

(piano), Gilad Hekselman (), Amos Hoffman (guitar, oud), Omer Klein (piano), Avi

Lebovich (trombone), (piano), Daniel Zamir (sax) among others have successfully established themselves internationally, creating music that melds various aspects of “American” jazz with an array of Israeli, Jewish and Middle-Eastern influences and those

3 Kartomi advocated for this term, which she borrows from Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz asserting that it does not carry with it the ethnocentric and/or confused etymological history of other terms such as “acculturation” or “hybridity”. 6 from numerous other non-Western musical traditions. While each musician is developing his or her own approach to this process of musical transculturation, collectively one can hear common threads interwoven and connecting them all. Unraveling these entangled sounds and related discourses lies at the center of my study.

In his book Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has it Moved to a New Address?), British journalist

Stuart Nicholson (2005) argues that many of the most innovative and creative developments in jazz are now happening outside of the United States precisely through the interaction between local musical traditions and American jazz. Beyond shedding light on the important work of a generation of Israeli jazz artists whose music has infused the international jazz scene with exciting new sounds, this case study of Israeli jazz musicians hopes to contribute to the growing body of literature that views jazz as a vehicle of expression for local cultures rather than a codified art form beholden to strict conventions of performance associated with its

American origins.4

PERFORMING ISRAELINESS

The musicians who are the focus of this project are Israeli nationals, who were born, raised, educated and socialized in Israel. And they are Jewish. With few exceptions, though, they are not religiously observant and view their Jewish identity through a cultural lens; that is, if they give it any consideration at all.5 Some take their Jewishness for granted, and others reported an antagonistic relationship with religion, Judaism or otherwise. A few did not identify as Jewish at all. For all of them, Jewishness was a secondary concern to national identification.

4 For a discussion of this perspective see Atkins 2001, 2003; Heffley 2005; Nicholson 2005; Cerchiari 2012; Feld 2012. 5 There are a few exceptions, most notably, saxophonist Daniel Zamir who moved to New York as a secular Jew but turned towards piety and is now a practicing orthodox Jew. 7

Even then, however, while most identified as Israeli, several others consider themselves cosmopolitans and reject national identification. Thus for all of these musicians, there is a distinction between Israeliness and Jewishness and this distinction informs my account of them and their practices.

Furthermore, their engagements with their Jewishness need to be seen through an Israeli lens rather than a North American or Western European one. That is to say, issues of concern to

Jews as an ethnic and religious minority group in North America and Europe played no significant role in these musicians’ processes of identity formation since they grew up as part of the dominant religious and cultural order in Israel, a Jewish state. Thus, debates over assimilation versus upholding particular Jewish ethnic and religious practices are not part of their discourse. Arguably, their identities are more strongly informed by pernicious binaries of

Ashkenazy and Mizrahi ethnic and cultural identification that continue to hold sway within

Israel’s cultural landscape than a Jewish/gentile division.6

For the above reasons, the musical backgrounds and music making practices of the musicians who are the focus of my study ought to be understood as separate and quite distinct from those of both American-born Jewish and, of course, non-Jewish jazz musicians. Needless to say, then, that discussions about “Jewish jazz” in the twentieth century, such as the work of the Tin Pan Alley , the music of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, Mickey Katz and

Shelley Manne are quite a different matter altogether.7

6 In Israel, these terms are used casually rather problematically and lump diverse groups with drastically different histories, cultures, religious practices and origins into oversimplified generalities. Ashkenazy refers to Jews whose origins are in Europe. Mizrahim (translated literally to Eastern) refers to Jews who originated from various countries in the Middle-East. The term Mizrahi is also often conflated with the term Sephardi which refers to Jews that are descendants of the exiled Jews of Spain (Brinner: 2009:16-17). 7 Communications scholar Josh Kun has written (2005) on Mickey Katz and Jewish-American identity in Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. More recently, political scientist Charles Hersch (2016) published a comprehensive study of Jewish American jazz musicians, their music and issues of ethnicity in Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity. 8

It is especially critical to distinguish between Israeli jazz musicians and their Jewish-

American counterparts who promoted a renaissance of primarily Eastern-European Jewish musical traditions as part of an American klezmer resurgence starting in the 1970s. Pre-dating and paralleling the emergence on the scene of foundational Israeli jazz musicians such as

Avishai Cohen, several American Jewish jazz artists, most famously saxophonist John Zorn, have been creating jazz that fuses Klezmer, Hassidic and Eastern European Jewish folk elements. Zorn has dubbed this movement “Radical Jewish Culture” and went as far as founding a called Tzadik dedicated to promoting and releasing albums that he deems resonant with his vision.8 Despite their temporal and geographic proximity, however, the degree of overlap between these two jazz movements emerging out of NYC is limited in terms of the individuals involved, ensemble personnel and musical sounds. Nonetheless, Zorn’s label has been home to several Israeli jazz musicians’ albums including most notably saxophonists

Daniel Zamir and Uri Gurvich, bassist Haggai Cohen Milo and pianist Omer Klein.

Such contact with Zorn’s label and the musicians who see themselves as part of Radical

Jewish Culture is one facet of a broader tendency in which Israeli jazz musicians are confronted

(more often than not, for the first time) with their “Jewish” identity, and the sense that they are members of a minority group only upon arrival in NYC and as part of their enculturation to

American culture. While the relative separateness of the scenes suggests a degree of discomfort in this reimagining of identity, my interviews and fieldwork also revealed that Israeli jazz musicians often benefit greatly from connecting with established Jewish-American congregations, communities and organizations. I should point out, though, that the support they receive from these types of groups often pre-dates their arrival as adults in NYC. Indeed, many

8 Ethnomusicologist Tamar Barzel’s monograph (2015) New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and Downtown Scene is an excellent first comprehensive account of this movement. 9 of the Israeli musicians who became active in the New York scene received scholarships to study jazz as teenagers while still living in Israel from the American philanthropic organization

America-Israel Cultural Foundation. This is but one example of special place that the United

States holds in terms of its influence on Israeli society in general and as the birthplace of jazz in particular—a matter that will be elaborated upon further in Chapter Three.

PROBLEMATIZING ESSENTIALIST CONCEPTUALIZATIONS

The complex circuits of influence by which American jazz has informed the work of

Israeli jazz musicians suggests the need for more critical engagement with prevalent binaries that continue to shape current discourses about both jazz and Israeliness. For instance, scholar Tony Whyton, has lamented the “loss of complexity and sensitivity to the intercultural dialogue” (2012:368) that arises out of binaries such as George Lewis’s

“Eurological” and “Afrological” distinction and results in a kind of jazz essentialism that marginalizes musicians, such as those from places like Israel, whose racial and cultural identities are not easily reconciled with longstanding and over-simple notions of jazz authenticity and authority.9 Similarly, the Israeli musical world in its many forms, continues to be informed by another assumed and problematic dichotomy, that of “East” and “West”. Rather than digressing into a detailed discussion of the historical forces that have shaped this deep- seated binary in the thinking of numerous Israelis, I turn to ethnomusicologist Benjamin

Brinner, who summarizes its impact: “For many Israeli Jews, the East/West distinction continues to mark a fundamental sociocultural divide within the nation despite several

9 In his essay “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (2002) George Lewis defines “Afrological” improvised music as following the path of resistance initiated by be-bop artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk; while “Eurological” refers to improvised music that belongs to the Western Art Music experimental music tradition and can be considered to be a reaction to the prominence of “jazz” in the Western Hemisphere. 10 generations of intermarriage and cohabitation in Israel” (2009:223). In other words, as a result of long-standing and problematic binaries, the musicians central to my study fit uncomfortably both with dominant notions of “jazz” and their musical practices situate them problematically in cultural terms in relation to Israeliness.

For example, the task of describing their music succinctly or conveying the flavor of particular sounds for promotional or conversational purposes can often lead to simplistic and reductive formulations. Still, as Brinner (2009) argues, musicians often utilize such glosses to communicate with one another and, thus, they should not be summarily dismissed as they embody important if often assumed meanings and values. Like other, related identity issues, the many musicians I interviewed admitted that even though what they do is far more nuanced than a simple combination of “jazz” and “Israeli” or “Middle-Eastern” music, they often utilize such reductive descriptions for promotion and publicity. These musicians, their managers, critics and fans often find it easiest to call the music they make “Israeli jazz” or to say that such and such musician creates music that fuses “jazz” and “Israeli” music. Furthermore, such simplistic labeling is often commercially effective.

My intention in using the term “Israeli jazz”, then, is to acknowledge its prevalent use by musicians, industry professionals and fans and not to reify it as a hard and fast category. To that end, my analyses aim to undermine essentialist conceptualizations of the sounds and discourses that are associated with this label. Fundamentally, the music of the artists I discuss cannot be reduced to a simple fusion between jazz and “Israeli” or “Middle-Eastern” practices.

Indeed, such generalizations do not aptly characterize the immense diversity of styles, traditions and sub-genres that exist within each label. As I discuss in detail in Chapter Two, for instance, “jazz” is not a stylistic monolith but rather an umbrella label for a wide array of 11 differing sounds, styles, and practices from different points in history. Furthermore, vociferous debates around the stylistic and generic characteristics of the jazz and the meaning of “jazz tradition” are ongoing. A newer aspect of these debates is that the histories of musics that may be called jazz are transcultural and transnational, and have been so from the start (Atkins 2003).

Similarly, to speak of “Middle-Eastern” influences in sweeping generalizations is to grossly oversimplify an immense diversity of sounds and styles—a diversity that is to some degree evident in the varied influence on Israeli jazz musicians. Brinner writes lucidly about the ongoing and imperfect labels that exist to describe the various musical traditions emerging from the Middle-East:

While some see both Eurocentrism and denial of Arab ownership in the label “Middle-Eastern music,” others find “Arab music” exclusionary as it ignores the essential contributions of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, to name other ethnic groups that partake and contribute to this area of musical practice. Muslim Arab cultural hegemony masks ethnic, religious, and political diversity in many parts of the Middle East, just as it diverts attention from circum-Mediterranean similarities and connections. (2009:81)

The label “Israeli music” is broad and at least equally misleading if used as a genre designation.

Those Israeli jazz artists who have risen to international prominence during the past two decades were born into a rich and diverse musical world that includes many separate – albeit fused - musical traditions along with a variety of blended styles that emerged out of a wide array of intersecting practices, both “local” and “global”. As my findings demonstrate, these multiple, mixed, and ever-changing genres stand as important influences for Israeli jazz musicians. The diversity in Israeli music is, further, inseparable from the diversity of Israeli society. As waves of Jewish immigrants from all over the world moved to Israel-Palestine during the course of the twentieth century, they brought with them musical traditions that had developed (often over centuries) in their previous homes. 12

With these caveats in mind it is reasonable to say that Jewish immigrants to Israel-

Palestine are generally, albeit problematically, understood to belong to two large and distinct groups, Mizrahi/Sephardic and Ashkenazy Jews. While this division informs everyday life and describes related but distinct cultures, ancestries, and histories of migration, in a general way, it is also important to note that each group is profoundly multiple and diverse in terms of cultural practices, especially music. Sephardic or , whose cultural heritage is rooted in countries all across the Middle-East, North Africa, Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, and Central

Asia brought with them music informed by Iraqi, Persian, Turkish, Yemenite, North African genres as well as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) musical traditions. Primarily immigrating from

Eastern and Central Europe, Ashkenazy Jews enriched musical life in pre-state Palestine and subsequently, post-1948 Israel with Eastern European folk songs, liturgical music and Western

European classical music. They also brought the Klezmer tradition and Hassidic musical practices.10

As Brinner notes in Playing Across a Divide (2009), even with the traction of history and the Askenazy/Mizrahi binary, cosmopolitanism has also been central to many Israeli musicians’ outlooks and identities for several decades now. Their attitudes have roots that go beyond globalization and Euro-American influences on daily life in Israel. After all, the vast majority of Israelis are either immigrants or children of immigrants, and have personal or referenced memories and ties to other locales. Extending beyond Israeli life, Brinner also recalls that for centuries Jews have performed a kind of doubleness, “always maintaining at least one language and set of relations in an internal community life and other languages and relations with the external Christian or Muslim majority” (2009:88). For many Jewish

10 For a comprehensive account of music, society and culture in Israel see Shiloah 1997; Regev and Seroussi 2004; Brinner 2009; Horowitz 2010. 13 professional musicians, such “doubleness” did not equate to separateness and often resulted in transcultural musical practices and polymusical competences.

Ethnomusicologist Evan Rapport’s study (2014) of Bukharian Jewish musicians illustrates this point well. Rapport writes about the cosmopolitanism of professional Bukharian

Jewish musicians who developed competencies in a wide array of styles ranging from traditional shashmaqom to diverse genres from various cultures. Indeed, as a result of the social, cultural, and aesthetic conditions that affected their lives, Jewish musicians in many locales have long adopted polymusicality and versatility as a means of professional survival. In this regard, Israeli jazz musicians at the start of the twenty-first century merely continue a practice prevalent for centuries.

Thus, the Israeli jazz musicians I discuss draw upon a wide and diverse array of

“Israeli” or “Jewish” influences that are in and of themselves blended and “cosmopolitan” in nature, while simultaneously drawing upon an even broader array of non-Israeli sources. In most cases, they don’t privilege the “Israeli” influences above others (such as African-

American jazz traditions, Arab classical). This fusion of already fused styles, underscores a second shared dimension that characterizes the musical practices of Israeli jazz musicians. As the following pages will reveal, cosmopolitanism is one of the distinctive markers of the

Israeliness in their musical practice. Indeed, the musicians I interviewed argued that the uniqueness and strength of Israeli music is rooted in the blending that occurred and continues to occur as a result of the multicultural interactions that occurred in Jews’ previous homelands as well as in Israel between the diverse array of newly arriving immigrants. This blend of blends is both an actual marriage of the “local” and ”global”, as well as an invitation to probe beyond 14 this binarism to consider what are the dynamic interactions of “local” and “global” in the context of the Israeli musical landscape.

AUDIOTOPIAS OF THE MULTI-LOCAL MUSICIAN

Novelist Taiye Selasi proposes that we substitute the primacy of nationalist identity with that of locality, and introduces the idea of the multi-local citizen. One “isn’t a citizen of the world,” she writes, “but a citizen of worlds” (Selasi 2014). Selasi outlines three categories that help us understand the various ways “localities” form our identities: rituals, relationships and restrictions. “Rituals” include the things we do every day, where we live, what we do, what we eat, what music we listen to, etc. “Relationships” involve the people in our lives.

“Restrictions” cover the real-politik dimensions of our lives, such as the passport we hold, racism or discrimination we face, the political system of the country we reside in and the economic conditions that affect us. Selasi proposes that instead of asking “where are you from?” we should ask, “where are you a local?” Her invitation to re-consider the weight we give to national identification in our identity discourse is highly relevant and important in the context of a jazz world that is increasingly defined by “stylistic pluralism” and transcultural musicmaking.

Following her, I suggest that jazz scholars should not limit themselves to a nationalist discourse of transcultural jazz that lumps artists into categories such as “Israeli jazz” or

“Norwegian jazz”. Such definitions too often essentialize and reduce complex, wholly unique and personal blends. Instead we might productively speak of the multiplicity and simultaneity, the polyphonies, as it were, of particular musical “localities” in individuals who possess complex identities and unique circumstances. 15

As a way to avoid the limitations of the nation-state as a descriptor for complex practices, born out of transculturation and created by multi-local citizens, I suggest the concept of the multi-local musician. Multi-locality is both a useful way to think about identity construction for today’s jazz musicians—and not just those from Israel—and an acknowledgement of the transformative power of a longing for a more inclusive, pluralistic and cosmopolitan world. Philosopher Ruth Levitas characterizes such utopic yearning as the desire to see “a better way of living…the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life” (1993:256).

This proposal resonates with what communications scholar Josh Kun offers in the concept of audiotopias as “the space within and produced by a musical element that offers the listener and/or musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world” (2005:22-23). He argues that, first, musical pieces are “almost-places of cultural encounter”. Second, he notes that, though music may be immaterial, it nevertheless exists “somewhere”. That “somewhere” is the place where the musician and listener may envision a different social reality. Though this

“almost-place” may be unutterable,11 it has the power to transform and change those that experience it (2005:2-3).

The multi-local musician is local in a diverse set of musical traditions, spanning vast geography and temporality, some of which may be conflicting musically, politically, and/or discursively. Through their practices, these musicians make music that provides a space for themselves and for their listeners to imagine and experience multiple localities and cultural affinities (past, present, and future). This “contact zone”, as Kun puts it, is not a space that erases contradictions or dissonance, but rather a place where “disparate identity-formations, cultures, and geographies historically kept and mapped separately are allowed to interact with

11 Levitas in Kun 2005:2-3 16 each other as well as enter into relationships whose consequences for cultural identification are never predetermined” (2005:23). This audiotopia is not only a “map of the future” (2005:23), but also a transformative process of living and creating in the present that affects the lives of musicians and listeners alike.

The music-making activities and lives of the Israeli jazz musicians who stand at the center of this dissertation demonstrate a multi-local existence both “real” and “audiotopic”. The vast majority of them grew up in Israel to parents or grandparents who immigrated from elsewhere but have lived the majority (or at least a substantial portion) of their adult life in the

United States or Europe. Their multi-locality started as soon as they were born. For example, bassist Omer Avital father’s side of the family comes from and his mother’s side from

Yemen; bassist Gilad Abro has one side from South African Jewry (Ashkenazy) and the other from Iraq. Similarly multi-local examples are numerous. Whereas, several important musicians have recently relocated back to Israel, a significant number of others have partnered with non-

Israeli spouses and declare no intention to return to Israel in the future. As internationally touring jazz musicians, based out of or other large cosmopolitan cities, they are involved in numerous cross-cultural and transnational collaborations.

Musically, these musicians’ multi-locality also begins with their upbringing in multi- cultural Israel, a country whose soundscape is colored by layers upon layers of transcultural exchange. Such embedded multi-locality was further enhanced for each of them in their adolescence as they began developing their command of African-American jazz traditions and vocabularies. Eventually, by way of musical “Ritual” and “Relationships”, many strived to become “locals” in American jazz traditions and styles. Similarly, many of the musicians I interviewed have further sought to become musical “locals” in additional musical practices, 17 such as Arab Classical Music, Moroccan and Algerian Andalusian music, North Indian

Classical, and various Afro-Cuban and Brazilian musical idioms.

In seeking to describe the transcultural music these artists make, it is important to highlight the fluidity with which they, themselves, traverse a wide range of geographical and temporal dimensions of musical style even within what can be considered the same genre.

Indeed, the very nature of their musical fusions and those that they “fuse” is highly personal and often varies from moment to moment. Thus, my research emphasizes an understanding of the multi-local threads of influence that form the foundation for the music these musicians make.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

My interest in Israeli jazz as a topic of study is no accident. Indeed, generationally, and in terms of the broad trajectory of my upbringing, musical training and career as a jazz pianist and , I belong to the third wave of Israeli jazz musicians on whom I focus this study.12

Still, my own musical journey both overlaps and diverges from them. I was born in the US to an Israeli mother and an American Jewish father. I spent the vast majority of my childhood and adolescence in Israel, with three separate six-month stints in the US before the age of twelve.

Hebrew was our primary language at home, but I often spoke English with my father. While living in Israel, I maintained other links to the US as well. My grandmother’s annual visits from the US were treasured occasions, truly the highlights of the year. “America” was the smell of gram’s candy-filled suitcases, packets full of baseball cards, and endless card games conducted in English. As I got older, my connection to the US – both my constructed ideal of it and those

12 Media articles about me have similarly positioned me as belonging to these waves, “Part of a wave of brilliant Israeli jazz musicians who have invigorated the US jazz scene over the past two decades, Lemish was…” (Gilbert 2012). 18 that were a matter of family ties—was a comforting presence, for instance when aspects of

Israeli life (particularly politics and the constant fear of terrorism and war) were hard to bear.

Conversely, though I have lived in North America for over fifteen years now, my daily morning routine still includes reading the news in Hebrew from my online subscription to the

Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Moreover, very little if anything in North-American culture can stir in me the unfettered emotion that a classic Israeli song or touching novel in Hebrew can. This sense of in-between-ness, the feeling that I neither fully belonged in either US or Israeli culture even though I identified with both, was, I think, cemented during a one-year period, the first half of which was spent in Philadelphia followed by a return to Israel at age eleven. I used to joke that home was in an airplane somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, but I also cultivated a fascination with cultures around the globe, a rejection of nationalism and cultural chauvinism

(even before I knew what those words meant) and a strong sense of empathy.

Interestingly enough, my own musical life is marked by a similar in between-ness. I think of myself as a performer-composer-scholar. I started composing music not long after starting to play and I have been thinking and writing about music and music making almost equally as long. I cannot simply define myself as one or the other; for me they are not separable, but rather fully interconnected aspects of my musical being. In navigating my way through the university system, the challenge of traversing through what seems like artificial separations of musical life has not always been easy. Likewise, the music I make and my musical interests cannot easily be categorized into one specific genre. My music lives in- between jazz, Western art music, , Israeli popular song, and a whole assortment of other influences. Perhaps a bit like my national and cultural identity, musically, I have never sought to become fully identified with any one specific tradition (though I have 19 studied several traditions in great depth) but rather to invest fully in expressing an integration of the many different aspects of my musical identity. In that regard, I have been fortunate from a young age to have parents, mentors and teachers who valued this type of pursuit and encouraged it. Yet I also believe that the seeds for my interest in transcultural iterations of jazz were planted long before I ever started playing music.

My interest in Israeli jazz specifically also predates my return to graduate school by many years. This dissertation, in fact, was foreshadowed in 1998, when my high school classmate Ofer Globerman and I built the first website dedicated to the topic. Called IJO-Israeli

Jazz Online, (Lemish and Globerman 1998) the site presented an overview of Israeli jazz musicians, recordings, venues and educational institutions. It even included a detailed description and our own reviews of the 1998 Red Sea Jazz Festival. It was a one-time project and we didn’t keep the site up-to-date following its creation. Before stumbling across it as part of my dissertation research I had forgotten about its existence for at least a decade.

None of this is especially distinct from the experiences of third wave Israeli jazz musicians. Like many of them, I also witnessed and was inspired first hand by the debut appearances in Israel of several first wave Israeli jazz musicians who worked as sidemen for jazz luminaries such as Chick Corea and . I devoured newspaper reports in the late 1990s about the early successes in NYC of musicians such as Omer Avital, Avi Lebovich and Amos Hoffman. Much like most of my interlocutors, I also received my early jazz education by taking private lessons from one of the leading jazz educators in Israel and by 20 matriculating from a jazz program concentration at one of the few elite arts high schools situated around .13

Yet, after high school my path diverged rather dramatically from my contemporaries and the typical path taken by most Israeli jazz musicians. Instead of moving to NYC or Boston to further my studies or attempt to “make it” in the mecca of jazz, I moved out west to a small town in Sonoma county, Northern California, where I lived with my paternal grandmother.

Situated about an hour north of San Francisco, I advanced my own studies and career by studying privately with pianist, composer and theorist W.A. Mathieu, enrolling as a jazz performance music major at Sonoma State University and simultaneously establishing myself as a pianist/composer in the San Francisco Bay Area jazz scene. In the years that followed my move to California, I lost touch with most of my high school classmates, and had no contact with the jazz scenes in Israel or NYC. For example, out of the forty-four musicians, industry professionals, educators and scholars I interviewed during my fieldwork for this project, I had only personally met or interacted with a handful previously. Those were all individuals I had known as a teenager while still living in Israel but had not been in touch with for years. In those few extraordinary instances, our interview served as a quite enjoyable reunion after fifteen years.

Still, my own musical journey contained within it many of the same experiences and characteristics that I discovered were typical for the Israeli jazz musicians I interviewed. For example, in the decade leading up to starting this study, I began exploring the blending of

“Israeli” and “Jewish” influences and sources in my own music. In 2005, approximately three years after I left Israel, likely as part of my attempt to process the emotions associated with my

13 Between the ages of 14-18 I studied with Opher Brayer, one of the founders of the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts jazz program, and a teacher for many well-known Israeli jazz artists, including Eli Degibri, Anat Fort, Yaron Herman, Shai Maestro, Anat Fort and numerous others. 21 departure and nostalgia for my childhood home, I developed an interest in Israeli music, film, literature and poetry. Visits to Israel would be marked by extensive shopping sprees for CDs and books unavailable anywhere else. Later, from the distance of the US, and like so many other ex-pat Israelis I have known, I too discovered the appeal of songs that in my youth I dismissed as hokey. My growing interest in “world music” also led me to purchase several collections of books and CDs documenting archival recordings of liturgical and folk traditions of various Jewish congregations from across Europe, the Middle-East and Central Asia.14

I started to notice these various influences in my original compositions around 2007 and they seemed to sprout in my music organically.15 Indeed, in the years leading up to this dissertation project, my own journey of listening, studying and eventually incorporating musical influences derived from traditions associated with various Jewish communities and

Israeli popular music in my own original compositions and was never a deliberate or entirely conscious effort. Furthermore, its appearance was sporadic, and much of my music making bore no distinct sonic marker of such influences. Now, following four years of intense research, my creative activities have been influenced even more by the rich musical traditions emerging out of Israel, the Middle-East and various Jewish communities across the world. I have also begun to broach a vast and abundant wealth of music by Israeli jazz artists

14 These collections were published by the Jewish Music Research Center at Hebrew University in . 15 Remarkably, I was contacted around this time by a researcher conducting genealogical research on the “Lemish” musician tree. He revealed a world unknown in our family, namely that my own paternal lineage connects to one of the three powerful Jewish Romanian klezmer family dynasties (known as Kapelyes). Indeed, it turns out that the Lemish clan from Iasi, Romania was very influential across the entire Black Sea region for several centuries leading up to WWII. And, starting in the late nineteenth century, when several family members immigrated to the US, in the development of klezmer musical culture and Yiddish theater in the Philadelphia area. Indeed, learning that being a professional musician was the “Lemish” trade for centuries in Europe as well as in the United States sparked even greater interest in connecting with these ancestral and musical roots (Strom 2002; Netsky 2015). 22 who, owing to their countless musical influences, should be understood as multi-local musicians.

METHODOLOGY

Though internationally active Israeli jazz musicians live in many sites across North

America, Europe and Israel, the vast majority reside in NYC or in one of several Israeli urban centers. In order to adequately capture the multi-local and dynamic nature of these musicians’ work, this dissertation should be read as a “multi-sited ethnography” (Marcus 1995; Hannerz

2003; Hemmasi 2010). My fieldwork was based primarily in NYC and multiple locations across Israel. In keeping with the idea of multi-localism, several important musicians were on tour during my research period and a few live outside of the NYC-Israel circuit. I interviewed these players telematically using Skype and I visited others in cities such as Columbia, South

Carolina. In all, I conducted forty-four interviews with musicians, educators, journalists, producers and scholars.

As a matter of the schedules of the musicians in the study and my own performance career, fieldwork was done over the course of multiple short trips. I spent ten days in NYC in

December 2014 conducting interviews and attending concerts of Israeli jazz musicians. Later that month, I flew to Columbia, South Carolina to interview and spend time with guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman who had recently relocated there. My field research continued in May and June of 2015 when I returned to NYC for three more weeks. Subsequently I spent six weeks in July and August of 2015 in Israel, primarily in Tel Aviv and its surrounding towns. In spring and summer of 2017 I conducted several more interviews with musicians and industry professionals in NYC, Israel and Germany via Skype. 23

My time in NYC and Israel allowed me to map the field of Israeli Jazz, including the interconnected networks of musicians, educators, scholars, journalists, foundation representatives, and promoters. In addition to conducting extensive interviews with Israeli jazz musicians, I spoke at length with scholars as well as leading educators, many of whom are associated with high school and post-secondary jazz programs in Israel. In order to expand my understanding of the full context of the Israeli jazz “music world” (Becker 1982), I interviewed concert and festival directors and producers as well as leading critics and journalists (both print and media).

To complement these interviews, I combed the archives of Israeli newspapers and

American jazz magazines, such as Downbeat and JazzTimes. I also utilized numerous online articles interviews from additional media outlets and artist websites.

Finally, my research is grounded in extensive listening and analysis of sound recordings and performance videos. My listening focused not only on the albums released by my interlocutors but also recordings of the myriad of musical influences that have shaped their own music making. In addition to analysis and transcription of recorded media, I also analyzed charts and lead sheets (provided by the artists themselves whenever possible).

DISSERTATION OUTLINE

Chapter Two situates this case study of Israeli jazz within the broader field of jazz scholarship. It identifies new developments since the emergence of the “New Jazz Studies” while highlighting the ongoing lacuna of in-depth studies of jazz practices outside of the US.

The chapter thus points toward an emerging field that focuses on transcultural and transnational iterations of jazz, what I call the field of “Global Jazz Studies”. 24

Chapter Three provides an in-depth overview of the Israeli jazz phenomenon and the key figures who stand at its center. Particular attention is paid to the conditions that enabled the growth of the generation of Israeli jazz musicians that established itself internationally since the

1990s. The chapter traces the historical development of jazz in Israel, the importance of its institutionalization in the late 1980s and the powerful influence of jazz educators who began teaching at arts high schools and post-secondary programs in the late 1980s and continue to teach today. Further analyses from explorations of the Israeli jazz phenomenon and its broader social context present the importance of what I call the “Israel-NYC” axis and interconnected networks of support and influence that started to develop in the early 1990s with the first wave of Israeli jazz pioneers.

Chapters Four and Five present analyses of the repertoires of music created and performed by Israeli jazz artists. Chapter Four focuses on original compositions, detailing and analyzing the many diverse musical influences, both local and global, that they draw upon to create their own particular transcultural jazz style. In showing the ways in which each individual creates music, drawn from their own particular blend of specific influences, I problematize essentialist conceptualizations of Israeli jazz and instead argue for understanding it as multiple, fluid, and changing. The chapter concludes with a discussion of multi-local musicianship, using the music making activities of guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman as a case study.

Finally, shifting from original compositions to arrangements, Chapter Five demonstrates the widespread practice of Israeli jazz musicians’ incorporation of musical and thematic material from a diverse array of “Israeli” and “Jewish” sources. The chapter contextualizes this practice within the broader phenomenon of jazz indigenization worldwide 25 and identifies the repertoire reservoirs utilized. It also investigates the differences and commonalities between these arrangements and the role that “standards” derived from the

Great American Songbook have played traditionally in the US. Finally, utilizing detailed musical analysis, I demonstrate the ways in which these arrangements provide further evidence for Israeli jazz as a transcultural music making jazz practice.

While this is the first comprehensive study of the contributions of Israeli musicians in the international jazz scene, it is also intended to engage with the global phenomenon of transcultural jazz practice more broadly. By considering the performers discussed in the study as multi-local musicians, I add additional perspectives to an ongoing debate that wrestles with the place of “America” in jazz practice and ascriptions of jazz authenticity. Indeed, as I discuss in the next chapter, an emergent body of literature that I refer to as Global Jazz Studies has challenged what might be thought of as an American exceptionalist view of jazz, for instance, that “real jazz” must be rooted in the United States geographically, sonically, or both. Yet this de-essentializing project has, at times, relied on an outlook that emphasizes nationalism in the localization of jazz in non-American nation-states. This approach has been especially prevalant among European scholars working on European jazz scenes. In contrast, my study emphasizes how, on one hand Israeli jazz musicians draw on and, indeed, are local in multiple music cultures while, on the other hand, they place tremendous importance on the notion of jazz as firmly rooted in a decidedly African-American tradition. My intervention invites further explorations of the multi-local music making practices of jazz musicians worldwide. Thus, as a case study, this project provides insight into the nature, role and politics of transcultural music making in contemporary jazz practice broadly. However, it is also an ethnography of a 26 particular group of Israeli musicians that aims to enahnce knowledge of modern Israeli society, culture, and jazz sounds, discourses and practices.

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CHAPTER TWO

VOICING JAZZ NARRATIVES: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE VOICES OF JAZZ IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

“Play your own voice” is one of those cliché phrases frequently repeated by jazz educators during lessons and spoken about in almost mystical terms by jazz musicians, from unknowns to those that are included in nearly every historical account of the music. What may seem to be a personal journey towards musical self-actualization can actually be interpreted as highly rich in political and cultural meaning. “Play your own voice” means not only discovering and expressing your own voice, but also being heard, being acknowledged for your individual expression, for your part in a collective expression and everything these contain.

Thus, as musicians have continually stretched or contracted the stylistic boundaries of jazz through their music and words, they have also actively contributed to and been a part of continually shifting narratives of jazz’s history and stylistic boundaries.

Many consider this directive to “play your own voice” to be one of the most salient characteristics of jazz, and it is also this call of duty that has contributed greatly to its rapidly evolving nature: “one of jazz’s main tenets is the responsibility it confers on each performer to develop a personal sound…to contribute uniquely to a dialogic whole” (Barzel 2012:182). The room and demand for individual expression has been, since the 1960s, a main impetus for musicians the world over to express who they were by constantly re-defining the music, incorporating various new elements and at times challenging some of its previously held musical features to the core. One can identify at least three important stylistic directions of musical exploration emerging since the 1960s that have fundamentally been left out of the standard narrative of jazz history and “mainstream” jazz world: transcultural jazz practices, free 28 jazz and jazz-rock fusion. This chapter will focus primarily on the first of these categories, the emergence of various manifestations of transcultural jazz and the study thereof, what I call

Global Jazz Studies.

In the past decade, a growing body of predominantly (but not exclusively) European scholars have challenged the assumptions of American exceptionalism that seem to lie at the heart of most American jazz discourse. Indeed, as noted above, the expectation for individual expression became a real catalyst for musicians the world over to change the stylistic nature of the music they were making. Thus, musicians living outside the United States decided to interpret the call for individual self-expression as a mandate for rejecting imitation and exploring new modes of expression that more authentically represented their own cultural background and influences. Since these musicians were not American, expressing “their own voice” meant expressing something different than established African-American jazz traditions.

As global jazz voices sought expression within jazz, we have witnessed the emergence of an assortment of transcultural “jazz dialects” (Nicholson 2005). This dissertation, which focuses on the transcultural “Israeli Jazz”, fits within this growing field of inquiry, which has challenged some of the key epistemological limitations that have hindered a more cosmopolitan understanding of jazz practice.

Before we focus on these emerging jazz styles and associated discourses, the next few pages will present a brief survey of the “standard” American jazz narrative and the critiques directed towards it by scholars belonging to the “New Jazz Studies”.

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STANDARD VOICINGS

In detailing the emergence of the dominant narrative of jazz history, American scholar

Taylor E. Atkins (2003) argues that historians and critics sought to establish the legitimacy of jazz as “serious art” by creating a canon of jazz greats and important works. This view remains prevalent well-into the twenty-first century in spite of a growing number of scholars active since the early 1990s who have engaged with the political, social and cultural dimensions of jazz in increasingly nuanced and interdisciplinary ways (what is generally referred to as the

“New Jazz Studies”).16 The older and now much critiqued “great man/serious art/evolutionary line” narrative was popularized and further entrenched through the Ken Burns’ PBS series,

Jazz, which was subsequently used as a teaching resource for jazz history courses across North

America. As noted by Atkins, “The resulting narratives detailed a natural stylistic evolution, guided by a select handful of geniuses who captivated the world with the sounds they produced” (2003:xii).

Much attention, perhaps rightfully so, is afforded to Wynton Marsalis’s role as torchbearer for the “traditionalist” construction of jazz history. Still, as historian Eric Porter

(2002) points out, Marsalis’s canonization efforts should be viewed as a continuation of a century long effort to define jazz as “America’s Classical music”.

From the genre’s inception to the present, jazz musicians have continually had to negotiate the tension of the music’s associations with popular music and Western art music.

Their positions on this matter have been complicated by the multilayered intersection with issues such as race, commercialism, politics and aesthetics. Porter’s extensive survey in What Is

This Thing Called Jazz? (2002) reveals a great diversity of contrasting personal positions. For

16 See DeVeaux 1991; Monson 1996; Tucker 2000; Porter 2002; Ake 2002, 2012. 30 example, Duke Ellington embraced popular music whereas ’s sought to differentiate his more sophisticated “Hot” music from the commercial “Sweet” music.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the emergence of jazz challenged Victorian era social mores and perceptions of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture (Levine 1988 Cited in Porter 2002:8-9).

Porter underscores the way jazz challenged European “highbrow” distinctions between composer/performer and performer/audience. Still, already at that juncture, some musicians and intellectuals sought to distinguish jazz from popular music, aiming to elevate its place in society by bringing it to the concert hall. Indeed, jazz scholar Scott DeVeaux argues that efforts to “protect” jazz (whether seen as folk music or art music) from popular music and the

“dangers” of commercialism have been recurring and pervasive throughout its history

(1991:529).

Thus, it seems jazz identity has often been constructed in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. For example, artists positioned themselves to revolt against the commercialism of swing and , while avant-garde artists railed against an assortment of

“confining” mainstream styles. When Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch emerged as spokespersons for the “neoclassicist” jazz movement, they, and many others who subscribed to this understanding of jazz, targeted fusion artists for “selling out”. Yet, as DeVeaux (1991:530) points out, this is not without some irony since, in his view Marsalis, and likely many other neoclassicist musicians have cultivated a non-commerical, “aura of artistic purity” that actually enhances their commercial appeal.

Jazz neoclassicists have been especially critical of popular culture, which in their view fails to uphold high cultural standards. Porter (2002) asserts that this belief informs Marsalis’s conviction that the role of the jazz artist is not only to make music that is artistically superb and 31 broadly appealing, but also to educate and uplift the masses. From such a vision, it is understandable that he and many other like minded musicians and scholars have sought to codify, preserve and uphold their particular notion of The Jazz Tradition. Yet, as DeVeaux notes, this project and the attitude that underpins it, has engendered the formation of a jazz canon that excludes many aspects of the music’s history and arguably has limited its appeal and development. Historically, this means that contributions of, for instance, Europeans or Asians, and women have been largely unattended to by jazz scholars. In the present and recent past, this has meant that various fusions of jazz that do not fit closely with a “swing and ” based model (Nicholson 2005) struggle for legitimacy.

Debates over jazz authenticity, further, are not new. Rather, rancorous debates about the music’s definition characterized much of the twentieth century: “Hot” jazz vs. Swing, the

“moldy figs” New Orleans revivalists vs. the bebop progressives, the hard boppers vs. free jazzers. As DeVeaux argues, scholars and critics repeatedly struck compromises choosing to emphasize commonalities over divisions, using the term “jazz” to encompass an ever-growing range of evolving styles. A key result is that “[jazz’s] definition [is] now more than ever dependent on ideas of continuous evolution and growth” (DeVeaux 1991:539).

In his essay, DeVeaux demonstrated how a narrative that viewed jazz as an “organic entity” that periodically regenerated itself while maintaining forward momentum came to dominate the historical view of the music. This narrative of progressive continuity served as a powerful unifying force that gave meaning to otherwise diverse styles under the broad umbrella of jazz:

The essence of jazz, in other words, lies not in any one style, or any one cultural or historical context, but in that which links all these things together into a seamless continuum. Jazz is what it is because it is a culmination of all that has come before. Without the sense of depth that only a narrative can 32

provide, jazz would be literally rootless, indistinguishable from a variety of other “popular” genres that combine virtuosity and craftsmanship with dance rhythms. Its claim to being not only distinct, but elevated above other indigenous forms (“America’s classical music”), is in large part dependent on the idea of an evolutionary progression reaching back to the beginning of the century. (DeVeaux 1991:530)

This view of “jazz organicism” seems to be widely embraced. Whereas traditionalists accept this basic tenant of stylistic evolution but only until the 1960s, progressives believe that such change has never stopped.

In reifying a linear history of evolving styles (from New Orleans, to Swing, to Bebop, to

Cool Jazz, to , etc) and deifying its heroes, the “mainstream” world of jazz has been engaging rather self-consciously with “tradition”. Looking backward, advocates of this view have established conventions that freeze practices particular to specific styles and pieces while emulating them in present day performances. Pieces from the great American songbook

(“standards”) coupled with compositions by jazz legends such as Monk, Ellington, Mingus and

Coltrane (“jazz standards”) form a fixed, though large, repertoire of pieces. Recordings of spontaneous performances have been elevated to “works” status, studied meticulously and subsequently replicated by students and professionals alike.

In such an environment, a mastery of convention and the ability to imitate is viewed as a prerequisite to innovation. Before you can “play your own thing” you are expected to show that you can play what Prez, Bird, Miles and Trane played.

The key is to sound like somebody else, to take what is already there and sound like an extension of that. It’s not to not sound like that. Music has a tradition that you have to understand before you can move to the next step. (Marsalis quoted in Porter 2002:292)

Thus, what had previously been an organic process of apprenticeship, collaboration, variation and innovation passed generationally (often on the band stand) has been transformed into a 33 codified set of historically “accurate” performance practices that are often taught institutionally and practiced widely.

COMPLEX VOICINGS: THE “NEW JAZZ STUDIES”

In the 1990s a range of scholars coming from diverse fields such as history, ethnomusicology, American studies, ethnic studies and literary studies began to challenge the tidy canonization of jazz history. They focused on the music’s development in its broader social context while highlighting the voices of individuals, movements and groups of marginalized people whose “own voices” had not been heard. This scholarly movement has come to be recognized as the “New Jazz Studies”.

Many scholars point to Scott DeVeaux’s already referenced “Constructing the Jazz

Tradition” as an important catalyst for this concentrated and continuous reevaluation of jazz narratives and identities. Viewed somewhat more broadly, in the early 1990s jazz scholars finally caught up with already well established advances in Black Studies, Women and

Gender’s Studies, Literary theory and thus began to critically investigate jazz in a far more interdisciplinary framework (Tucker 2012).

Indeed, scholars such as Eric Porter, Sherrie Tucker, Ingrid Monson and David Ake have made important contributions to our growing understandings of jazz discourse. They have introduced the voices of African-American musicians and intellectuals while urging a consideration of these in a broader social context (Porter 2002); introduced gender into jazz studies (Tucker 2000); explored the margins of the jazz canon while elucidating the complexity of genre formation (Ake 2002, 2012) and shed light on the interactive dimensions in (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996). 34

Working from an understanding that canon formation operates as “a technology of exclusion, hierarchy, and power” (Tucker 2012:266) these scholars, individually and collectively, have poked holes at the tidy master-narrative of jazz history. Such efforts have vastly enriched our understandings of jazz as a musical and cultural expression, along with the complex debates that surround it.

GLOBAL VOICINGS: JAZZ DIALECTS AND THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL JAZZ STUDIES

Whereas the growing number of scholars advancing the New Jazz Studies paradigm

(e.g., Ake; DeVeaux; Monson; Porter; Tucker) have challenged what they view as a linear, often romanticized account of the music’s history, there remains a puzzling neglect of jazz practices in the international sphere. British jazz scholar Tony Whyton (2012:367) observes that “ironically, in dispelling several mythologies about jazz, the New Jazz Studies has arguably failed to engage with the global spread of jazz and the intercultural exchanges that have occurred in the music since its inception”. Over the last decade this lack of critical attention to “global jazz” is gradually being addressed by scholars primarily outside of the US, who are developing what I refer to as Global Jazz Studies.

Indeed, since the early 2000’s several books and articles focused on jazz beyond

America’s shores have been published. These include Jazz Planet (Ed. Atkins, 2003), Is Jazz

Dead? Or Has It Simply Moved to a New Address (Nicholson, 2005) Eurojazzland (Ed.

Cerichari et all 2012) to name but a few.17 Additionally, several multi-national and interdisciplinary research initiatives have been set up in Europe, including Rhythm Changes:

Jazz Cultures and European Identities, along with new academic journals such as the European

17 Additional important books on the subject include: Heffley 2005; McKay 2005; Nicholson 2014; Perchard 2015; Bohlman & Plastino 2016; 35

Jazz Research Journal and Routledge’s Transnational Studies in Jazz book publishing line edited by British scholars Tony Whyton and Nicholas Gebhardt.

Since all histories are constructed out of subjective choices, authors’ assumptions are often revealed by their omissions (Jost 2012). As Sherrie Tucker indicates, focusing on the work of musicians that have been neglected is a very worthy pursuit in and of itself, but another still, involves ascertaining the causes for such neglect.

In his introduction to Jazz Planet, American jazz historian Taylor Atkins takes aim at the premise of American exceptionalism that seems to lie at the heart of much jazz discourse. It is often argued that jazz possesses intrinsic characteristics that capture the essence of American life and the spirit of its people and that its birth could have only happened in the United States.

Rejecting such a view, Atkins proposes viewing “frontier expansion, settler colonialism, slavery, immigration, industrialization, and cultural hybridization as transnational processes”

(2003:xiii), with analogies possible in Australia, Brazil, Russia and beyond. Jazz, Atkins claims, should be viewed from the outset as both national and postnational music.

Furthermore, Atkins makes a general case for jazz as an “agent of globalization”. He recounts the story of jazz’s global travels outside the US, briefly documenting its spread (and complex reception) after World War I as a result of the confluence of new technology and growing American influence in the world. Indeed, it would seem naïve to analyze jazz’s ascent in the global sphere in isolation from the circumstances of growing economic and cultural

American hegemony in the twentieth century. Yet, perhaps not unlike other cultural and political discourse in the United States (democracy or sports for example) a decidedly insulated approach persists:

The evolution of jazz from local subaltern expression to cosmopolitan art form has typically been explained as purely a result of the music’s intrinsic 36

charm, and displayed as evidence in a triumphal narrative of benign American cultural achievement. Of course, many did indeed find the music appealing, liberating and refreshing…But this supposed aesthetic detachment from base politics has too often obscured the relationship between jazz’s ubiquity, colonialism, nationalist politics, and American military, economic, and cultural hegemony. (Atkins 2003:xix)

Atkins also suggests that the music itself did not remain unchanged. Every locale adapted jazz to their particular musical and cultural context. By the 1930s and 1940s efforts were already underway to nationalize or indigenize jazz all over the world, using indigenous musical material and repertoire. Ironically these nationalizations were sometimes motivated by a desire to mask its (African) American origins. These efforts preceded the oft-cited cross- cultural fusions credited to American musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and

Randy Weston (Atkins 2003:xvi).

Atkins provides particularly interesting insight into the complex role that jazz played as

America’s “secret sonic weapon” during the Cold War. The US promoted jazz overseas sending leading black musicians as cultural ambassadors representing the “voice of freedom” aiming to demonstrate racial tolerance. There is evidence to suggest that this was effective as some “eighty million people put their lives on hold for two hours every night to listen to Willis

Conover’s jazz program Music U.S.A. on Voice of America” (2003:xviii).

However, jazz as cultural propaganda tool was full of paradox and yielded some unintended consequences. Back home in the US these same musicians were discriminated against and oppressed. Leading American jazz artists often expressed solidarity with anti- imperial, anti-colonial sentiments. Local cultures embraced jazz, which was birthed by oppressed people, as a symbol of “third world” solidarity and as rejection of American colonial aspirations. Musically, this often meant artists being interested in incorporating indigenous aesthetic principals, “The result was a considerable expansion of jazz’s sonic palette and 37 expressive potential, and a multilateral, truly global exchange of musical ideas, inspiration and influence” (Atkins 2003:xviii-xix).

The nationally oriented jazz style emerging in Japan in the 1960s serves as a useful example of the complex cultural and musical processes that were directly tied to jazz’s travels worldwide. In Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001), Atkins proposes viewing the move to create a national style as a part of a larger movement in the arts and society of Japan in general in the 1960s motivated partly out of anti-American, anti-imperial sentiment.

As the subtitle for his volume suggests, the issue of authenticity is central to understanding the processes that took place. musicians generally pursued three strategies of authentication: 1) imitating “American Jazz” 2) making it in a “legitimate” scene such as the US or interwar Shanghai 3) indigenzing or nationalizing the music by way of incorporating elements from local traditional music.

The third strategy, “indigenization,” which was employed actively by some Japanese musicians starting in the 1960s, is particularly relevant to my discussion below of emerging transcultural jazz dialects and most especially to this dissertation’s focus on music created by

Israeli jazz musicians. In an effort to create “Japanese Jazz”, musicians began incorporating traditional melodies and instruments from Japanese folk music. Additionally, artists developed a discourse about use of “space” and other characteristics that were imagined as uniquely

Japanese. I will return to this strategy in greater detail below.

Responding to issues of authenticity and exclusion arising from the US, some Japanese artists sought to highlight an ethnic bond with African-Americans that would ordain legitimacy to their musical efforts. They aligned themselves with Black Nationalist causes both politically 38 and in the arts. This inspired their view of the “yellow negro” arguing for shared commonalities between Japanese and African-Americans (Atkins 2001).

A different response to the same set of concerns involved Japanese musicians constructing exclusionary fences around their own musical practice. These artists often made the claim that Japanese Jazz can only be authentically played by Japanese. In creating a musical expression “which foreigners cannot imitate” (Atkins 2001:12) these musicians created a space for themselves (both artistically and commercially) in Japan and within the broader international jazz community.

According to Japanese writer Yui Shoichi “jazz, rather than sweeping away the diversity of global cultures, provides a mechanism for rediscovering indigenous traditions” (in

Atkins 2003:xix). Indeed, Japan was not alone in this process. Noted British jazz journalist

Stuart Nicholson analogizes jazz to the English language, as both spread globally by “the agents of globalization” (2005:171) and both serve as a lingua franca for many “non-native” speakers: “In the world at large, English and jazz are both viewed as tools for expression, not as something that is “owned” by the Americans or the British” (2005:173). As a result, musicians in various places around the world are asserting their own cultural identity within the global jazz world through the development of local jazz dialects (ibid).

Following this line of thought, Nicholson offers two views on the use of these languages that stand in tension with one another. A prescriptivist view is advocated by those who feel themselves to be gatekeepers of a particular version of history or interested in maintaining economic and political power. From this perspective, jazz (or English for that matter) should be practiced following certain rules and guidelines. The descriptivist view perceives the practice of these languages as more malleable. Origins aside, local communities 39 adopt these languages, feeling no particular obligation to specific rules and incorporating them into their own cultural repertoire (Nicholson 2005).

As they relate to the meanings of jazz and especially its historiography, the complex processes of globalization lead to seemingly paradoxical musical results. In writing about transculturation in the context of popular music, Nicholson notes that pioneering global music industry scholars Roger Wallis and Krister Malm (1984) argue that both musical homogenization and increased musical diversity are occuring simultaneously (Nicholson

2005:167). Building on Wallis and Malm as well as the work of Roland Robertson, Nicholson proposes the distinction between two co-existing phenomena: “globalization” and

“glocalization”. For Nicholson, “globalized” jazz, whether performed in Amsterdam, Rome,

Sydney or Tokyo, involves musicians emulating and imitating established stylistic conventions.

This homogenization of jazz practice lines up with conceptualizations of globalization as

“cultural imperialism” as discussed in the writing of scholars such as Shuker and Ritzer (cf.

Nicholson 2005:165-66). In contrast, “glocalized” jazz occurs when “local” communities process and transform these exported “global” cultural products into new, “glocal” variants.

This view of local/global synthesis arises out of the growing critique of the “center-periphery” model of globalization which Nicholason sees as lacking in nuance (Nicholson 2005:166-67).

It is important to note that Nicholson is not suggesting that what he calls new jazz dialects supplant the more traditional styles and practices. Rather, he assers that multi- dialecticism in jazz is about “musicians around the world working within the music to find innovative and original ways for it to continue to evolve and broaden the music’s expressive resources in the twenty-first century in ways that are relevant to them and their audiences” 40

(2005:193). This strikes me as an inclusive, pluralistic and positive vision for the genre’s future, and one that is evident in the practices of Israeli jazz musicians.

As referenced already, Jazz Planet, was a first of its kind collection of essays edited by

Taylor Atkins focused on the story of jazz globally. Focusing on the way in which local cultures outside of the United States absorb and interact with jazz practices, the essays in this volume range in topic from individual musicians, to particular geographical contexts, to specific temporal junctures in the twentieth century. Jazz Planet made an important early contribution to the emerging field of Global Jazz Studies, challenging traditional historical narratives of jazz, and highlighting untold histories of jazz in Europe, Australia, Latin America,

Asia and Africa.

For example, Raul Fernandez (2003) traces the history of Cuban musicians and their contribution to the development of jazz and . His main argument is that from the outset Cuba played an important role in the birth of the new genre. The back and forth exchange between Cuba and New Orleans in the early days meant that “Latin” influence was already in play with musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and others. Similarly, jazz was present and active in Cuba from the early part of the twentieth century and thus influenced the development of Cuban popular styles. In subsequent decades,

Cuban musicians coming to the US and US musicians bringing jazz to Cuba, as well as collaborations between these musicians was paramount in creating the “Latin Jazz” genre.

Acacio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade (2003) contextualizes the emergence of “Brazilian

Jazz” within the history música popular brasileira (Brazilian popular music), positioning it as a product of an ongoing ambivalent interaction between Brazilian national styles and influences from North American Jazz. Piedade describes this as “friction of musicalities”. He argues that 41 just as “ US jazz” has influenced “”, the same is true in reverse and that this process is a dynamic, interconnected, on going process of change and exchange, often very much cyclical or back and forth several times.

In her essay about jazz in Zimbabwe, Linda Williams (2003) argues that Zimbabwean jazz artists have blended American jazz elements with their own musical traditions to create a

“distinctive style of music, transferring American idioms into an African expression” (96). To substantiate her claim, Williams presents a discussion of the type of competences and values that are favored in musical training and music making in the jazz scene of Zimbabwe.

One competence that is highly valued in Zimbabwe is the ability to play by ear,

“indispensable to the creative process in Zimbabwean music” (Williams 2003: 83). Williams articulates the different views on the balance between “playing by ear” and theoretical training.

A second competence, developing a unique sound is identified as parallel with American jazz values. A third important competence involves a performers’ rhythmic ability, and in particular the skill to recognize and effectively utilize intricate rhythmic patterns. Furthermore,

Zimbabwean musicians value the way in which rhythm informs melody. According to the musicians she interviewed the Triple-Rhythmic Effect (a kind of poly-rhythmic 12/8 simultaneity) is the most distinguishing feature of Zimbabwean jazz.

The recently published volume Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (2016) edited by ethnomusicologists Philip V. Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino includes chapters focusing on jazz from diverse regions, countries and diasporas such as Scandinavia, the Balkans,

Azerbaijan, Iran, Portugal, Ethiopia, South Africa, Italy, India, and the Armenian diaspora. All these examples point to the various ways in which individuals belonging to diverse cultures around the world have worked with the global American jazz tradition, adapting, blending and 42 often transforming the music to create new transcultural jazz dialects. These efforts emerge out of the desire of musicians around the world to express “their own voice” individually and collectively.

To put this process in historical perspective it would be useful to reflect on Eric Porter’s account of early jazz composer/arranger/bandleader James Reese Europe who advocated the legitimacy of African-American artistic expression in an environment of continued marginalization. In a 1919 interview Reese Europe is quoted as saying that he is, “more firmly convinced than ever that negroes should write negro music. We have our own racial feelings and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies” (in Porter, 2002:20). Notable here is that the practices in subsequent decades of many jazz musicians worldwide operating within

American jazz hegemony, seem to be rooted in an imperative similar to Reese Europe’s advocacy for the definition of a distinctly African-American artistic space within hegemonic white American culture. Through various means, they seek to play their own voices rather than imitate. In so doing, many create their own transcultural jazz dialects, developing musical styles that more closely express who they see themselves to be.

German music historian Ekkehard Jost is one of the foremost scholars on European jazz with a primary focus on the movement emerging in Europe in the middle of the

1960s.18 In his essay “The European Avant-Garde of the Later 1960s and Early 1970s: Where

Did Emancipation Lead?” (2012), Jost positions European free jazz as a response to several developments (both musical and political) in the 1960s. Up until the 1960s European musicians were primarily imitating styles developing in the US, and such was the case with the free jazz of the late 1950s from the US. Unlike various styles preceding it that had clear stylistic

18 It may be worth noting, parenthetically, that several scholars writing about jazz in Europe highlight the significant role that the free jazz movement played in creating the conditions for these various transcultural subgenres to emerge across Europe. 43 conventions (such as swing or bebop), free jazz was characterized by its lack of stylistic cohesion, and by the emphasis on individuality. This left room for, in fact required, European musicians to develop their own individual voice in the music. So, paradoxically, in this case, out of imitation grew independence.

Additionally, the resulting musical sounds emerging out of the American free jazz scene more closely resembled the sounds created in Europe by post WWII avant-garde composers, and thus had immediate sonic connections to the activity and influences of many European creative musicians. Speaking politically, the emergence of European free jazz was closely tied the European student protests of the late 1960s and to a growing anti-American sentiment.

In his 2012 essay Jost uses the loaded word “emancipation” to describe the process of

European self-realization through Free Jazz. Their approach, Jost suggests, frees European jazz musicians from the requirement to follow the norms and imitate American jazz. He further situates this liberation as a protest against American imperialism. The result was a distinctive genre. He writes, “The European players [of the 1960s] created their own means of expression and structural patterns…Thus, toward the end of the decade, a specifically European type of free jazz found its way to audiences” (2012:277). Musicians such as Peter Brotzmann, Han

Bennink, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey created diverse music that ranged in style from explosive “kaput playing”, to humorous deconstruction of jazz conventions to so called “non- idiomatic” free improvisation that hardly referenced swing or otherwise recognizable jazz language.

From another perspective, the complexity of racial politics in the US and jazz’s position within it cannot be underestimated. A music that was created primarily by oppressed and marginalized people was adopted and exported by the very dominant culture and establishment 44 that oppressed them. As such, it is no surprise that a number of scholars and musicians persist in their efforts to protect the music from appropriation and adaptation.

In “Europe and the New Jazz Studies” (2012), Tony Whyton takes aim at a host of binaries and oversimplifications emanating from both sides of the Atlantic. In addressing

American scholars, including those belonging to the New Jazz Studies, Whyton laments what he sees as a continual “denial of European influence” (368) in narratives of jazz history.

Whyton further argues that the continued equation of “whiteness” with “European” makes it

“impossible to move beyond very straightforward and oppositional descriptions of U.S. and

European scenes” (ibid). Indeed, in today’s twenty-first century cosmopolitan reality, it is hardly possible to imagine the United Kingdom or countries belonging to continental Europe as monolithically “white” nations.

While acknowledging the continued presence of institutionalized and day-to-day racism, Whyton seeks to destabilize the “essential black subject”, drawing on the writings of bell hooks, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall in an effort to allow for more fluid and diverse formations of racial identity. For example, Whyton notes “Hall argued that in order to transform the politics of representation and liberate ourselves from the monolithic construct of race as a sociopolitical category, it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the existence of new ethnicities and to understand a diversity of subject positions” (Whyton 2012:372). In moving towards a more nuanced jazz scholarship, Whyton provocatively challenges African-

American ownership of the genre based on a fixed black subject position while simultaneously cautioning against the pitfalls of European essentialism. Representative of an extreme position, the debate over the place of African-Americaness in jazz continues among musicians and scholars a like worldwide. 45

Steven Feld’s account of Ghanian percussionist and composer Guy Warren (Ghanaba) in his Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra (2012) lends other perspectives to this debate. Warren, born in Ghana, moved to the US as a young man in the 1950s seeking to establish himself as a drummer in America’s jazz scene. He collaborated with some of the leading jazz artists at that time but became disillusioned with American attitudes towards African music and musicians.

He subsequently moved to the UK where he produced several of his innovative Afro-Jazz albums and returned to Ghana in the mid-1960s, focusing on creating works for talking drums that blended Western art music (Handel, Ravel), jazz, and Ghanian styles.

Feld details Warren’s scathing critique of both white critics and black jazz musicians for their exoticization of Africa and their refusal to explore the “idea of renewed cross- fertilization with African music” (2012:41). It is particularly interesting to note that much of

Warren’s wrath is directed at black jazz musicians whom he views as elitist for viewing

African music as “primitive”. Speaking about how he and other African musicians were perceived in the 1950s by African American jazz musicians, Warren recalls:

They thought we were incomplete versions of them. They thought that jazz was better than us, more sophisticated, that, you know, we stopped on the evolutionary ladder. That what we had to do with jazz was in the past, you know, that it was just about drums and the slave times. Well that’s bullshit. And it’s racist. (in Feld 2012:53)

The poignancy of Warren’s critique centers on the way in which imaginings of Africa in the past blinded the view of Africa in the present. Warren witnessed first hand the emergence of

Black Nationalism in the United States and the “return to roots” movements’ re-claiming of pre-diasporic African heritage. African-American jazz musicians claimed an imagined and glorified Africa of the past as cultural capital. Their legitimacy and authenticity as jazz musicians grew thanks to their connection to pre-slave African musical heritage. Yet, this view 46 of connection to Africa as a thing of the past was often accompanied by dismissal of the potential for equal artistic contribution in the present from African musicians. As Feld writes about Warren, “Africa was often reduced to a distant place and time in the American story of jazz. He found that narrative to be an act of cultural humiliation, with no serious space for engaging with Africa in the present” (2012:55-56).

As noted above, Warren went to the US with ambitions of making it in the American jazz scene. However the seeds for his move towards Afro- were planted early in life.

At the time of his arrival he was already highly aware of and fluent in a diverse array of

Ghanian popular music styles, practices originating from Nigeria and Sierra Leone (by way of encounters with migrants), American swing and music from Hollywood movies. He also embraced the interconnectedness of these styles:

The background to his African musical universe was seriously reflexive; he understood that African music contributed hugely to popular musics in the U.S. and the Caribbean diasporas. And he knew that the diaspora had fed back its own fusions into African popular styles. (Feld 2012:58)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, around the same time as many European musicians came to same realization, Guy Warren understood that in order to play authentically he had to be himself. That meant reflecting the totality of his musical-cultural background and blending the various influences in his own unique way, “I had to make a choice between being a poor imitation of Buddy Rich or playing something they couldn’t. I could play jazz well, but I possessed something that nobody else had, so I started to play African music with a little bit of jazz thrown in, not jazz with a little bit of African thrown in” (in Feld 2012:58-59). Here,

Warren echoes one of the recurring themes of this dissertation, the centrality in jazz of playing one’s own voice, and one’s own history and culture. Furthermore, when Warren says that he chose to play something “they couldn’t”, he also pursues the same exclusionary stance that 47

Atkins reports about the “Japanese Jazz” nationalist school in the 1960s. Several times in our survey of these jazz narratives, we witness the marginalized respond to their own exclusion by marginalizing others in order to confer legitimacy upon their own art.

The marginalization Guy Warren felt and his critique of the monolithic “American” jazz narrative is paralleled, perhaps even on a broader scale, by ongoing segregation of the range of styles known as “Latin Jazz”. Trombonist and ethnomusicologist, Christopher Washburne writes about the variegated styles of “Latin Jazz”:

In spite of growing interest and popularity, this music, along with the musicians who make it, are persistently marginalized and separated economically, politically, ethnically, and racially by the media, educational institutions, jazz producers and promoters, consumers, and musicians. (2012:89)

Washburne argues that the reasons for such segregation are numerous and complex, undoubtedly at least partially driven by economic competition. However, I believe that the tightly constructed narrative of jazz history and its accompanying discourse of authenticity also have considerable bearing on the positioning of “Latin-Jazz” as “other”. Indeed, as Washburne indicates, radio, festival and programming compartmentalization suggests that “Latin Jazz” is viewed as “the exotic, the novel, the lightweight, the not real jazz music for cats who can’t play changes” (2012:90).

Washburne also details the career of conguero Ray Barretto who experienced enormous success in the 1960s and 1970s fronting his own Salsa band. He subsequently spent the remainder of his career striving to leave what he dubbed the “Latin jazz Barrio” (2012:101) and be accepted as part of the “legit” jazz world. The case of Barretto reflects a different response to the type of marginalization that Guy Warren experienced in the 1950s. Instead of protesting the exclusionary attitudes and fundamentally withdrawing from engaging them 48 within the US, Barretto sought to situate himself and his music squarely within the dominant narrative: “In spite of his difficulties and his financially rewarding salsa career, he steadfastly believed that his alignment with jazz yielded greater prestige and cultural capital” (Washburne

2012:102).

In his book Latin Jazz (1999), journalist John Storm Roberts asserts that the role of

Latin American music has been underplayed and under researched in the general discourse of jazz. He believes that when narrating the story of jazz’s birth and evolution, Latin American music must be added to the mix. This is not meant to undermine the critical role that African-

American elements played in the evolution of the genre, but rather that “jazz has always been in some measure an Afro-Euro-Latino-American music” (1999:x).

Building on such historical argumentation, one may consider the multi-directional intercultural exchanges of the Americas and Africa in the context of what Joseph Roach calls the “circum-Atlantic”:

The concept of the circum-Atlantic world (as opposed to a transatlantic one) insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity. In this sense, a New World was not discovered in the Caribbean, but was truly invented there. (Roach 1996:4)

The diverse musical traditions of the Americas, Caribbean and Africa, and their on-going cross- pollination with one another have existed from before the birth of jazz and have continued uninterrupted to the present day. These various often overlapping genres and sub-genres, consisting of popular, folk and traditional musical practices, have been informing one another for centuries, defying any notion of “purity” or “authenticity” (Washburne 2012). Why shouldn’t jazz be considered within this broader framework? 49

Let us return momentarily to the historical analysis. Roberts details the extent to which pre-jazz New Orleans was a hub for musical and cultural interaction, an arena involving more than African-American, Creole and European cultural mixtures. New Orleans was home to

Haitian refugees and its local musicians had regular encounters and exchanges with Mexican and Cuban bands and immigrants. Furthermore, Roberts claims that various Caribbean idioms, themselves already transcultural, had been influencing one another for at least a century before the birth of jazz. He speculates that early jazz works in New Orleans may have been a product of musicians blending already fused rhythms, melodies and dance structures.

An exclusive focus on jazz itself has left us with an overly narrow view of groups that usually played a range of dance music, of which jazz was only part. Moreover, much early jazz research was influenced by various political, ethnic, and romanticizing agendas that have disguised the complexity of the story. Mostly these have led them to overplay the working-class, black, and folk-oriented aspects of the music. (1999:6)

Roberts provides yet another challenge to the racial and cultural tidiness of the master narrative about the music’s birth. In so doing he pushes for further and continual re-evaluation of jazz historiography. For those embracing an essentialized notion of jazz this view could be threatning.

Viewed constructively however, what kind of doors might open if we were to embrace this challenge even partially? Wouldn’t we be more inclined to accept the fact that jazz has always engaged in a multi-directional stream of interaction with cultures outside of the United

States? Might such an embrace of circum-Atlantic, Pan-American cross-current influences not invite us to explore the obvious historical similarities that exist across the Western hemisphere such as the commonalities between cultures of the Americas in the way in which race, slavery, colonialism, European settlements and the musical products that emerged out of these cultures 50 interacted? Wouldn’t such a view further advance the notion of jazz as a blend of blends?

Wouldn’t this liberate us to take future blends seriously?

As Taylor Atkins notes, jazz’s spread, increased popularity and influence around the world should be considered within the purview of growing American economic and cultural influence in the twentieth century. Jazz’s appeal to millions of people worldwide is undoubtedly partially related to the beauty and engaging nature of its sounds. However, it’s popularity and growth globally cannot be separated from America’s growing reach. Is jazz categorically different or exceptional when compared to other “new world” transcultural styles such as Afro-Cuban styles, cumbia or Brazilian choro or has it simply been amplified and elevated on the world stage for almost one hundred years by the dominant economic power of the twentieth century?

Much like Taylor Atkins, a growing number of scholars from around the world are challenging the narrative of American excpetionalism that seems to underlie much of American jazz discourse. These scholars ask us to reconsider our assumptions about the genre’s birth and be open to the possibility that even more extensive transcultural exchange than has been acknowledged occurred throughout the development of this treasured musical practice.

Furthermore, many around the world are highlighting the contributions of local jazz musicians who are actively forging new stylistic directions for the music, incorporating diverse influences both local/global and turning them into transcultural jazz dialects. Collectively, we can start to see a new branch of jazz studies emerging: Global Jazz Studies.

The important contributions discussed in the preceding pages represent an encouraging start for Global Jazz Studies. However, there remains a tremendous amount of research that still needs to be done in the years to come, both in terms of breadth and depth of inquiry. This 51 dissertation, which focuses on the sounds and discourses of Israeli Jazz, aims to contribute modestly to this enterprise.

PERSONAL VOICINGS: TRANSGENERIC, MULTI-LOCAL MUSICMAKING

In Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, and the Creation of Fusion (2011) music and cultural theory scholar Kevin Fellezs frames jazz-rock fusion as a transgeneric, “in-between” musical movement emerging in the 1970s that stayed between genres, in what he calls the “broken middle”. In this realm, the music created by the artists at the center of his study resides on shaky ground, a creative instability where tension and contradiction between the various traditions (jazz, rock, funk, classical) exists. The music does not fully belong to any of the above genres and yet is “incapable of breaking away completely into its own space” (2011:8).

In occupying this vulnerable creative space, these musicians pushed back against market and listeners’ expectations, challenged social norms and stylistic conventions.

Fellezs recounts the interest that rock and jazz musicians in the 1960s had in various types of “world-music”. In an ever more globalized world, and as part of larger social/political/cultural/spiritual movements in the 1960s, increased availability of recordings along with greater travel ease exposed artists to a vast array of musical traditions that had previously been out of reach. Musicians such as John McLaughlin, who with Zakir Hussain founded the Jazz-Rock-Indian fusion group Shakti, began to create transgeneric music that could not easily be labeled.

A superficial survey of ECM, arguably Europe’s most significant jazz record label since the 1970s, quickly reveals the degree to which transgeneric music making is a salient characteristic of the work of many of today’s jazz artists worldwide. Artists such as Jan

Garbarek, John Surman, Anders Jormin, Anouar Brahem, Egberto Gismonti, Jon Balke (and on 52 and on) have been engaging in work that defies the conventional understandings of jazz (and any other genre, for that matter) for several decades.

In his article “Roots and Collage: Contemporary European Jazz in Postmodern Times”

(2012), German scholar Herbert Hellhund argues that in the present day postmodern European jazz world that has moved beyond America’s “dictatorial” influence there is room for a wide range of aesthetic directions and possibilities based on the personal preference of each musician/group. With “tradition” disassembled and straightforward development of the genre halted in a post-1960’s world, the evolving aesthetic in Europe favors individual choices out of a growing abundance of available influences.

Hellhund uses the phrase Stylistic Pluralism to describe the present artistic environment in the European jazz scene, allowing for interplay between old and new aspects of jazz practice as well as interaction with musical traditions diverging from jazz, “Thus, out of numerous present and available idioms ensues a single situation marked by a general lack of direction.

Each musician must adopt a position in this situation, but the positions are anything but self- evident” (2012:434). In describing today’s contemporary jazz musician in Europe who “must find or create connections between disparate musical genres without becoming arbitrary” (435),

Hellhund describes a flexible musician (“generalist”) possessing an array of competences that allow him to be equally at home in modern jazz contexts (“complex changes”) and free jazz, conversant in European concert and local folk traditions, aware (and often fluent) of current pop-trends, as both a performer and composer, and skilled with a wide range of emerging technology.

Similarly, in “Gianluigi Trovesi’s Music: An Historical and Geographical Short-

Circuit” (2003), Italian scholar Stefano Zenni presents the work of Italian reedsman and 53 composer Gianluigi Trovesi as a successful example of an artist who integrates a wide range of influences into a personal artistic statement. According to Zenni, Trovesi’s synthesis cannot simply be reduced to a simple mixture of Italian folk traditions or European Classical Music and American Jazz influences. Rather it is comprised of several diverse yet specific sources relating to both different eras and regions. Trovesi’s multi-local influences include Northern

Italian folk traditions (specifically the area of Bergamo); the compositional techniques and structures from the baroque and renaissance era; American jazz (both swing and more

“modern” modal approaches as well as the music of Eric Dolphy); Balkan and Middle-Eastern influences.

Much like Gianluigi Trovesi, many jazz artists have answered the call of “playing your own voice” to the tune of music that blends often diverse sources from the world over in a wholly personal way. As noted in the introduction, I propose viewing these artists as multi- local musicians. Many of these musicians prefer to think of their music as outside any specific genre and find the label “jazz” to be limiting or an inadequate description of their music. Eric

Porter reminds us that jazz’s history is filled with American musicians (Duke Ellington,

Charles Mingus) who sought to situate their music beyond the limited confinements of the

“jazz” label “because they felt it did not do justice to the breadth of their artistic projects and because of the ways it signified the economic, discursive, and social limitations under which they labored” (2012:14).

Though many present day musicians conceptualize their music as genre-defying, Ake,

Garrett and Goldmark argue that genre classification still matters:

Genre designations play a fundamental role in shaping how we teach, learn, create, access and assess music…there is no denying that a wide array of institutions and businesses—iTunes, radio stations, record stores, Internet websites, grant endowments, magazines, newspapers, libraries, booking 54

agencies, and college curricula, among them—rely on genre classification to help organize, present, support, and/or sell music. (2012:3)

While the jazz world, for the most part, is not a richly rewarding commercial field, it holds a cultural cachet that other genres do not. A circuit of jazz festivals and clubs is available to those artists whose music is labeled as “jazz”, while increased institutionalization has led to available university positions and governmental grants that are not open to practitioners of “pop music” for example (ibid).

Thus, much as they have throughout the genre’s history, jazz musicians continue to negotiate the tension between their individual expression and broader social, political and economic implications of their identity construction. Furthermore, awareness of these issues helps explain why debates of ownership and authenticity – often in relation to discrepant understandings of the place of Americaness and African-Americaness in jazz – continue vociferously today as ever before. Indeed, as I will discuss, Israeli jazz musicians navigate these debates in particular ways.

MULTI-LAYERED VOICINGS: JAZZ POLYPHONY AND THE SIMULTANEITY OF NARRATIVE

Scott DeVeaux writes that the linear construction of jazz tradition seems to be tied to an organicist view of jazz history. New developments are explained as having emerged internally.

When previous styles reach artistic impasses, new styles emerge. Indeed, the birth of bebop is conventionally depicted as a response to ’s decay, the birth of free jazz as a response to the exhaustion of bebop and hardbop.

One can detect a parallel between this sort of account and the modernist narrative of

Western Art Music that claims atonality developed as a result of tonality being exhausted by 55

Romanticism at the end of the nineteenth century. Though this matter continues to be a contentious debate in certain circles, I believe events of the past thirty years have demonstrated that tonality had not been exhausted at the dawn of the twentieth century. Tonality and modality continue to be explored in novel ways by composers today while experimental work in the fields of electro-acoustic music, serialism, and many other branches of contemporary

Western Art Music are ongoing side by side.

Similarly, one might argue for a pluralist, inclusive vision and historical view of jazz.

Swing music didn’t hit a total impasse when bebop was born, as evidenced by the continuing big band tradition well into the twenty-first century. New swing tunes are still being written and

New Orleans style bands continue to perform in festivals across the US and Europe.

Bebop, Hardbop and continue to permeate the present day jazz world, not only because the neoclassicist stance is so pervasive, but because they never actually left. Similarly, fusion and free jazz continue to exist, develop and influence a whole range of artists.

Contributions of jazz musicians from the world over have created an assortment of transcultural jazz dialects that indeed have even influenced jazz styles in the United States. Furthermore, many artists view their music as genre defying, blending diverse musical traditions into specific individual expressions.

Imagine a Venn diagram of overlapping jazz styles. In an inclusive view of this sort, all of these jazz styles co-exist, constantly informing one another, evolving within established convention and breaking away from convention to chart new stylistic territory. It is not so much a matter of replacing the old with the new in an evolutionary process but rather a growing plurality of existing styles that reside simultaneously, continuing to inform one another, interact, develop and contract. It is a polyphony of jazz styles. 56

As in any strong polyphonic piece, all voices are of equal importance but their sonic perceptibility to the listener’s ear varies from moment to moment and section to section based on their thematic content, range and the performer’s rendition. Indeed, listeners perception is dramatically influenced by the performer’s privileging of one voice over the other, such that in a baroque fugue, it is custom to bring out the subject of the fugue, and the ear follows along.

Thus, in this polyphony of jazz styles, each musician’s privileging of selected influences and styles form the basis of her unique individual expression, playing her “own voice”.

In a variation on Elsa Barkley Brown’s “Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for

Women’s History” (in Tucker 2012:266), I want to extend the image of polyphony further, as even the narratives themselves can be seen as creating a tapestry of overlapping views of jazz history and identity. These narratives reside side-by-side, partially true, creating a polyphony of narrative voices that is dynamic and ever changing in its power distribution.

As far as 1991 DeVeaux called for the emergence of new, alternative jazz narratives.

Twenty years later, after two decades of important work by scholars belonging to the emerging field of New Jazz Studies, Sherrie Tucker’s compelling essay “Deconstructing the Jazz

Tradition” (2012) asks scholars to continually challenge their own assumptions about jazz, their

“subjectless subject”. Tucker asks, “What kind of narratives do we want to tell in the new jazz studies” (270)?

The preceding pages have highlighted contributions coming from Global Jazz

Studies as one important new branch of narratives about jazz history and identity.

Inspired by Sherrie Tucker’s call for self-reflection by performers, scholars and educators, I would like to ask what kind of jazz scholarship can more accurately reflect an inclusive and global view of the multiplicity of jazz narratives? How can we, as jazz 57 scholars, teachers, performers, and listeners incorporate a more nuanced view of jazz as artistic creation, but also an actor in nationalist and transnational politics; an agent of

American cultural hegemony in the world, the artistic expression of marginalized people and yet paradoxically a symbol of rebellion against American colonial interests?

A more inclusive understanding of jazz history would incorporate an account of jazz globally, including an exploration of the many transcultural jazz dialects that have emerged over the past fifty years. Such a view would also include study of the free jazz movement, the trans-generic, post-generic, cosmopolitan and individualistic poly-idiomatic styles that characterize the “creative music” scene and an array of individual artists who do not associate with any particular label yet produce music that has direct ties to the jazz tradition.

Bearing in mind that even with the aim of complicating narratives, highlighting omissions, and challenging the marginalization and neglect of unheard voices, “we cannot but narrate” and must accept that no narrative is objective truth (Spivak 1990

Cited in Tucker 2012:271). Perhaps the best possibility, then, is to embrace a messy, overlapping, multi-vocal polyphony, in which the emergence of new narratives such as those coming out of “Global Jazz Studies” can help expand the richness of our understandings and imaginings of jazz as musical practice, culture and discourse. One such narrative is the story of Israeli jazz musicians, and the transcultural jazz they perform and compose. The next chapter provides an historical overview of jazz in Israel, introduces the waves of Israeli jazz musicians who have emerged in the international jazz scene beginning in the 1990s, and contextualizes the phenomenon of Israeli jazz that stands at the center of this study.

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CHAPTER THREE

“ISRAELI JAZZ”: HISTORY AND OVERVIEW

The Rex, Toronto’s premier , hosted a spotlight on “Israeli Jazz” featuring two bands led by prominent Israeli jazz musicians in April 2016. Headlining the event was internationally celebrated trumpeter Avishai Cohen, on tour to mark the release of his

Into the Silence (2016), produced and distributed by ECM, the prestigious European label. In fact, this was the third consecutive year in which The Rex celebrated Israeli jazz. The bill was highlighted by guitarist Gilad Hekselman and pianist Shai Maestro in 2014 and the next year by woodwind artist Anat Cohen.19 Such events are not unique to Toronto. For the past ten years such celebrations of “Israeli jazz” have become regular occurrences worldwide. From Japan to

Germany and France as well as to San Francisco and NYC, festivals, jazz clubs, concert series, and music halls in dozens of locations around the globe have all taken to featuring leading

Israeli jazz artists, while highlighting in their public relations the Israeliness in these musicians’ music making.

The past fifteen years have also seen a proliferation of attention in leading media outlets around the world covering the wave of internationally successful Israeli jazz musicians who are said to be creating music that listeners will identify as blending “Israeli” sounds with

“American” jazz. Further, some of these artists graced the covers of American jazz magazines

Downbeat and JazzTimes and have received generous and ongoing coverage by the New York

Times, NPR, and many other local media outlets. The titles of several of these features reveal the extent to which this phenomenon has generated buzz among media circles. For instance, a

2008 JazzTimes article hails “The Israeli Jazz Wave: Promised Land to Promised Land”

19 Notably, in terms of the political-economic dynamics of the music world, these events have been sponsored by the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation and supported by the Israeli consulate of Toronto. 59

(Gilbert 2008). Two years later an NPR special, “Why Are So Many Jazz Musicians from

Israel These Days?” (Jarenwattananon 2010),20 asks the question that is, seemingly, the focus of attention of many critics, musicians, and fans. Indeed, a joke popular among Israeli jazz musicians presently living in New York goes like this: Whenever an Israeli arrives at New

York’s JFK international airport, the immigration officer asks: “What instrument do you play?”21 Both overtly and between the lines of many articles and discussions within jazz circles, many people are asking how and why so many successful jazz musicians have emerged in the international jazz scene from Israel.

Though this question is intriguing, and contains within it several layers of meanings and assumptions that have to be parsed, it is secondary to this project. That is, I am far less concerned with addressing the question: Why is it that so many Israeli artists have made it in the jazz world? Rather, my primary concern is to present, in the following three chapters, analyses of the music they make as well as the discourses surrounding their musical lives and identities as jazz musicians from Israel.

The present chapter lays the foundations for doing so by providing an overview of

Israeli jazz by identifying key figures in its international emergence since the 1990s; providing background about the institutionalization of jazz in Israel, with particular attention to the important role of jazz education there; and mapping the complex, variegated cultural, political, and musical issues involved in its history. My aims are to situate, contextualize, and provide historical perspective on the waves of Israeli jazz musicians who have established themselves

20 Similarly, in an article published in Israel in late March 2016 - “A Jazz Superpower Has Accidentally Grown Here”, noted Israeli music critic Ben Shalev of marvels at the continued outpouring of influential, successful and compelling albums released by Israeli jazz artists. 21 I heard this joke on several occasions during my fieldwork in NYC and Israel. 60 on the international scene creating music that blends an array of already blended sources, both

“local” and “global”.

ISRAELI JAZZ MUSICIANS IN THE WORLD TODAY

Dozens of Israeli jazz musicians maintain busy international touring schedules, appearing in festivals, concert halls, and jazz clubs across the globe. According to David Homan,

Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation (AICF),22 which maintains a large database of Israeli jazz musicians operating in the US, there were at least 200 Israeli jazz musicians living and working in New York City alone in 2014 (Homan 2014). This number does not include dozens of undergraduate students attending universities and conservatories

(primarily the New School in NYC and Berklee College of Music in Boston) nor the many musicians who live in NYC or elsewhere in the US but who do not have ties with or registered their profile in AICF’s online database. Though NYC is home to the highest concentration of

Israeli jazz musicians operating internationally, a select number of others with thriving careers work from other locales. For example, pianists Yaron Herman and Yonatan Avishai are based in France, while pianist Omer Klein lives in Germany. Additionally, several prominent Israeli jazz musicians have returned to Israel after long stints in NYC. Utilizing their international reputations, they continue to maintain their touring careers out of Israel, as will be discussed toward the end of this chapter.

22 The AICF is a US based non-profit organization established in 1939 that provides financial support for artists and cultural institutions in Israel. According to its website the AICF’s mission is “to support and develop artistic life in Israel by awarding scholarships and grants. By encouraging Israeli artists and supporting institutions and programs, AICF makes a vital contribution to the cultural foundation of Israel and strengthens her relationship with the United States” (AICF n.d.). According to current executive director David Homan and my research many leading Israeli jazz musicians received grants and bursaries from the AICF during their teenage years in Israel.

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This noted, NYC remains the premier hub of Israeli jazz activity. On any given night in

New York, you can open Time Out magazine and find the names of Israeli musicians performing at the leading jazz clubs in town including Smalls, Fat Cat, Cornelia Street Café,

The , The Blue Note, Sweet Basil, The Bar Next Door, Rockwood Hall,

Mezzrow, Minton’s Play House in Harlem and countless other prominent establishments.

These musicians often lead their own bands or appear as sidemen with other artists of varied nationalities. Indeed, the NYC jazz scene is filled with Israeli musicians performing in a multitude of styles and in a variety of contexts. At jam sessions or when an Israeli jazz musician performs leading her own ensemble, one is also likely to see a group of young Israeli men and women congregated in the audience. Hebrew language and spirited exchanges can be heard sprinkled with jazz terms in English from time to time. Aside from non-musician Israeli locals visiting or living in NYC, these audience members include the youngest and newest musicians who are recent arrivals from Israel. Indeed, cohorts of new students appear each fall to join the jazz program at the New School, which is part of a special collaboration with the

Center for Jazz Studies at the Tel Aviv Conservatory.

Indeed, the NYC jazz scene has played a central role in the development of the international phenomenon of Israeli jazz. Out of NYC came the explorations of transcultural jazz making by Israeli jazz musicians blending an array of local and global influences. The vast majority of the musicians I interviewed either live in NYC in the present or lived formative years there before returning to Israel or moving elsewhere. The prominence of Israeli jazz musicians in New York is, nevertheless, part of a much wider ranging presence both across space and through time. Thus, much of this chapter is focused on a history of jazz in Israel.

This will help contextualize and partially explain the explosion of talent coming out of Israel, 62 exemplified by a group of musicians who have explored blend on the international scene since the 1990s. Then, I shift to a discussion centred on New York in order to introduce the global and multi-local nature of Israeli jazz in relation to what I call the NYC – Israel axis. Indeed, both locales, and movement between them, have played significant and critical roles in the emergence of Israeli jazz, and both remain central scenes for its practice.23

In order to make sense of the prominence, abundance, and wide-ranging creative activities of Israeli jazz musicians operating on the international scene today, then, it is productive to start by introducing several, but by no means all, of the main actors. In focusing on those most central to my study, I necessarily omit their forbearers. However, their work and contributions will be presented in mid-chapter.

The First Wave – Pioneers

Though the seeds were planted long before the 1990s, it was the emergence of artists such as bassists Avishai Cohen and Omer Avital, guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman and trombonist Avi Lebovich that for the first time situated Israeli jazz musicians as prominent players on the international jazz scene. Avishai Cohen joined Chick Corea’s trio in 1997 and was a founding member of the Origin band. In 1998 he released Adama, his first album as a leader on Corea’s Stretch label.24 I consider this album to be the first widely heard artistic statement by an Israeli musician blending a wide array of middle-eastern, Cuban, Israeli and

American jazz influences. The musical blending heard on Cohen’s first release, later nicknamed Israeli jazz, would come to influence an entire generation of Israeli jazz musicians.

23 NYC, on one side of the axis, holds a special place as the destination of choice for the vast majority of Israeli jazz musicians who seek to establish international careers. Israel the nation-state, stands on the other pole as Israeli jazz artists emerge from different locales within the country. 24 Adama in Hebrew means “ground” or “earth”. 63

It foreshadowed Cohen’s now twenty years of creative output that continues to be as emblematic and influential as that of any Israeli jazz musician.

Meanwhile in the mid- to late 1990s, a second bassist, Omer Avital, forged a formidable place as an in-demand musician in the downtown NYC scene. Avital became a mainstay at jam sessions and gigs at and other downtown venues that at the time featured soon to become American jazz icons , , , and many others (Avital 2017).

Cohen, and Avital were not alone. Guitarist and oudist Amos Hoffman, himself an early

1990s arrival in NYC, was similarly an in-demand sideman in the same downtown scene.

Trombonist Avi Lebovich, also a part of that inner circle of trailblazing Israeli jazz musicians active in the downtown scene, was taken under the wing of Slide Hampton, joining Hampton’s

Big Band “The Jazz Masters” for a stint that led to many more opportunities with leading jazz musicians (Lebovich 2015).

Not only did Cohen, Avital, Hoffman, and Lebovich arrive on the New York scene around the same time in the early 1990s,25 these four men, all in their early twenties at the time, actually lived in the same building in the Upper East Side of Manhattan:

Socially, this togetherness strengthened us. Musically, it strengthened us even more because we were always busy making music. Omer [Avital] was always playing gigs, I would always be going out on tours, Avishai [Cohen] would be out on tour with Danilo [Perez]. Then we would meet in the building and I remember that Avishai and I would play music that he was writing and play standards and it was incredible…we did a lot of learning by playing with friends, these jams, you know playing all the time. It really strengthened our creative output and the connection between us, even as each one of us would eventually go pursue his own thing. That was the melting pot and we still have a lot of respect for that point in time.26 (Lebovich 2015)

25 According to Lebovich, he and Avital, who became friends as teenagers in Israel, flew to NYC on the same flight (Lebovich 2015). 26 Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were conducted in Hebrew, and interview based quotes were translated by the author from Hebrew to English. 64

Lebovich dubbed it the “Israeli building”. They jammed together, ate together, listened to music together. In short, their lives were intertwined. Supporting each other, as after all, they were young men, foreigners in a new land, a big city, trying to make their way into the scene.

Together they forged the path followed since by dozens of Israeli jazz musicians.

The international success that Cohen, Avital, Hoffman and Lebovich achieved in the mid- to late 1990s as sidemen to jazz superstars and as respected young talents in the jazz scene of NYC had a profound effect on the aspirations of countless younger Israeli musicians.27 As these achievements received widespread publicity in the Israeli press, teenagers and young musicians across the country took it as a sign that “they too can make it”.28 Their success not only forged real paths, connections, and networks for future musicians, it established what is now the commonplace perception about Israelis’ jazz acumen and provided a symbolic beacon for others to believe in themselves and follow in their footsteps. Indeed, what we have seen since those early days, is wave after wave of young Israeli jazz musicians picking up and moving to NYC (and to a lesser extent Boston or Europe) and going on to establish themselves in their respective scenes.

As noted above, perhaps the most well-known Israeli jazz musician today is Avishai

Cohen (b.1970). Enjoying widespread international acclaim as one of the world’s leading jazz bassists, Cohen is celebrated for his instrumental virtuosity and his unique compositional voice

27 Eli Degibri’s meteoric rise as the 1998 winner of the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute award and as sideman for Herbie Hancock had the same kind of profound influence on younger Israeli musicians. Degibri arrived in the US in 1998 and belongs generationally to The Second Wave, explored below. Nonetheless, he achieved international success around the same time as Cohen and others did in the late 1990s. 28 By way of personal memory and experience: I was in attendance in 1998 when Avishai Cohen walked on stage at the Red Sea Jazz Festival, held in Eilat Israel, as bassist for Chick Corea; and similarly at Tel Aviv symphony hall when Eli Degibri was introduced in front of a rapturous Israeli crowd by Herbie Hancock. These moments were etched in my mind as a teen-age jazz pianist with dreams of making it in the world as a professional musician. 65

– both of which have influenced jazz musicians worldwide. His distinctive compositions are, for many, synonymous with the Israeli jazz sound. Indeed, from gigs to the halls of jazz departments across North America, one might hear non-Israelis reference “Avishai’s” sounds either directly or by invoking the phrase Israeli jazz.29 Similarly, YouTube is littered with bassists imitating Cohen’s compelling groove based melodies and soloistic prowess.

Cohen, who resided in NYC for many years, now works from a base in Israel, from which he tours the world year-round. His early career included aforementioned work as bassist for Chick Corea’s groups, as well as being a member of Panamanian pianist ’s trio. Since Adama in 1998, he has released fifteen other albums as a leader, most recently

‘1970’ (2017). His projects present mostly original compositions and to a lesser extent arrangements of songs from the Jewish Ladino tradition and the Shirey Eretz Israel (Songs of the Land of Israel, henceforth, SLI) canon.30 31 The trio has served as the cornerstone vehicle for his music. However, albums and projects have also featured larger ensembles, including extensive collaborations with oudist Amos Hoffman, percussionist Itamar Doari, vocalist Karen Malka, as well as projects with strings. In additional to continuous tours with his trio, Cohen has also been recently involved in concerts in Europe featuring arrangements of his original compositions for jazz trio and symphonic orchestra.

Cohen is an accomplished pianist in his own right, and his piano playing is on display in the 2001 album Unity. His compositions often feature very specific piano parts, clearly reflective of his own pianistic abilities and preferences. In recent years, Cohen has also begun

29 Based on my own experiences as a course instructor and graduate student at the University of Toronto jazz program and through informal conversations with colleagues who teach in other universities in North America. 30 The Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) is a canonical set of popular songs composed primarily from the 1920s to the 1950s. Chapter Four focuses on this repertoire with greater detail. 31 Cohen has also recorded arrangements of three songs from the Great American Songbook including “Nature Boy”, “Smile”, and “A Child Is Born”. 66 to incorporate singing into his albums, performing original songs as well as selections from the

Ladino tradition. Albums such as Aurora (2011) and Seven Seas (2010) feature several vocal selections and the 2008 album Sensitive Hours consists entirely of vocal tracks.

Bassist and oudist Omer Avital (b.1971), too, is a leading figure in the global Israeli jazz scene. Avital’s path to international prominence was forged in the 1990s downtown NYC scene through collaboration with many of the young and leading musicians of the time.32 Avital was a fixture in the Smalls jazz club scene, a hub for much of the “modern jazz” innovation of the time. This is suggested by how he was characterized by a local jazz publication in New

York: “Years from now, when folks are remembering the early days of the West Village jazz haunt Smalls, bassist Omer Avital’s name will be synonymous with the club as Bill Evans’s is with the Village Vanguard and Thelonious Monk’s is with the original Five Spot Café” (Time

Out 2006). Sometimes referred to as the “Israeli Charles Mingus”, Avital is widely acclaimed by fellow American musicians and critics for his tone, formidable stage presence, and deeply groovin’, swingin’ blues based bass playing.

Avital has been leading his own groups since the mid-1990s, having released ten albums as leader and countless others as co-leader.33 Avital is widely regarded as a pioneer in blending influences from the Arab world and the Maghreb into original jazz compositions. In addition to his considerable work as a leader and co-leader, he appears as a sideman on dozens of recordings by Israeli and non-Israeli jazz musicians.

Avital has also been involved in several compelling transgeneric and transcultural projects. First, he served as artistic director for the New Jerusalem Orchestra, an orchestra that combined jazz, classical, and middle-eastern folk instruments to create transgeneric

32 Folks such as Brad Mehldau, Peter Bernstein, Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, , Christian McBride and others. 33 His most recent releases with the Omer Avital Quintet are New Song (2014) and Abutbul Music (2016). 67 performances and recordings of Jewish Andalusian music and piyyutim derived from Jewish communities across the Arab world.34 Second, he co-founded, produced, arranged, and played in the “world music” ensemble Blues, a group that combined Yemenite influences with jazz, blues, and funk. Third, his on-going collaboration, entitled Avital Meets Avital, with classical music mandolinist Avi Avital (no family connection), showcases original compositions and arrangements of music from diverse sources including jazz, Western Art

Music, and several Middle-Eastern musical practices. Their first album was released earlier in

2017 on the prestigious German label Deutsche Grammophon (Avital and Avital 2017).

Similarly, Israeli guitarist and oudist Amos Hoffman (b. 1970) has been an important and leading figure in the jazz scenes of NYC and Israel. He is best known to international audiences through his distinct oud playing on bassist Avishai Cohen’s most popular recordings.

His recordings as a leader demonstrate both a deep and profound affinity for the be-bop and hard-bop jazz traditions as well as a dedication to Arab Classical music and folk traditions from

North Africa. Indeed, much of his original music explores the blending of his various influences. One of Hoffman’s most remarkable contributions has been the introduction of the oud as a soloing instrument in the jazz context. His virtuosity on the instrument, including the ability to perform repertoire that is not idiomatic to the oud, stands unparalleled in the jazz world today.

34 Piyyutim, plural for piyut refer to liturgical poems that were composed to embellish prayers during holidays, and other public, familial or private religious ceremonies. Dating back to the 4th century, originating among the Jews in Palestine, and from there spreading over the centuries to Babylonia, Italy, France, Germany, Byzantine and most importantly around the 10th century to Spain. There, for about five centuries the piyut tradition “blossomed with a direct affinity to the various forms of Arabic poetry” (Shiloah 1992:111). After the Jews’ expulsion from Spain, the Spanish piyyut continued in the various diasporic communities (such in Yemen, Tunis, Morocco and Aleppo). Also, according to Shiloah, “From its inception the piyyut was meant to be sung”, and indeed many piyyutim have accompanying melodies that go with the poems. A single piyut often has multiple melodies that can go with it. 68

Not long after his arrival in NYC in the early 1990’s, trombonist Avi Lebovich (b.

1972) sought the mentorship of the legendary trombonist Slide Hampton. Shortly thereafter,

Hampton invited Lebovich to join his orchestra “Slide Hampton & The Jazz Masters”.

Lebovich’s stint with the Big Band led to many more professional opportunities, including work as a sideman with such notable jazz musicians as Michel Camilo, , Jason

Lindner, Danilo Perez, and Steve Turre. Lebovich returned to Israel in 2003 after a period of time working with the British pop group Incognito. Since then he has been leading The Avi

Lebovich Orchestra, a 12tet that performs original compositions as well as arrangements, and in recent years has advanced collaborations with leading Israeli singer/songwriters (Lebovich

2015).

The Second Wave

Soon after the successes of Hoffman, Avital, Lebovich, Cohen and their peers, a second wave of Israeli musicians began forging their own distinguished international careers followed suit. For instance, in 1998, saxophonist Eli Degibri (b. 1978) won the Thelonious Monk

Institute award and was recruited by Herbie Hancock to be a part of his quintet. Degibri toured with Hancock for three years (1999-2002) and later with drummer for nearly a decade. Between these gigs, Degibri settled in NYC. From the beginning of his tenure with

Hancock, he has also led his own groups, releasing multiple albums featuring collaborations with leading American jazz musicians. For example, his 2010 release Israeli Song features

American jazz greats Brad Mehldau on piano, on bass, and Al Foster on drums. In

2011, Degibri moved back to Israel, where he continues to record and tour internationally with an all-Israeli quartet. Since his return, Degibri has also taken an active role as a jazz educator 69 and currently serves as the artistic director of the Red Sea International Jazz Festival (Degibri

2015).

Unusual for any jazz or even music community, the “Three Cohens”, as they are known, are siblings: saxophonist and clarinetist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Avishai Cohen (not the same person as the bassist), and saxophonist Yuval Cohen. Each Cohen sibling has established a thriving independent career. Together, their collaborative ensemble, the “3 Cohens”, has also generated international acclaim as suggested by their feature on the cover of Downbeat magazine in January 2012. In 2005, Anat Cohen founded the artist owned Anzic records. The label has been home to numerous releases by the Cohen siblings, the Israeli jazz ensemble

Third World Love, Eli Degibri, as well as such well-known American artists as Joel Frahm,

Daniel Freedman, and Jason Lindner (Cohen 2017).

Anat Cohen (b. 1975) has established herself as one of the leading woodwind players on the international jazz scene today. She has released seven albums as a leader and multiple other recordings as co-leader and sidewoman. Keeping an intense touring schedule, Cohen performs in many of the world’s most prestigious jazz venues, festivals, and concert halls. Her performances and recordings utilize a wide array of sources, including jazz, Israeli songs from the SLI, and Brazilian choro.

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen (b. 1978) has released nine albums under his own name, including two recent recordings, Into The Silence (2016) and Cross My Palm With Silver

(2017) with the prestigious European label ECM. He is widely acclaimed to be one of the most versatile and virtuosic jazz trumpet players of his generation. Therefore, he is also a much sought after sideman for projects covering a wide range of styles, from straight-ahead, modern and free jazz to fused styles that draw upon Israeli and Middle-Eastern influences. 70

After a stint in the US, studying at Berklee College of Music and living in NYC, saxophonist Yuval Cohen (b. 1973) returned to Israel to establish himself as one of the leading performers, arrangers, composers, and educators of jazz in Israel. His albums showcase a proclivity towards modern jazz and the influence of the SLI (Cohen 2015).

Another prominent “second wave” Israeli jazz player, saxophonist Daniel Zamir (b.

1980) also arrived in NYC in the late 1990s and shortly thereafter recorded his debut album

Satlah (2000) on John Zorn’s record label Tzadik.35 Featuring saxophone, bass, and drums, the album blends klezmer as well as post-Coltrane, free jazz sensibilities. Zamir’s numerous releases followed suit advancing a similar artistic direction. After his return to Israel from the

US in the mid 2000s, Zamir established himself as the second best-selling jazz artist in Israel, after Avishai Cohen, releasing a series of albums that presented a more accessible blend of

Chassidic, Klezmer, Israeli popular music, and modern jazz. His 2006 hit album Amen sold over 10,000 hard copies, an unusually large number for a jazz album, revealing his crossover appeal beyond jazz audiences. Zamir continues to release albums on both Tzadik and Israeli labels.

Pianist Anat Fort (b. 1970) is also a late 1990s arrival in NYC. Unlike many of her peers, who aimed to situate themselves right at the heart of the downtown scene centered at

Smalls, Fort first pursued an undergraduate degree in the jazz program at William Patterson

University, located in New Jersey. In 1996, she formed a New York based trio with two

American musicians - bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider, a collaboration that

35 Tzadik is a record label founded by American-Jewish saxophonist John Zorn. The label is dedicated to presenting “avant garde and experimental music” with one prominent line of recordings focused on “Radical Jewish Culture”. According to the label’s website, the “Radical Jewish Culture” series presents “Jewish music beyond klezmer: adventurous recordings bringing Jewish identity and culture into the 21st century” (Tzadik, n.d.). For more about John Zorn and the Radical Jewish Culture movement of downtown NYC read ethnomusicologist Tamar Barzel’s recent book New York Noise (2015). 71 continues to this day. Fort’s international breakthrough came after legendary drummer Paul

Motian recorded an album with her and shared the mixed tracks with , owner of

ECM. Eicher decided to release the album and to sign Fort to the label, making her the first

Israeli to appear in the label’s jazz line. Fort continues to record for ECM, and in addition to her steady work with her trio she has recently collaborated with fellow ECM recording artist,

Italian woodwind player Gianluigi Trovesi (Fort 2015).

In 2002 bassist Omer Avital teamed up with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, pianist Yonatan

Avishai, and American drummer Daniel Freedman to form the ensemble Third World Love.

The ensemble enjoyed a highly successful decade of activity, establishing a tremendous following in Israel, especially among young musicians. The ensemble released five albums and had numerous performances worldwide. Throughout their tenure together, Third World Love displayed an extraverted attempt to blend post Hard-Bop jazz sensibilities with Middle-Eastern grooves and melodic themes.

The Third Wave

The past decade has seen an explosion in the number of Israeli jazz artists forging careers on the international scene. The list is too long to include here in full, but a list of the most prominent musicians would include: guitarists Gilad Hekselman, Yotam Silberstein,

Rotem Sivan, and Nadav Remez; pianists Omer Klein, Shai Maestro, Omri Mor, and Nitai

Hershkovitz; bassists Gilad Abro, Haggai Cohen Milo, and Or ; drummrs Ziv Ravitz,

Amir Bresler, and Daniel Dor; flutists Hadar Noiberg and Itai Kriss; saxophonists Uri Gurvich,

Oded Tzur, Asaf Yuria, Jonathan Greenstein, and Amit Friedman; trumpeter Itamar Borochov.

Each of the artists listed above leads their own projects, serve as sidemen for a diverse array of 72 collaborations, appear on numerous records (as leaders and sidemen), and maintain active and sometimes busy touring schedules. In their effort to “play their own voice”, each of these musicians blends a personal array of influences into their own distinctive style.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAZZ IN ISRAEL: 1930-1990

Whereas prominent First Wave artists - Cohen, Avital, Hoffman, and Lebovich - as well as the many others who followed in their footsteps, have for twenty years made a mark on the international jazz scene and established what has come to be considered by critics, fans, and musicians alike a distinct “Israeli” sound, they didn’t emerge out of a vacuum. The foundations for their emergence on the international scene were actually set in motion in prior decades via more modest and local beginnings of jazz in Israel.

Notably, little has been written about jazz in pre-state Israel British Mandate Palestine or during the earlier periods of Israel as a nation-state, in the late 1940s – 1980s, certainly nothing in English. The one exception is a recently published book chapter, in Hebrew, by musicologist Alona Sagee-Keren (2014). Sagee-Keren’s chapter provides some historical background about ways in which globalized jazz music influenced the Israeli music scene and established its roots in Israel.

According to Sagee-Keren the earliest seeds for jazz in Israel were likely planted with the wave of Jewish immigrants coming from Central Europe in the middle part of the 1930s.

These immigrants had been exposed to various kinds of imported American jazz, by way of visiting bands, recordings, and local musicians who imitated them. These immigrants arrived at a time when the fairly new city of Tel Aviv was quickly becoming a cultural hub of what would become Israel. Tel Aviv’s popular music scene, prevalent in theatres, cafes and hotels, was characterized by various international trends including dance music such as the tango, 73 charleston, and foxtrot. Often frequented by British soldiers, the Jewish musicians who performed at these night spots, usually in small ensembles, played a repertoire which can be characterized as “light popular music”, including Dixieland and swing inflected dance music.

The economic downturn that followed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 forced a reduction in ensemble sizes and a diminishing of swing music’s popularity. The waves of immigrants that came to Israel from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII along with the younger Jewish musicians born in Palestine became aware of the emerging be-bop language through listening to American radio. As a result, this was the generation responsible for introducing be-bop into Israel’s local musical landscape, albeit in small doses. According to

Sagee-Keren, while this period was primarily marked by small ensembles, there were also several big band orchestras operating in Israel that included some jazz like pieces in their repertoire.

During the 1950s, most of the musical activity was still centered in Tel Aviv.

Interestingly, bands performed commercial popular and dance music in hotels and cafes during the earlier part of the evening, and then switched over to swing style jazz during the late hours of the night. The 1950s also saw an influx of musicians immigrating to Israel from North

America. These musicians brought with them more direct knowledge of the jazz styles prevalent in the United States. In the latter half of the 1950s several clubs hosted jam sessions, which were mostly attended by students. The first jazz club opened in Israel in 1956 near the

American Zionist House in Tel Aviv. This location hosted a weekly , had listening lectures, and provided a space for ensembles to play and rehearse. Another important milestone during the 1950s included the first appearances by well-known American jazz musicians, including Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong (Sagee-Keren 2014). 74

The 1960s saw an expansion of jazz activity in Israel. According to Dani Gottfried, who is cited extensively in Sagee-Keren’s article, saxophonist Mel Keller, an American Jewish immigrant, founded the new nation-state’s first regularly performing jazz ensemble in 1961.

Keller’s group, which included two other American immigrants and the Israeli born Gottfried on piano, had a live weekly broadcast on Israeli national public radio (“Kol Israel”) and performed educational jazz concerts across the country during the early part of the 1960s. The

1960s also saw several additional jazz clubs open their doors, including, most importantly “Bar

Barim”, which was founded by drummer Aharale Kaminsky in Tel Aviv. This club became a hub for jazz activity until 1979.

The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the advent of the first dedicated jazz recordings in Israel. Saxophonist and arranger Stu HaCohen and vocalist Rimona Francis released two albums in which be-bop was merged with Israeli songs and odd-metered Balkan time signatures. The first album, released in 1969, included jazz arrangements of several Israeli popular songs from the SLI, as well as, well-known jazz tunes, such as Paul Desmond’s “Take

Five” and Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring”. It is interesting to note that even the earliest jazz records in Israel pursued a fusion between American jazz styles and a differing folk tradition, in the above case, the SLI and the rhythmic world from Bulgaria, HaCohen’s country of origin

(ibid).

This move toward transculturation was present in the first instrumental jazz album, entitled Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu (trans. From Exile to Return), released by “The Jazz

Workshop” ensemble in 1972. This was not only the first instrumental album released in Israel, but it was also the first example of an Israeli jazz album that blended indigenization of local musical styles with American jazz. Led by pianist Dani Gottfried and saxophonist Albert 75

Piamenta, the record featured jazz arrangements of Israeli songs and traditional folk melodies from Jewish, Arab, and Armenian traditions. When I asked Gottfried about the transcultural blends of today’s Israeli jazz artists, he maintained that, really, they were “already doing it” back in the 1970s (Gottfried 2015). Indeed, to a certain extent he is right. The impulse and the explorations were already happening, much as they were in other places around the world at the same time.36 However, when listening to the 1971 release, the sounds reveal a dramatic difference as compared to the work of today’s Israeli jazz artists.

By comparison, today’s creations more often than not reflect the individual artist’s integrated voice, which has matured over time, through the particular blend of disparate influences into a personal expression. This personal sound then manifests primarily through original compositions but also through arrangements of various existing materials. In contrast, one hears in the arrangements in Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu, a coarser result achieved through collage and juxtaposition between various middle-eastern sonic vocabularies and American jazz swing and blues vocabularies. Thus, while Mezare deserves its place as the “first” instance of indigenization, it is not necessarily an influential predecessor for today’s explorations. This is doubly true as the recording went out of print long before the aforementioned generation of

Cohen and Avital came of age, and thus had little influence on their music making or artistic visions.

Sagee-Keren argues that the 1970s, too, was an important decade. On the one hand, jazz had established roots in Israel by the 1970s, with a dedicated following, and an emerging stream of young musicians. At the same time, Sagee-Keren maintains that the local scene suffered from diminishing activity during this decade, partly as a result of the October 1973

36 For wide ranging global examples of indigenization in jazz read E. Taylor Atkins Blue Nippon (2001) and Jazz Planet (2003) and Philip V. Bohlman’s and Goffredo Plastino’s Jazz Worlds/World of Jazz (2016). 76

War and its consequences: economic slowdown, political turmoil, decline in morale and general post-war malaise. Also, in the second half of the 1970s, many of the leading younger musicians moved overseas to pursue studies and further their careers abroad. Still, the 1970s also saw a new set of immigrants arrive in Israel from the Soviet Union, which included several notable jazz musicians: woodwind player and arranger Roman Kuntzman and pianist-composer

Nachum Pereferkovich. Shortly after his arrival in Israel, Kuntzman teamed up with leading drummer Aharale Kaminsky to form the very influential band Platina, which was founded in

1971. The ensemble was originally conceived as a back-up band for well-known Israeli popular music singer , but it actually dedicated itself to performing jazz and various types of jazz-rock fusion. The band stayed active until 1976 with its pinnacle achievement a 1974 appearance at the famous Newport Jazz Festival (Sagee-Keren 2015).

Within Israel’s local jazz world, the 1980s was a period of time that can be said to have very directly laid the foundations for the emergence of the aforementioned First Wave of Israeli jazz musicians internationally. The decade’s importance is attributed to the increased institutionalization of formal jazz education, the creation of international jazz festivals in Israel and to an increased appetite by Israeli jazz musicians to seek further education in the US.

Musicians such as saxophonist Amikam Kimelman and later flutist Ilan Salem felt that in order to play jazz they had to go to the “source”: the United States. Salem conveys this exact notion while also comparing it to the remarkable difference that today’s Israeli jazz musician faces:

I really went there without knowing anything. [It’s different for] the guys that go today…take my son Hillel for example. Hillel went at a level where he already knows the music and knows how to play it. He can already join ensembles and play. So, you see the young guys, to a certain extent, don’t go to study, they go to make a career. They don’t need to study, what will they teach them there? You understand? But, I really went there to study, to understand the language. What are these phrases, you know. I came to Berklee and heard: What the fuck [are] you’re playing. (originally in 77

English)…Its not that I didn’t play. I played here (ed: in Israel) before I went…we were playing jazz, standards, and all, but I was playing by ear and I had no clue what I was doing. No clue. And I wasn’t really playing the language, just the sounds here and there. (Salem 2015)

When musicians such as Kimelman and Salem returned from the US to Israel, they brought back with them the knowledge and experience gained during their studies and gigging. And, perhaps not entirely unrelated, around the same period of time, towards the end of the 1980s, in what now can be seen as pivotal events in the history of jazz in Israel, jazz became institutionalized in Israel in a few important schools and through creation of the Red Sea Jazz

Festival.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF JAZZ IN ISRAEL

Formal Education: High School and Post-Secondary Programs

High School Programs

Among the most important initiatives in development of jazz in Israel was the founding in 1987 of the jazz program at the Thelma Yellin Arts High School in the Tel Aviv suburb of

Givatayim. Thelma Yellin had already been long established as the most prominent arts high school in the country, a place to which talented kids in all the arts disciplines (music, dance, visual, cinema, theater) gravitated. But prior to 1987, the music department only focused on

Western Art Music. As we will see, following the creation of its jazz program it has produced a very high percentage of Israel’s jazz musicians.

It was jazz educator Opher Brayer who along with Eli Benacot (who had studied at

Berklee) pioneered the establishment of Thelma Yellin’s jazz program. It emerged quite organically, as a response to the needs of students who did not feel satisfied with the school’s classical music focus--these students wanted to improvise and make other kinds of music. 78

Brayer, who had taken a correspondence course with Berklee, and Benacot created a program that modeled itself after Berklee’s curriculum but applied it to the high school setting (Regev

2015).

Trombonist and jazz educator Yossi Regev, who has been serving as the director of the jazz program at Thelma Yellin since 1994, describes the vision that guided the establishment of the program:

The important invention of this program, when it was created around 1987- 1988, is that it didn’t orient itself around the students’ age, but rather their abilities…Brayer and Benacot adopted many things from Berklee…they created a program that is generally designed for students above the age of 20 but applied it to 15 year old students…its like I always say, if you don’t tell the kid how hard something is, he doesn’t know. (ibid)

Indeed, in scope and breadth, this high school program is essentially equivalent to a large North

American undergraduate jazz program. This rigorous training that Israeli jazz musicians receive in their teens helps explain the strong foundations they possess as well as the success so many achieved on the international scene (ibid).

In the Israeli version of an arts high school like Thelma Yellin, students matriculate in all the standard subjects like their national peers, but in addition spend approximately twenty hours a week studying music related courses. At present, there are approximately 70-75 students enrolled in the program spanning grades 9-12. Since its inception, the faculty roster at

Thelma Yellin’s jazz program has consistently included some of the leading jazz musicians/educators residing in Israel. According to the department’s website, its current roster of instructors includes, among many others: Erez Barnoy, Yuval Cohen, Ilan Salem, and Daniel

Zamir. The late Amit Golan (d. 2010) and Amos Hoffman, who moved back to the US in 2014, both were mainstays during the 2000s at Thelma Yellin. Director Yossi Regev also notes that every year he has brought in special guests to lead some of the ensembles, including great 79 singer/songwriters such as the legendary and influential Matti Caspi or Arkadi Duchkin (Regev

2015).

Here is a brief overview of the Thelma Yellin curriculum, which is modeled after

Berklee’s and has stayed fairly consistent since its early days. All students take four years of an integrated harmony/arranging course. As a final project for each year, the students compose a chart: grades 9 and 10 arrange a chart for 4 horns, grade 11 for 5/6 horns, and in grade 12 each student prepares a big band chart. All students also study four years of improvisation (the improvisation instructor rotates every year to allow for different perspectives to be shared with students), ear training, and jazz history. And, each student participates in two ensembles, of varying sizes, per academic year. There are twenty ensembles each year, including a Big Band, a vocal jazz ensemble, and a salsa band (Regev 2015).

Thelma Yellin’s notable alumni list reads as a Who’s Who of Israel’s jazz scene, as many of the most well-known Israeli jazz artists are graduates. Among them are: Yonatan

Avishai (piano), Omer Avital (bass), Amir Bresler (drums), Anat Cohen (woodwinds), Avishai

Cohen (trumpet), Yuval Cohen (sax), Eli Degibri (sax), Daniel Dor (drums), Gilad Hekselman

(guitar), Shai Maestro (piano), Haggai Cohen Milo (bass), Reut Regev (trombone), Gilad

Ronen (sax), Ilan Salem (flute), Jonathan Voltzok (trombone), Asaf Yuria (sax), and Daniel

Zamir (sax) (ibid).

In the 1990s, following the model set forth by Thelma Yellin, several more high schools created specialized jazz programs, most notably Yigal Alon High School for the Arts in the Tel

Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon and Ironi Aleph High School in Tel Aviv. Though these schools have smaller jazz programs, they too featured faculty rosters with leading musicians, and have produced some notable alumni. For example, Yigal Alon High School has among its 80 noted alumni, Gilad Abro (bass), Yaron Herman (piano), Yotam Silberstein (guitar), Doron

Tirosh (drums) and me. The last decade has seen continued growth of jazz departments or jazz divisions within high school music programs across the country, including in locations that are farther away from Tel Aviv. This has allowed more students across the country to study jazz at the high school level and matriculate nationally with a jazz concentration.

Post-Secondary Programs

In 1985, the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music was established in the affluent Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon to provide training for post secondary level students.37 In 2013 it changed its name to the Rimon School for Music. Founded by young musicians Guri Agmon, Gil Dor, Yehuda Eder, and Ilan Mochiah, Rimon quickly became a learning center from which many of Israel’s leading jazz musicians emerged (Kimelman

2015).38 Saxophonist, arranger, and composer Amikam Kimelman has been serving as

Rimon’s academic director since 1990. He played a key role in developing its vision and curriculum, as well as establishing its wide ranging partnerships in Israel and with institutions overseas. Kimelman was recruited to join the faculty at Rimon around 1987, very shortly after returning from years in the US studying at Berklee College of Music as well as living and performing in NYC (Kimelman 2015).

In our interview, Kimelman spoke about designing Rimon’s curriculum and vision based on the education he received in Berklee. Furthermore, utilizing his connections with

37 Though Rimon is widely considered the first influential post-secondary jazz program in the country, it was actually not the first post-secondary institution to open a jazz program in Israel. The Jerusalem Academy opened its jazz program in 1980 (Sagee-Keren 2015). 38 In the broader context of Israel’s music scene, it is also important to note Rimon’s central position as a hub from which many leading singer/songwriters as well as popular music arrangers/composers emerged. In fact, during its entire existence, the vast majority of its students have not been jazz musicians but rather musicians aspiring to make a career in various popular music genres. However, in the context of this research project, I focus on its important role as a post-secondary institution for jazz studies. 81

Berklee, he established in 1993 an accredited collaboration with it through which Rimon became part of the Berklee International Network (BIN). This allows graduates of Rimon who wish to transfer to Berklee’s Boston campus to carry over their core area credits and shorten the time it takes them to complete their degree there. Many Israeli musicians have pursued this option often receiving generous scholarships. Over the years, Rimon has established a strong reputation at Berklee for the caliber of students it sends over. In subsequent years, Rimon also established reciprocal relationships with schools in Ireland and Spain that belong to the international network. As a result, Rimon even has a small group of foreign students enrolled in its BIN program. According to Kimelman, these students are often drawn to the possibility of completing Berklee accredited courses at a much more affordable institution with a more affordable cost of living (ibid).

Rimon has also established curriculur partnerships with some of the leading high school jazz programs in Israel, Thelma Yellin chief among them, such that high school graduates from these programs can waive some of the Rimon degree requirements. Kimelman refers to the path followed by the many jazz musicians who complete their high school studies, continue on to

Rimon, and then transfer to Berklee as the “Thelma Yellin-Rimon-Berklee express”.

In the 1990s Rimon grew from a small school that enrolled approximately thirty students into the “Berklee” of Israel with a student body that averages 500. The school now comprises six departments and offers 250 courses and multiple ensembles all dedicated to teaching a wide range of musical styles from jazz to various forms of “world music” to an array of popular music idioms. The interaction that takes place as a result of the school’s diverse offerings has led to many successful projects and collaborations (Kimelman 2015). 82

In 2012, Rimon established the Jazz Institute, a small “elite” two-year program that enrolls approximately thirty students per year. This new program focuses on helping its students build profiles as versatile performers/composers/arrangers who are proficient with technology. The program is deliberately open stylistically, drawing on popular idioms as well as jazz, and includes a broad range of courses designed to develop strong skills in arranging, composing, and improvisation (ibid).

In 2002, in what would become another important marker in the growth of jazz education in Israel, pianist and educator Amit Golan established the jazz youth program at the

Tel Aviv Conservatory. By 2005 there were already ninety students studying in the program and teachers included saxophonist Erez Barnoy, guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman, trumpeter

Danny Rosenfeld, drummers Shay Zelman and Doron Tirosh, along with Golan. Four years later, Golan and Michal Abramov established the Center for Jazz Studies at the Tel Aviv

Conservatory, as a partnership with the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in

NYC.39 The Center for Jazz Studies offers students a four-year Bachelors of Arts degree from the New School that begins with two years of study in Israel followed by two years in NYC.

According to current director of the Center, Erez Barnoy, many of the leading Israeli graduates receive the highest scholarships when they arrive at the New School, and from there establish themselves in the NYC scene. Current faculty members at the Center for Jazz Studies include many of the leading jazz musicians living in Israel, such as: Gilad Abro, Erez Barnoy, Yuval

Cohen, Ofer Ganor, Avi Leibovich, Omri Mor, Ilan Salem, Jonathan Voltzok, Daniel Zamir, and Shay Zelman (Barnoy 2015).

39 Golan drew his inspiration for the center from the education model created by American saxophonist Arnie Lawrence who founded the New School University’s jazz program (The Center for Jazz Studies n.d.). Incidentally, Lawrence who moved to Israel in 1997 and died in 2005 was cited by several of my interloctours for being a highly influential educator and mentor in their lives. 83

A few years ago, saxophonist Daniel Zamir was recruited to serve as the academic director of a new post-secondary jazz program called Mizmor located approximately an hour south of Tel Aviv. It is no coincidence that Zamir, who is the only prominent religiously orthodox Jewish jazz musician with a following among both secular and religious communities, was tasked with the challenge of opening this program. He has become a singularly important figure for young aspiring religious musicians in Israel, who see in him a role model proving

(against criticisms from within the religious community) that one can be an orthodox Jew and a jazz musician at the same time.

Mizmor was founded in 2010 with the mission of catering primarily to the religious

Jewish population in Israel and so providing a musical education that also accommodates for its students’ religious beliefs and traditions (Mandel 2010). Fifty students enrolled in the first year of existence and the school has been thriving since, with some of the leading jazz musicians in the country on its faculty roster. Thus, in just a few years there has been a growing involvement with jazz music by certain segments of the religious Jewish sector in Israel (Zamir 2015).

The founding and success of Mizmor is clearly more than a teaching job for Zamir, as it aligns with his deeper aspirations to make inroads for creative music making among the religious Jewish community and gain acceptance within it. Since Mizmor has only been around for a few years, it is still too early to fully gauge its impact on the availability and interest in jazz among Israel’s more pious Jews but Zamir is pleased with the early results:

There’s high demand for enrollment, and what has happened as a result are many things that didn’t previously exist in the religious world … [such as] types of music and styles of music that folks invented here. All sorts of combinations and blends, and things they are doing that didn’t exist [before]. All sorts of singers and instrumentalists that simply didn’t exist before Mizmor. It’s remarkable. We have basically created a real change in the perceptions of music in the religious world, but not only in perceptions, but in actuality in terms of what the religious sector produces. We have turned it 84

upside down. We have invented something here that didn’t exist in history: A women’s only salsa ensemble. In two weeks, we will have a show for women only at Haezor (ed. jazz club in Tel Aviv) of a salsa band made up only of women. And there’s a woman here who has an ensemble combining Yemenite music with Afro-Cuban music with her father’s melodies from home…things that didn’t exist. Religious jazz players! Players that are influenced not by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but more so by Avishai Cohen, an entire scene of this sort. It’s very hard work but it’s very fulfilling. (Zamir 2015)

In addition to Mizmor, this surprising interest the religious sector has in jazz is also manifest in a “musical yeshiva” that is affiliated with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, called

Kinor David (trans. David’s harp) and located at the Jewish Settlement of Ateret in the occupied Palestinian West Bank territory. A yeshiva is a Jewish religious educational institution for male secondary and/or post-secondary students. According to the Kinor David website, there are currently 140 high school aged students living and studying at this boarding school program (Kinor David n.d.). Their studies combine religious with musical studies.

Students majoring in music matriculate through completion of national examinations. Several interlocutors who serve as examiners on these high school final exams reported their surprise, indeed astonishment, at the level of musicianship displayed by Kinor David students in recent years (Barnoy 2015; Sagee-Keren 2015).

As of the year 2017, there are four post-secondary jazz programs (Rimon, Tel Aviv

Conservatory, Jerusalem Academy, Mizmor) and jazz training is available in many high schools. Still, it is worth noting that the vast majority of internationally successful Israeli jazz musicians have emerged via the very particular path of a Tel Aviv area high school (most likely

Thelma Yellin) through one of the two prominent post-secondary programs (Rimon or Tel

Aviv Conservatory) and on to the US. Furthermore, the vast majority of these musicians come from upwardly mobile Israeli families who live in the Tel Aviv or Jerusalem area. Indeed, 85 access to this type of extraordinary education in jazz, which entails extra fees, if not tuition, is topic of heated debate as is virtually every other aspect of education in Israel. Children growing up in what is known as the peripheria, in provincial towns and villages located far away from the cities and nearby suburbs of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, whether in the north or south, and thus are far from the centers of power and opportunity in Israel, have much less opportunity for specialized jazz training and, according to many critics, top level education in general.

Such restricted access is even more acute for the non-Jewish population in Israel, a segment of the population that makes up nearly 20%. The education system for Palestinians living within Israel as Israeli citizens is almost exclusively segregated and severely underfunded. At present, there are no jazz programs in Arab towns or villages.

Within the Jewish population living in the peripheria, however, there are exceptions to the norm of minimal jazz education. Some students with the means to do so travel at great lengths to go to one of these elite high school programs. For example saxophonist Amit

Friedman would wake up every morning at 5am to travel from the southern town of Ashdod to

Thelma Yellin, a journey that normally would take an hour by car and two hours using public transit. But Friedman was the exception in his determination and ability to pursue such training:

Say you want to learn jazz in Ashdod, you can’t…same thing in the north, occasionally there’s some nut who’s into it and will build something, but it doesn’t really happen, and I’m not talking about Eilat, or Beer Sheva or Dimona (ed: southern towns even further away from the center), it simply doesn’t exist and it’s ridiculous. You know it’s not the provinciality of the US, this is a provinciality of a 40 minute, one hour drive, from the finest teachers. I teach now at Tel Mond, and now things have reversed a bit, but when I started teaching, I tried to convince parents of talented students to travel to Ra’anana or Kfar Saba, [towns] that are you know just across the road, and it wasn’t an option, you understand? (Friedman 2015)

In some small measure, this geographical limitation is being addressed through the recent increase of jazz programs in high schools and conservatories in towns in the north and south of 86 the country that previously did not have them. This has also led to a growing number of students coming from areas that are further away from Tel Aviv who enroll and travel to do their studies at the Tel Aviv Conservatory and travel great distances (by Israeli standards) on a weekly basis to pursue their studies, as Erez Barnoy notes:

What happened is that folks like pianist Nitai Hershkovitz, saxophonist Lior Piterstein and pianist Hila Kulik came here from Mizra (ed. a village in the north) every week after they finished their studies there and folks started coming from all over the country…from Beer Sheva. This year, for example, we have students from Zichron Yaakov (ed: a town near Haifa, an hour north of Tel Aviv), from Haifa. People come here once a week. They get on the train, they make the whole way. I know that in Toronto this sounds like very little, but in Israel for a fifteen year old to decide that they’re going to go all the way to Tel Aviv because that’s the place to study jazz is kind of crazy, and this has become a hysterical place for jazz studies. (Barnoy 2015)

Though such developments seem to signal an increasing willingness of young Israelis to travel greater distances to advance their studies, it does not mean that there has been a shift in accessibility of jazz education for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This is particularly true of those who live in towns and villages that are far from Tel Aviv or who belong to the most underprivileged segments of Israeli society, namely orthodox Jews and

Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The Red Sea Jazz Festival40

Another important institution established in the late 1980s that has had a tremendous impact on the development of the jazz scene in Israel is the International Red Sea Jazz Festival.

The event takes place over four days in late August in the port area of the southern-most city of

Israel, Eilat, which sits right on the Red Sea. The festival was established in 1987 by pianist

40 A second important festival, The Tel Aviv Jazz Festival started in 1991. The festival was originally known as “Jazz, Blues, Videotape”, taking place every February for a few days in Tel Aviv’s Cinemataque (ed. a cinema house for independent and art films) (Weiss 2017). 87

Dani Gottfried, and has become a staple among the world’s top tier of international jazz festivals. However, as Gottfried recounts, it came about largely by way of circumstance:

Folks were looking to do something in Eilat. The mayor said to the Ministry of Culture: “there’s nothing going on, do something”. So someone came from an organization called “Tarbut La’am” (trans. Culture for the People) and said maybe we should do a jazz festival. They gave me a call and asked me if I was willing to help out…and I also invented the name, I thought there’s the North Sea Jazz Festival, I can take a ride on that name and call it the Red Sea Jazz Festival. We started very modestly because there was no money. I had a budget of $25,000 for foreign artists in the first festival and I went with this to the US. So, of course, I went only to Jewish musicians, I went to Jews, all sorts of guys that I already knew, like Mel Lewis may he rest in peace and the Brecker Brothers, Red Rodney, all sorts of folks that had already been to Israel and that I knew a bit. I told them, we want to do a festival but there’s no money, only enough to cover travel expenses and accommodation. Come, do it for Zionism! Everyone came, and that’s how the first festival started which already had some really big names. (Gottfried 2015)

Also key to realizing the festival was Gottfried’s pairing with producer Avi Yifrah. It was, in fact, Yifrah who came up with the idea for an industrial, open-air festival concept situated at the Eilat port, right on the water, using stacks of the ZIM company’s massive shipping containers to create buffers between stages. All performances are outdoors, going deep into the night, followed by an all-night jam session at one of the large local hotels. Masterclasses and workshops are held during the day. Each of the four nights has approximately ten shows divided onto four stages, with two stages operating and two stages “resting” at any given moment. Tickets are purchased by the day or as packages for the entire event, and so movement between shows is free flowing and flexible (Gottfried 2015).

Over the years the Red Sea Festival has hosted many of the world’s leading jazz musicians, while simultaneously providing an important platform for Israeli artists. Indeed,

Gottfried intimated to me that it was a high priority for him to ensure equal representation for

Israeli artists. Every year, there is a 50/50 split between local and foreign artists. Gottfried 88 speaks about establishing this basic framework with its organizers in advance of the first festival:

I said, on principle, an equal number of Israeli and foreign bands. To give Israelis a stage…we’re doing an international jazz festival, it’s a platform. You can come later and say, I played in the same festival as Randy Brecker and all the greats that played there. I told them, we’ll do this on principle, this is how it’ll work. (ibid)

Gottfried notes that every year he receives around one hundred artist submissions for the ten slots available to local artists. He believes this alone led to tremendous growth of activity in the local jazz scene:

Just by virtue of the fact that you have a hundred submissions that means that there is activity on the ground. In order to submit, after all, even those that weren’t the most serious had to get into the studio, they had to prepare, they had to record, they had to think about what they were going to do. And those that were more serious did much more serious work and so on and so forth. So it really was a very important platform. (ibid)

As with any institution and its leadership, the festival and Gottfried received their share of criticism on issues ranging from low pay for local musicians, to favoritism of certain artists over others, to matters of program content and orientation. According to Gottfried, some Israeli artists complained about being scheduled on the small stages. Gottfried acknowledges that this is the reality, citing that the economics were such that the biggest draws of the festival remain the well-known foreign artists, and this dictates a certain hierarchy in terms of stage sizes and time slots. According to Gottfried, ensuring the financial viability and survival of the festival also necessitated that the festival be eclectic and diverse stylistically, ensuring that “every person can find in it something that he loves, from New Orleans to Latin to ethnic jazz” (ibid).

These criticisms aside, now nearly thirty years after its establishment, the Red Sea festival remains an annual destination for many jazz musicians and fans alike, and has established a prestigious reputation internationally. It sold approximately 70,000 tickets 89 annually in its heyday during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Gottfried no longer serves as artistic director, and in recent years the festival has been curated by leading Israeli jazz artists such as Avishai Cohen (bass) and presently by saxophonist Eli Degibri.

A close examination of the 1998 Red Sea Jazz Festival program provides evidence of increased visibility for musical efforts to “localize” jazz in Israel. Not coincidentally, 1998 was also the fifty-year anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel and the founding of the city of Eilat. The program notes from the 1998 festival indicate that the concerts by Israeli musicians and ensembles were curated with these celebrations in mind, aiming to showcase the diversity and vitality of Israeli musical activity in the preceding fifty years. For example, the

Israeli Air-Force Big Band with American jazz greats and Dave Liebman as special guests presented a concert featuring swinging arrangements of Israeli songs. Pianist

Nachum Pereferkovich, vocalist Ricki Manor, and saxophonist Albert Piamenta led a band presenting fresh arrangements of texts derived from the biblical “Song of Songs”; guitarist

Meir Ben Michael led a band presenting hard-bop arrangements of Jewish-Moroccan piyyutim

(Lemish and Globerman 1998). 1998 also marks the year that Avishai Cohen’s debut album

Adama appeared – the first internationally released album by an Israeli artist that showcases the blend of local influences with the global influences of jazz and Afro-Cuban music. These examples of the various Israeli jazz artists interested in transcultural fusion appearing at the

Red Sea Jazz Festival reveal that while Avishai Cohen and his internationally successful counterparts may have benefitted from wide ranging credit in Israel and overseas for initiating such a wave, their interest in blend was very much in line with existing trends and trajectories in the broader Israeli jazz scene in Israel.

90

THE WAVE OF RETURN, AND THE BACK AND FORTH

The last fifteen years have seen a process in which leading Israeli jazz musicians re- establish strong connections with Israel after having successfully established themselves internationally. Many Israeli jazz musicians continue to feel a deep connection to their homeland and choose to return to Israel. Many do so permanently, in their view, so they can be closer to family, seek Israeli partners with whom they might raise a family, be at greater ease culturally and/or, simply, return in order to enjoy the comforts of home. Indeed, this is not necessarily as dramatic as it may appear at first sight, as some artists who have a strong international presence find that they can live anywhere and continue to tour. In fact, with venues in Europe providing much of what many of today’s professionals describe as best work for jazz musicians, Israel becomes an easier and financially preferable central base from which to travel:

I knew when I was eighteen that I wanted to go through this journey (ed. of moving to the US) only to return to Israel. The day I understood that I can manage my career from a tent in Africa so to speak as long as there is an airport near by it was my cue to return. (Degibri 2015)

Several of these musicians noted that they put in their time in the “jazz capital of the world” or, in more metaphorical language, paid their dues and cut their teeth. More conceptually, several affirmed that they have established the kind of career and opportunities they longed for and/or accomplished the kind of learning they had hoped for, and having done so they return home to

Israel. While each individual’s story is different, collectively, some of the leading figures in

Israeli jazz have returned home. This trend is exemplified by bassist Avishai Cohen, who has resided in Israel since the mid-2000s. Avi Lebovich returned in 2003; Daniel Zamir in 2006 and Eli Degibri in 2011. 91

A second approach was taken by Amos Hoffman, who returned to live in Israel for almost 15 years between 1999-2014 but recently returned to the US. Similarly, Omer Avital, spent several years in Israel during the 2000s before moving back to NYC.

Yet a third approach has been adopted by many leading Israeli jazz musicians who continue to live abroad but return to Israel several times a year, sometimes for extended periods of time. Saxophonist and director of the Center for Jazz Studies at the Tel Aviv Conservatory,

Erez Barnoy, conveys the tenor of this approach:

Tons of musicians go back and forth, in numerous ways. First, Israeli musicians, even if they live in New York, feel compelled to visit home, some stay here for entire summers. They are home-sick and hummus-sick... They continue to be a part of the community here even when they are not physically present. I think that this homey aspect of the community is strong. There’s no way that the guys will come back for a visit and that they won’t go to Beit Hamudim (ed. jazz club) or come to the Conservatory to do a workshop, or come to hang with the students here. (Barnoy 2015)

For many of the musicians who did not move back to Israel, the pull of home, family, and community is often still very strong, as is the potential for on-going professional collaborations.

As Barnoy notes, their visits are usually accompanied by concerts, impromptu performances at jam sessions, workshops, and masterclasses. These return visits by established musicians, who are operating in the US and Europe at the cutting edge of these various jazz scenes, nourish the

Israeli scene. The returning musicians bring back the energy, experience, and knowledge they have gained, share it with fellow musicians, students, and audiences in Israel.

This massive “return wave” has had tremendous ripple effects on the scene in Israel, especially in the formal and informal education younger musicians receive. Indeed, the return of these musicians was cited by many of the individuals I interviewed as the leading reason for the explosion of jazz talent emerging out of Israel in the last two decades. As noted, musicians of the First Wave, such as Cohen, Avital, Hoffman, Degibri and Lebovich, spent a decade 92 cutting their teeth in the still “old school” scene of NYC, proving themselves in jam sessions, performing as sidemen with the leading jazz musicians of the time, and carving out careers for themselves as band leaders. On their return to Israel, they shared their knowledge, experience, and musicianship directly, through lessons and workshops, and indirectly by performing in local clubs and venues. The impact of their return was acknowledged to be of paramount importance by later waves of the younger generation of musicians now establishing themselves in NYC.

New York-based guitarist Rotem Sivan, who arrived in NYC in 2008 and belongs to the Third Wave, talks about going to listen to these returning musicians while he was still living and studying in Israel:

The first generation, Omer Avital, Amos Hoffman, Ofer Ganor, all those guys that were here (ed. NYC) in the 1990s, learned the music profoundly. So, then, my generation that grew up in Israel basically studied with them. I remember in 2007 going to hear Amos Hoffman play at Taza Doro (ed: Israeli jazz club), and every once in a while Eli Degibri would come by and sit in. And these guys would visit or would be passing through, and Omer Avital is in Tel Aviv playing trio with Omri Mor. It’s crazy. So, it seems to me that my generation, that moved to NY around 2008/9, we had a very strong foundation in the roots of the music, because they studied it from the roots. They weren’t messing around, you know. So, when they taught us, they showed us things from the foundation; the be-bop, the language, with an emphasis on harmony and on transcription, to really learn the music. I think this is one of the reasons that many Israeli players have a really strong foundation and a deep knowledge of the language from its roots. (Sivan 2015)

Amit Friedman has similar recollections:

First and foremost it was going to listen to Amos Hoffman and Shay Zelman which is that exact generation that came back and I believe really revolutionized things here…[Amos] Hoffman was a real figure, a role model, you know to go hear him play, and it’s connected to Amit Golan who told me “go listen to Amos play” and it had to do with a new spirit that they brought, it was a new spirit to hear those guys play, they brought something new that hadn’t been here before…[You’d] hope that they will let you play a tune, and then gradually they call you to sit in, call you to play the gig, and then, you 93

know, from there, it took a little bit of time, but from there they become folks that I can call for a gig. (Friedman 2015)

Like Sivan and Friedman, many other musicians cited Amos Hoffman’s importance to their development. Hoffman, who moved back to Israel in 1999, was one of the first musicians who returned, maintaining a very active performance and teaching schedule in Israel. Guitarist Gilad

Hekselman, whose meteoric rise internationally has positioned him as one of today’s most followed young jazz guitarists in the world, speaks about the multiple ways in which Hoffman was an important figure in his development:

Beyond the fact that he showed me the foundation of what it is to play jazz on guitar, he did two additional things that I greatly appreciate. First, he supported me wholeheartedly and with a fervor from the first time he heard me. Right after that, I was like his brother. He made me feel that I was good, that I have something to offer…and he also showed me a little bit of what it means to be a working musician, the attitude, how to behave, what’s right to do, what’s not right, and just from going to see him play. I would go to hear him play every Friday at Taza Doro. They would play in the afternoon and he would always call me to sit in. He was really, really supportive. (Hekselman 2015)

Hekselman’s story is not unique and was echoed by several other interlocutors. They all noted that this type of informal, cross-generational education and support on the bandstand and through the related “hang times” are undoubtedly as important, if not more important, than any formal education transmitted in lessons or institutions.

Saxophonist Erez Barnoy speaks more broadly about the phenomenon of these returning musicians:

And Amit Golan also returned to Israel, and little by little, Amit Golan especially, because he’s a really important figure and in every fiber of his being he was a jazz educator, jazz messenger, jazz warrior, and he was so strong and dominant, so sweeping and he really brought this full force ahead, this new wind as we experienced it in NY, that first guys get to know the heroes, how it started, what it’s like to play with spirit, and he really influenced the entire generation, and I think it influenced their success in the world, because the Brecker-types, Europe knows how to produce, no 94

problem, and Asia knows how to produce, no problem, but I think that the guys that came here with so much inside their playing, so much of that sound, the guys that came back, you know, even Avishai Cohen the bassist is back so to speak, lives here, and Omer Avital came here for two years and taught at the Jerusalem Academy, and Amos Hoffman came back and so many guys that were there, Yonatan Riklis who teaches here and Yuval Cohen who came back…Shay Zelman that came back from that scene in NY, so we slowly got connected lots of guys that really heard the music ear to ear. (Barnoy 2015)

Barnoy emphasizes the importance of people like pianist Amit Golan, Amos Hoffman, Ofer

Ganor, and Shay Zelman, a group of musicians who all shared a great deal of reverence for the

American straight ahead jazz tradition, imparted this type of respect and admiration to their students, and taught them to play the music in a way that was deeply indebted to the be-bop and hard-bop eras. All four musicians returned from stints in NY in the late 1990s. Of the four, only

Amos Hoffman established an international career, but many of the musicians I interviewed attribute the strong foundations and success that Israelis have had in the American jazz scene to the education they received formally and informally from the circle of musicians that surrounded pianist and educator Amit Golan. They emphasized learning jazz in a way that was even more narrowly focused on be-bop and hard bop than the equivalent American jazz programs of the same time.41 Note also that when Barnoy refers to bringing a new “spirit” in this context he is also relating to the fact that up until this point, Israel’s jazz education was highly influenced and modeled after the Berklee College of Music educational approach as was evident in the preceding discussion about Thelma Yellin High School and Rimon.

Gilad Hekselman elaborates on Amit Golan’s importance and alludes to the sometimes heavy-handed manner in which Golan and his contemporaries sought to advance their view of the music:

41 Since the 1980s and 1990s, American school programs were deeply influenced by the post-Coltrane Michael Brecker/Dave Liebman/Jerry Bergonzi Berklee School of Music educational approach that promoted more chromatic and virtuosic playing. 95

Amit exposed me to music that I had never heard before. In our first high school jazz history course, he said the name Miles Davis and I had no clue who that was. He mentioned Louis Armstrong and it sounded a little bit familiar. That was when I was 14, 15 years old and I feel I owe him, even though he also forced his own musical taste on us. But when I think back to it, it was a good thing. Because it’s really easy to fall in love with Chick Corea and The Mahavishnu Orchestra when you’re a kid. But no one comes to you and says - listen to Sonny Clark, go check out Horace Silver and Horace Parlan. These are names that many folks who grew up in the US have never heard of. You tell them Horace Parlan and they don’t know who that is. Amit exposed us to many things and I am really happy that he did. I came from fusion, so I automatically went to Chick Corea and to Mahavishnu and all sorts. But if it wasn’t for Amit then its possible that I would have never heard this music and that would have been a great loss for me. (Hekselman 2015)

Hekselman talks here about the jazz history course he took with Amit Golan in his first year of high school studies at Thelma Yellin. Indeed, upon their return from the US, Golan, Hoffman,

Shay Zelman, and many others began teaching at multiple high schools and post-secondary institutions. Thus, starting in the late 1990s, a “new spirit” as it was referred to by many of my interlocutors entered formal jazz education in Israel and influenced many of today’s leading jazz musicians, particularly those emerging in what can be called the Third Wave.

Indeed, many of Israel’s leading jazz musicians who reside in Israel make a good part of their living teaching, simultaneously, in multiple institutions. During my conversations with him, Amos Hoffman recounted his busy teaching schedule during his years in Israel. Hoffman taught at the Tel Aviv Conservatory, both in its youth program and in its post-secondary program collaboration with the New School. He also taught at Thelma Yellin High School and at the Jerusalem Academy. Hoffman had to teach out of survival, because making a living in

Israel as a professional jazz musician requires that you teach in large volume—supporting oneself with local performances alone is impossible. He is not a unique case. Other leading

Israeli jazz artists who returned from years overseas continue to teach in both high school 96 programs and post-secondary programs as well as give private lessons. This includes folks such as saxophonists Yuval Cohen, Erez Barnoy, Daniel Zamir; trombonist Avi Lebovich; pianists

Anat Fort and Yonatan Riklis among many others.

Although the payment situation in Israel creates tremendous financial burden for the artists, a more positive side effect is that high school students, aged 15-18, are availed of personal, up close and regular attention from world class musicians who have extensive experience performing jazz in the US and worldwide. This type of education is usually not available for high school aged students in the United States or Canada.

Whereas much of the new musical “spirit” that the returning musicians instilled in the

Israeli scene was rooted in be-bop and hard-bop, they also inspired younger generations with stories about current life in NYC, the “Mecca of jazz”. Flutist Itai Kriss recalls:

Why did I even come to NYC? Because of all the Israeli [musicians] that I got to know when I was growing up who had been to New York and told me about it. And it was always like a legendary tale, one that continues to unfold because folks would constantly be arriving from NYC telling you how wonderful it is. (Kriss 2015)

Aside from stories, the returning musicians also provided insights and tips for making it in

New York. They relayed the practical realities of life as jazz musicians in the United States, while providing invaluable advice about how one has to go about forging their careers in the

Big Apple. Equally important, they often provided critical contacts, connections, and recommendations for their younger counterparts, enabling these future arrivals to tap into a growing network of Israeli musicians who had already established themselves in NYC.

While the scene in Israel provides a fertile ground for formal and informal jazz education, most young Israeli jazz musicians still aspire to move to NYC as a step towards developing their musicianship and establishing international careers in the world of jazz. In the 97 large and competitive broader NYC jazz scene, Israeli musicians often gravitate towards one another, musically and socially, relying on previously established networks and connections to get settled and advance their careers. Together, these musicians have created a vibrant and highly active Israeli jazz micro scene.

“KFAR” NEW YORK: TONS OF HUMMUS IN THE BIG APPLE 42

On July 12, 2017, guitarist Yotam Silberstein posted the above photo on Facebook with the accompanying caption “An epic moment last night!” (Silberstein 2017). Silberstein’s caption refers to bassist Gilad Abro’s (center middle row) arrival and performance in NYC and to the group of musicians memorialized in the photo: a “who’s who” of Israeli jazz musicians living in NYC who came to listen to the performance. Abro and Silberstein go back almost two decades to their days as teenaged band mates in a 1998 ensemble class at Yigal Alon High

42 Kfar in Hebrew means village. 98

School and their subsequent formative collaborations in Israel .43 The pair was first getting started as young professionals in Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, playing in groups together and cutting their teeth side by side at jam sessions. Since then, Silberstein, has gone on to become an internationally touring jazz guitarist based in New York, a much in demand sideman for leading jazz musicians worldwide, and a band leader in his own right.44 Abro, who has stayed in Israel throughout, has for years been the first call bass player for both local and international acts coming through Israel. He has served as a sideman (including in international tours) for many leading Israeli jazz artists such as Amos Hoffman, Daniel Zamir, and many others.

In July 2017, nearly two decades after they first met and collaborated as teenagers in

Israel, Abro arrived in NYC for a visit and a series of performances with various Israeli colleagues and friends who have been living and building careers in NYC. The photo above was taken after Abro performed at The Bar Next Door on July 11th with flutist Itai Kriss and drummer Dan Aran. Several days later, on July 15th Silberstein and Abro appeared together at

The Django as part of a trio performance with drummer Felix Lecaros dubbed as “a very special reunion” by Silberstein (Silberstein 2017).

The photo captures an after gig “Israeli” hang featuring, in addition to the musicians listed above, prominent Israeli jazz musicians such as bassist Omer Avital, trombonist Yonatan

Voltzok, drummer Daniel Dor, guitarist Alon Albagli, vocalist Yaala Balin, saxophonist Asaf

Yuria and others. Though Abro’s arrival and appearances in NYC might indeed be “epic” in the

43 The small jazz combo at Alon High School was coached by American saxophonist Walter Blanding. Blanding had toured with Wynton Marsalis’ group and was in Israel for a short period because of his marriage to an Israeli woman. The ensemble was rounded out by myself on piano and drummer Doron Tirosh. All four musicians have gone on to become professional jazz musicians. 44 For example, Silberstein is the guitarist in American bassist John Patitucci’s newest release Irmãos de Fé (2017). 99 context and narrative of the Israeli presence on the NYC scene, the collection of Israeli jazz musicians gathered together and displayed in the photograph after a gig in NYC is rather ordinary. Indeed, perhaps, the only extraordinary feature of this event was that it was captured with a posed snapshot.

For instance, I observed a similar Israeli presence and “hang” at various shows by

Israeli musicians that I attended during my fieldwork in New York during the summer of 2015.

Similarly, when in August 2016 I performed with guitarist/oudist Amos Hoffman at Cornelia

Street Café in Manhattan, I noticed that approximately half of the sold out venue that held about fifty seats were Israelis, mostly musicians ages 20-40. After the double bill (both shows featuring Israeli led groups), a lengthy, energetic Israeli hang ensued outside of the café, the smoke of cigarettes and the sounds of Hebrew traveling through the air.

The Comments section on Silberstein’s Facebook post reveal the way Israeli jazz musicians perceive their presence in the NYC jazz scene. For example, pianist Shai Maestro writes humorously “A good day in Allenby”, referring to the name of a main street in Tel Aviv.

Atcha Bar, CEO of a jazz club in Jerusalem called The Yellow Submarine, notes in Hebrew

“Hekamtem Moshava” which translates into “You’ve built a settlement”, and drummer Ziv

Ravitz chimes in, “Wow!!! Kfar NY is getting heavier!!!” Indeed, many Israelis and non-

Israelis, musicians and non-musicians alike, are astonished by the ongoing and pronounced presence of Israeli jazz musicians on the NYC scene. The Israeli jazz village, “Kfar NY”, as

Ravitz alludes to it, continues to grow, with waves of new musicians arriving regularly.

Above, I discussed the early beginnings of this phenomenon with the arrival in the

1990s of Avi Lebovich, Avishai Cohen, Omer Avital, Amos Hoffman, and several other musicians who lived in two adjacent apartment buildings in Harlem, supporting one another, 100 growing together as young aspiring jazz professionals making their way in NYC. Those

“founding fathers” certainly made initial and critical inroads within the broader NYC jazz scene. Now, two decades later, the Israeli “hamlet” in NY has grown into a “village”, with a network that is exponentially larger and more entrenched.

Today, Israeli jazz musicians arriving in NYC tap into a thriving musical micro-scene within the broader jazz scene. Upon arrival, these new arrivals typically lean on existing connections with already established compatriots, who introduce them to the broader scene by way of sessions, gigs, and social “hangs”. These introductions extend to extra-musical issues as well, for example, providing leads on housing, day jobs, and various ways to survive in the big city. This informal but effective network of support also manifests itself through a vibrant social community of Israeli jazz musicians who spend leisure time, play music, and attend shows together. Bassist Or Bareket recounts his own arrival in NYC and the various ways this pre-existing “Israeli” network helped him during his initial days on the scene:

It was very important socially, emotionally, and professionally. First of all, I had someone to call when I arrived…there were guys who were my age that moved here before me, so I had someone to call to say, “hey, I’m here, lets play” even prior to some kind of professional or economic consideration, I had someone to hang with…socially it was really important, I had a community the minute I arrived. And on the practical level, someone gave me a phone number of a player who had a regular gig who always needed a bass player. I gave him a call and two days later I got called for the gig. When I started, it was $60 plus tips and I would live on that for like a week (laughs) and it was a really big deal. (Bareket 2015)

Flutist Itai Kriss had a similar experience:

When I finally moved to NY there was an expansive network of people that I already knew from Israel. So the minute I arrived I went with [my Israeli] roommates to Smalls and they introduced me to all of the other Israelis at Smalls really quickly. And you know what it’s like with Israelis, it’s easy to talk to Israelis, we speak the same language and come from the same place, so it’s easy to connect even after a few minutes. So, it really, really helped. I came to an apartment of Israelis and my first gigs were with Israelis that 101

already knew me or got to know me quickly upon my arrival. So, it really helped. Until today, I play with tons of Israelis and I pretty much speak Hebrew every day. (Kriss 2015)

Drummer Ziv Ravitz argues that the network of Israeli jazz musicians in NYC is a by-product of the general habit Israelis have of surrounding themselves with other Israelis when overseas:

It’s generally true in the world today that Israelis really gravitate to other Israelis. I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who lives in . She’s from Guadeloupe. She told me, “I know one person from Guadeloupe here, and you are surrounded by a hundred Israelis. How can that be? You live in NYC, how is it that there are so many Israelis in your orbit?” We really gravitate to one another. It’s the herd mentality that we have everywhere in the world. And as a result of that we also play more together. (Ravitz 2014)

It seems abundantly clear that such “herd mentality” has served Israeli jazz musicians well in their efforts to develop professional careers in the challenging and competitive jazz scene of

NYC.

Beyond the significance of the broad Israeli network, almost every musician I interviewed who belongs to the younger generation has a story about how an established Israeli musician inspired them, encouraged them actively, opened doors for them via collaboration, or imparted knowledge through lessons and informal hangs. Flutist Hadar Noiberg, trumpeter

Itamar Borochov, pianist Omer Klein, and drummer Ziv Ravtiz are just a few of the musicians who’ve spoken about Omer Avital’s importance. Avital welcomed them, introduced them to other musicians, Israeli and non-Israeli, and through collaboration lent credibility to their own early efforts in the NYC scene. Avital is also credited by numerous musicians for having opened their ears and exposed them to a wide array of Arab classical music, Moroccan Gnawa, and Andalusian music.

Similarly, bassists Gilad Abro, Or Bareket, and pianist Omri Mor cite bassist Avishai

Cohen’s support and encouragement as playing an important role in their growth and fostering 102 self-belief. Furthermore, several of Cohen’s Israeli sidemen have benefited from the exposure they gained during their years in his band. After his return to Israeli in the mid-2000’s, Cohen started manning his trio with young and promising Israeli pianists and drummers who had not yet lived outside Israel. After several years of high profile performances on the international scene, these musicians were able to utilize the reputation and connections they had gained through membership in Cohen’s band to launch their own careers or pursue other invitations from well-established artists. For example, pianist Shai Maestro who anchored the piano chair in Cohen’s group for many of the bassists’ most successful and beloved albums, eventually moved on from his work with Cohen, settled permanently in NYC, launching his own trio and becoming a much sought after sideman.

Bassist Haggai Cohen Milo similarly benefitted from the Israeli network. He goes a step further in explaining that part of the strength of the network is connected to the excellent reputation for musicianship that Israeli jazz musicians have in NY:

I think that the network for me, personally, is really helpful, with the move to Boston and to New York, in two ways: First of all, yeah, the people are here, the people you know immediately and people you don't know, but you speak the same language, it's much easier…you hit it off easily, socially I mean, and then the other way is just that there's already the brand, like you are from Israel, you play jazz, you probably play well. Seriously, people think that about you, and I hear it from other people who are not Israelis, sometimes I hear it as a complaint, sometimes I hear it as a good thing, but I hear people say, “yeah, you know, you guys always take each other, you always hire each other, you always help each other” and it's true. I don't think we mean to do it, I think it just happens. Seriously, it's easy and it happens, and it's so amazing, like this network, it's like, I can't say enough good things about it, all these guys are also great friends, and always hang together, really so nice, beautiful, beautiful.45 (Cohen Milo 2014)

As Cohen Milo notes, new arrivals also take advantage of the path forged by older generations, utilizing the well-established reputation for excellence of Israeli jazz musicians among non-

45 My interview with Haggai Cohen Milo was conducted in English. 103

Israeli musicians, promoters, jazz club owners, and critics. Or Bareket has experienced a similar positive view of Israeli musicianship: “If you’re Israeli, people assume that you play well, there’s a good name for Israelis here in terms of the level of playing, at least that’s what

Americans tell me” (Bareket 2015). Indeed, in addition to concrete support from their Israeli colleagues, the existence of this reputation also helps those new to the scene musicians establish themselves with non-Israelis.

Amos Hoffman, who as one of the “founding fathers” of Israeli jazz played a pivotal role in establishing this reputation of Israeli prowess, reflects on his generation’s contributions and the dramatic benefits that future waves of Israeli musicians have reaped from their early efforts in the 1990s:

When we came, this generation of Avishai [Cohen], [Avi] Lebovich, Omer [Avital] and I, it was much more difficult for us than the guys today. Today you come and you say “I’m from Israel”, they say “come sit in! play!”. Folks are like, “you’re from Israel so maybe you’re a bad motherfucker”. But, we had to prove ourselves. (Hoffman 2014)

Indeed, assumptions of the great skill possessed by new Israeli musicians on the scene is deeply indebted to the initial group of individuals to which Amos belongs and refers to. In addition, we can attribute this reputation to the talent and success of each subsequent wave that followed.

Ultimately, the international success that numerous Israeli jazz musicians enjoy is rooted in their ability to carve out an aesthetic and commercial niche for themselves within the broader jazz world. In seeking to establish a viable place for their creative work and wishing to

“play their own voice” many of the aforementioned musicians are creating transcultural jazz that blends together an array of already blended sources. Grounded in African-American jazz traditions, each musician also weaves together a myriad of their own personal threads, both 104 local and global. Exploring these threads and the various ways Israeli jazz musicians weave them together is the subject of the next two chapters.

105

CHAPTER FOUR

“ISRAELI JAZZ”: BLEND OF BLENDS AND THREADS OF INFLUENCE

I think the best definition of Israeli jazz is really the combination (shiluv) of things, because of the shiluv that we have with the edot here,46 and often times each artist wants to go to his own roots and to investigate something new, and to see where he came from and what the music of that place is. Israel is such an array of combinations (shiluvim), myself, I’m half Iraqi, half South African, so that shiluv is out there, Bagdad and Capetown. (Abro 2015)

I just search, like many jazz musicians or many musicians in general, I search for new ideas. And I found that there is room for improvisation in Andalusian music, improvisation under very strict criteria, but it is still a kind of improvisation in what is called istihabar which is the parallel for taqsim (in the East)…47 so I also learned to improvise istihabarat in plural on all these modes and then I said wait a minute! and then naturally I started playing more pieces, pieces with one chord and all of a sudden I saw that I was putting these elements in. Then I took a specific melody that I had studied and I tried harmonizing it and then I tried improvising on the new harmony while staying loyal to the maqam,48 the original mode. And that’s how it was created. So the challenge here is to think dualistically or more than dualistically, to be simultaneously loyal to the maqam and the harmony in your solo. (Mor 2015)

As I argued in Chapter Two, much of today’s transcultural jazz practice is characterized by what Herbert Hellhund (2012) calls Stylistic Pluralism. Increasingly, individual artists craft their own voice out of a specific and personal blend of influences and styles that extend far

46 Eda (s), Edot (pl): ethnic groups within Jewish people 47 Taqsim is “an improvisational instrumental genre with an unmetred, or ‘free,’ rhythm, usually performed by a solo instrumentalist…according to certain conventional aesthetic rules. The taqsim is probably the most important instrumental genre of Arab music (Muallem 2010:233). 48 According to Arab Classical Music scholar David Muallem (2010), maqam which literally means “a place” in Arabic, has several meanings. 1) It can refer to the entire scalar system, such as the makamat a six scale system prevalent in Central Asian traditions (such as Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan). In Turkish-Arab traditions it is simply referred to as maqam. 2) It can also refer to a classical song form or structure such as the Iraqi al-maqam al-‘iraqi. 3) It is sometimes used to refer to the scale of a particular mode. “People that use the term maqam for a scale, actually refer to the group of notes in the framework of an octave and their tonic which are used for a particular maqam”. (56) 4) The particular way or organizing and demonstrating the melodic progression of the notes of a maqam scale by way of a well established system with performative rules and conventions, i.e. the way the maqam is “treated”. This is referred to as the sayr al- maqam. (57) 106 beyond the jazz genre as conventionally defined. In many cases artists draw from influences that come from their own cultural background or personal history. They also frequently draw from sonic worlds that they were not born into but rather choose to “live in”, study or cultivate.

The degree to which this encounter with musical genres and cultures outside of their own is a serious attempt to internalize them based on study or a more passive, indirect process varies from artist to artist and influence to influence. Even “creative misunderstanding” (Lipsitz 1994) of musical styles outside of a musician’s own background sometimes leads to fascinating results. In today’s transcultural jazz landscape many musicians are constantly searching for and sometimes randomly encountering and absorbing new influences that enhance their sonic vocabulary.

This is certainly the case for the Israeli jazz musicians I studied. These artists create original compositions that blend an array of sources and influences, both “local” and “global”.

Some of these threads of influence can be considered “Israeli”, or at least are particular to the musical environment within which these artists grew up in and share. Others, such as jazz and

Latin-American musical styles, can be considered “cosmopolitan” or “global” influences.

While each musician I spoke with blends a unique and specific combination of influences to create his or her own voice, it is possible to identify several significant shared threads of influence. It will certainly not be the case that each individual artist draws from each and every one of the threads identified below, however, many do draw from several of these influences and there is a great degree of overlap, such that each artist has much in common with his or her musical peers.

Indeed, along with their aim for and success in finding individual approaches, there is still a sound associated with them, sometimes referred to as “Israeli jazz” by other musicians, 107 critics, festival promoters and record producers. Some of the musicians I spoke with identified with and even embraced such labeling, while others rejected the label as too reductive and superficial. In the analyses of these artists’ original compositions that follow, I have identified several specific threads of influence that contribute to this sound. While I do not aim to provide a checklist for defining Israeli jazz, I do want to suggest that various combinations of these threads as performed by this generation of Israeli jazz musicians, yields what musicians and audiences alike have identified as the Israeli jazz sound.

In providing evidence for this thesis, my intention in the following pages is not to over- generalize, codify, or freeze what are fundamentally individually crafted artistic practices and pieces into essentialized categories. But, rather, to highlight the ways in which these artists all draw from similar wells of inspiration and resources, while fundamentally sharing one underlying thing: the musical practice of interweaving and blending these musical styles in their own way.

This chapter focuses on original compositions that demonstrate most distinctly and clearly the processes of transcultural blends undertaken by this generation of Israeli jazz artists.

Still, much more research can be done on areas such as improvisation and interaction, dimensions that this dissertation unfortunately does not touch in great depth or detail.

THE COMPLEX “GLOBAL” PART I: THE JAZZ TRADITION

Before delving into the many important local influences that shape the particular blend of jazz that Israeli jazz musicians produce, we must not lose sight of the central role that

African-American jazz traditions play in the training, approach, and music these musicians create. As described in detail in Chapter Three, the “founding fathers” of today’s cohort of 108 internationally recognized Israeli jazz musicians came of age musically in the 1990s New York

City downtown jazz scene. There, they focused intensely on absorbing and internalizing be- bop, hard bop, and cutting edge straight-ahead styles that were characteristic of the scene at the time. In fairly short order, they established themselves at key spots in the scene such as Smalls jazz club, and they served as sidemen for internationally recognized jazz artists such as Chick

Corea, Herbie Hancock, Slide Hampton, Danilo Perez, Al Foster among others. Subsequent waves of younger Israeli jazz musicians have followed suit. These younger generations partly benefitted from older musicians who returned to Israel after years of study and performance in the US. So they grew up in an environment with private teachers as well as high school and college programs that emphasized intense study of straight ahead jazz vernaculars.

Chapter Three also highlighted the special role that musician/educators, such as Amit

Golan, Amos Hoffman, Erez Barnoy and others, played in engendering a strong commitment and appreciation for African-American traditions by training younger musicians thoroughly in the be-bop and hard-bop styles of the 1940s through 1960s. Such a hyper-focus on these styles, with an emphasis on oral learning, can even be seen as “old-school” compared to leading educational approaches that dominate the concurrent landscape of post secondary jazz programs in North America, which have been trending towards stylistic pluralism and have been highly influenced by the Berklee School of Music’s approach to jazz education. Thus, the

Israeli musical landscape can be characterized as being rooted in aspects of jazz tradition that have passed out of favor in the US.

In addition to the training they received in Israel, there are numerous examples of the new generation of Israeli jazz musicians citing the pronounced importance of apprenticeships with American jazz musicians. For instance, trumpeter Itamar Borochov highlights pianist 109

Barry Harris’ important influence: “Barry Harris, ‘till today is a kind of mentor to me, he’s an authority…If someone truly taught me how to play jazz, its Barry” (Borochov 2015). Eli

Degibri noted how much he learned from playing in Herbie Hancock’s band for three years

(when he was 18) and later with drummer Al Foster. Avi Lebovich describes in great detail his seeking out Slide Hampton’s mentorship and Hampton’s willing patronage:

I went to Slide and I told him, “I think I play like you, I would like to meet you, sir”, I said it to him using those words, and for him it was so ridiculous that he had to hear it, “OK, lets get together”. He has such a big heart! And he’s probably like, bihyat rabak,49 what are you coming to me from Israel for? I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I had to see him, if he had said no, I would have gone to his home, I had to do everything [I could]…so I went, and he said “lets play”…and I start playing and he really got excited, really. Wow! And he took me under his wing, and I was with him all the time, in terms of practicing, learning arranging, composition, how to put my hands on the piano, how he harmonizes things…whenever I wanted, I would go to him…he would say “just come, don’t even call”. (Lebovich 2015)

Indeed, time and time again, most of the musicians I interviewed emphasized their rootedness in African-American jazz traditions.

Even though much of the original music these musicians make blends Israeli and

Middle-Eastern influences, they put considerable emphasis on their internalization of The Jazz

Tradition.50 Considering the complex web of cultural and racial politics in jazz practice and discourse, one can interpret this emphasis as part of an effort to stake out or, maybe, establish legitimacy for their current transcultural musical activities. In this view, careful study of canonic jazz performers reflects a desire to ensure that the blended styles of music that Israeli jazzers are creating today are understood by critics and listeners as grounded in The Jazz

49 Bihyat rabak: Arabic slang for “come on”. 50 The vast majority of Israeli jazz musicians that I interviewed subscribe to a view that considers rootedness in The Jazz Tradition as rootedness in styles that begin roughly with Louis Armstrong and continue through swing, big band, be-bop, and through to the hard-bop and cool jazz of the 1960s. 110

Tradition. Framing their work in a manner consistent with dominant notions of jazz authenticity does considerable work toward establishing their legitimacy as real jazz musicians.

Nonetheless, it would not be fair to simply interpret their appreciation for jazz’s traditions only from a cynical perspective. The affinity and love for jazz’s roots expressed by the Israeli musicians I interviewed is genuine. Furthermore, starting with their early musical upbringing and continuing with their formative years in the US, their personal histories reveal the central role that jazz tradition as defined by canonic be-bop and hard bop musicians plays in their own development as performers.

Take saxophonist Daniel Zamir, who has recorded several albums on John Zorn’s

Tzadik label and a separate set of records on Israeli labels. Among these is Amen (2006), one of the best selling jazz albums in Israeli history. Zamir also holds the unique position of being the only well-known orthodox Israeli jazz musician. His music, which he has labeled “Jewish jazz”, reflects influences such as modern jazz, downtown NYC radical Jewish culture Avant

Garde (a la John Zorn), klezmer, Chassidic Jewish influences, and Israeli popular music.

Despite this eclectic blend, Zamir argues that the jazz tradition is the foundation upon which his original music is built:

I am proud of the fact that I come from jazz…my entire musical foundation is jazz…I make Jewish Jazz, but first and foremost its jazz…What gives me the strength to do what I do is the fact that I have a jazz orientation, a most pronounced one. (Zamir 2015)

For Zamir, it all starts with Charlie Parker: “Charlie Parker first of all, that was the bread and butter. That’s totally where I came from and I am still really close to it till today” (Zamir 2015).

Saxophonist Eli Degibri expresses similar indebtedness to classic jazz. In our interview, he recounted how, from when he fell in love with jazz, at the age of ten he listened to nothing but jazz, starting with the tapes that his teacher (Stu HaCohen) would give him during lessons: 111

One tape had Charlie Parker on both sides, one had Cannonbal Adderley and Sonny Stitt, and I would listen to it nonstop, I’m telling you, and I’m not exaggerating, only to these tapes, every day on a loop…like a baby that’s learning a language…I didn’t listen to anything else, not Israeli music, not classical music, not musiqa mizrahit [trans. Eastern music], nothing, just this for years, and slowly I added another disc and another tape that he would record for me, but only this. (Degibri 2015)

Degibri finished the above thought by articulating his rootedness in the jazz tradition as a fully internalized, digested musical language, going as far as to argue that his authenticity is no less valid than a young man who grew up in Harlem: “It’s my mother tongue, and Charlie or I don’t know who, who grew up in Harlem, it’s the same thing, there’s no difference” (ibid).

Amit Friedman expresses a similar sentiment when talking about African-American trumpeter Nicholas Payton, an advocate for describing jazz as Black American Music (BAM):

You can’t mention me in the same breath as Nicholas Payton…but I can say responsibly that we listened to the same music, at least we have a lot a lot in common. I am not sure that he heard Sonny Rollins’ albums more than I have, and you know, when I play, I feel that I speak the language, when I play swing and I play standards, again, I try to get better at it and everything, but I feel that I speak the language and I feel that it sounds the way saxophonists that I hoped to sound like sound. (Friedman 2015)

It is clear that Israelis feel “at home” in the jazz vernacular because they feel that they have done their homework, having internalized the language and made it a central part of their musical identity.

Furthermore, some of the musicians I spoke with also seemed to be channeling the

North American jazz education doctrine of, “first prove that you can cut it in within The

Tradition, and then you are free to do your own thing”. Yuval Cohen’s comments similarly emphasized the prevalent view that any Israeli take on jazz must be rooted in jazz traditions. He clearly recoiled at the idea of bypassing it in favor of Israeli musical transculturation as a point of departure: 112

I don’t think you can look at jazz and say, OK, “I’m a jazz musician, but I only bring it in a fused version”…It’s not right, because first of all you can’t know jazz without knowing Louis Armstrong and New Orleans and Jelly Roll Morton… people don’t know who Louis Armstrong is and it drives me crazy…people who know Avishai Cohen’s albums, the bassist, but they say, “Louis Armstrong, remind me again, is that the singer?” So excuse me, stop right there, we have a problem. Someone’s saying I don’t know about Louis Armstrong but here I know the pieces of so and so, here, I play really well on 7/4 with this kind of groove and I’m a great jazzist. Okay, maybe you’re a musician, but something’s missing here, something is out of whack. (Cohen 2015)

The majority of Israeli musicians with whom I spoke hold to what Stuart Nicholson

(2005) describes as the prescriptivist interpretation of jazz: a tradition that is rooted in swing and blues; a musical genre that is distinctly connected to the African-American tradition. Yet they also simultaneously view it as a music that calls for and enables personal self-expression, which ultimately leads them to create the particular kinds of transcultural blends that are the focus of this dissertation.

Before discussing this path from jazz tradition to transcultural blend, however, it is important to gain some insight into the way these artists view The Jazz Tradition. Amos

Hoffman told me that:

To me, jazz is African-American music that has a really strong element of rhythm and a big improvisation component. These are two things that are really important. Now, you’ll say that rhythm and improvisation are two elements that you’ll find in a lot of styles that aren’t jazz…but I personally I love the motive of really African-American music, of swing, the feeling of the bass and drums (demonstrates a swingin’ bass line with his voice). (Hoffman 2014)

Amit Friedman compares the internalization of The Jazz Tradition to speaking a language and using its vocabulary in particular ways:

Jazz for me is work within a form…with an element of improvisation and an emphasis on rhythmicness (kitzbiyut), but you can pretty much say that about every kind of music. I think what makes it jazz is this language, that if you’re a pianist I’d like to hear some Wynton [Kelly] in there, Oscar Peterson, you 113

know Red Garland, McCoy [Tyner], whomever you choose, [Charlie] Parker of course…what makes Hebrew, Hebrew? There’s someone who speaks the way they do in Ashdod and someone who speaks the way they speak in Kfar Saba, but within that, father is father and mother is mother, there’s the language, and if that doesn’t exist, even a little bit…well…there’s no shortage of improvised music. (Friedman 2015)

Yuval Cohen’s take on jazz traditions emphasizes a strong sense of respect towards African-

American ownership of jazz and the need for all musicians who are blending new styles and influences into jazz to remember the origins of the art form:

Jazz is music that was created by African-Americans…without Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie there was no jazz. Period. Exclamation mark!...I think it boils down to respecting the tradition…if you call the music jazz, you have to remember and respect where the music came from. (Cohen 2015)

The rootedness in The Jazz Tradition as an African-American tradition valued among these Israeli musicians contrasts to some degree with several indigenized jazz movements emerging out of Europe and Scandinavia beginning with European free jazz and later, various iterations of the “Nordic Tone” as represented most ardently by the ECM sound. While some see this music and related discourse emerging out of Europe as open rebellion against the notion of The African-American Jazz Tradition, it may also be viewed as assertion of an alternative narrative of jazz authenticity. Neither grounded in swing and blues nor the rhythmic vocabulary of African-American jazz, such “European jazz” stresses the ethos of freedom for individuality and self-expression. At times, further, proponents of this alternative “European jazz” narrative situate it within a broader political rejection of American hegemony (Jost 2012).

In contrast, the Israeli embrace of the African-American Jazz Tradition can be linked to the powerful cultural influence by the United States on Israel and the strong ties between the two nation-states. Indeed, the growing appeal of jazz in Israel, particularly since the 1980s, is 114 connected to a broader trend of Americanization that has been unfolding in Israel since the

1960s, when the United States assumed the role of Israel’s central ally.51 Gilad Abro doesn’t mince words on this matter:

[Israeli involvement with jazz is] a product of it being an extension of America. It’s no secret that Israel wouldn’t exist without America. America provided Israel with support in each war. There isn’t one thing that isn’t viewed through the American lens, and the connection between the Jewish community in America and Israel, I think, is really an influence. […] like when you hear the news [or when] commercials proclaim “just like America” […]This [jazz], too, is a tradition that came from America. It really influenced Israelis and the people that brought it from there. So you really hear this influence in players here compared to other places. I think this is why Israelis get a lot of respect in New York. […] much more than the Europeans, they really appreciated the American tradition. They didn’t take it lightly. There’s something really respectful in this attitude to the music. (Abro 2015)

Second, this appreciation of jazz as first and foremost an American art form, can be tied in to a broader yearning towards the West, a desire to belong to an “elevated” cultural sphere.

This is also a way to escape, even metaphorically by way of listening and participating, from the confines of a troubled region and the isolated position that Israel holds within it (Regev and

Seroussi 2004; Brinner 2009).

Interestingly, it may be argued that Israeli jazz musicians adopted two common jazz narratives. They do position their music making as fundamentally grounded in African-

American music and culture, and their respect and appreciation for this notion of jazz tradition is a central pillar to their approach. At the same time, most simultaneously embrace the view that jazz is an art form that allows, and in fact demands, an effort to represent authentically who you are with your music. Thus, while they spent time learning the vocabulary of jazz and becoming comfortable playing in the American way, many feel compelled to incorporate and

51 For more on Americanization in Israel read Maoz Azaryahu (2000) “McIsrael? On the ‘Americanization of Israel’”; Tom Segev (2002) Elvis in Jerusalem: post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel. 115 integrate musical styles and influences from their background and childhood home as Israelis born in the Middle East. Thus, their approach toward blend does not come as a rejection of

American jazz styles, but rather from a place of seeking their own authentic and honest expression based on it.

Itamar Borochov, for example, feels that his involvement with jazz gave him the catalyst and freedom to find his own personal voice as a musician:

It’s a tradition that I greatly appreciate. It’s even important for me to represent it respectfully. Yet it’s not mine. It’s a tradition of the black American man. Now, I’m not a black man and I’m not American. I just really love this music. So OK, I have been living in the US for eight years. I play with African-Americans. I am involved in this culture and I have been embraced. But this is why I do give myself the freedom, and some even say the license, to make original music within the world of jazz. Because jazz is a really honest kind of music…I didn’t grow up in a church, I grew up in a synagogue…and my “Love Supreme” won’t sound like John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme.” It’ll sound like something that ties it to some chazzan (trans. cantor) in …there’s some way that you connect to yourself through the world of jazz. (Borochov 2015)

Pianist Omri Mor who lives in Israel (and who, unlike his colleagues, never lived for an extended period outside of it) tends to approach things from a perspective that’s similar to

Borochov, emphasizing the connection between place (makom) and creative expression, while also connecting his own inclination towards transcultural blend to broader trends in music worldwide:

I think that music has to be connected to the place that a person lives in. I don’t know if it’s a must, but it is inevitable…To a certain extent, people like Wynton Marsalis are right, there’s the jazz tradition, standards, a certain language. Its true, it has a place and I really respect it….But I approach jazz also as folklore. The folkloric element is really important. So if a person from Bulgaria brings some Bulgarian music and wraps it in a jazz envelope or does something interesting that includes improvisation, but he brings Bulgarian roots and rhythms, harmonies and this fragrance it could be really interesting. It’s all a question of how you do it. That’s the trend and you can say that that’s also my direction. I try to play what interests me; and at the moment I am more interested in playing an Andalusian theme and improvising on it 116

than to play Anthropology, even though I also really love playing on Anthropology. (Mor 2015)

For Ilan Salem the idea of performing music that blends Israeli, Jewish, and Middle-Eastern styles with jazz and other musical genres is directly connected to the basic reality of where he grew up, where he resides and where he comes from culturally, that is, the reality of his life.

Salem talks about jazz and explains why these various “Israeli” influences blend into his music and the music of his contemporaries:

We didn’t grow up there, we learned the music, we basically acquired it, we got turned on by it and we learned to play it. But at the end of the day, we live here. We grew up here and these influences are a part of us. (Salem 2015)

Commenting on his reverence for African-American jazz traditions, on the one hand, and his pursuit of transcultural blend through his original music on the other, Amit Friedman notes that he doesn’t feel as though every piece has to “swing” in the narrow sense or comply with the particular stylistic elements that characterized American jazz up until the 1960s. He also asserts that incorporating influences from other traditions is actually quite consistent with the jazz tradition itself:

Say you are building a set for a performance or an album. Let’s say the first song is going to be a ballad. So what if instead of a ballad it’ll be a Bolero, which is what happens on my album. So what’s the difference? Or, if instead of playing Latin the way that Dizzy played it, there’s a Latin that’s a bit different. Or if instead of playing 6/8 there’s a tune that’s more [North] African. Why is that different from what Dizzy and all those guys did? (Friedman 2015)

In referencing Dizzy Gillespie’s incorporation of Afro-Cuban elements into jazz in the 1950s, as well as “all those guys”, Friedman is alluding to the history of jazz as transcultural music from the start. This recalls my previous discussion of the complex history of jazz as a transcultural music, one in which the blend of new and disparate influences has been a constant. 117

Friedman raises a key point, for as we move to examine the threads of local influences that Israeli jazz musicians incorporate to create their particular individual transcultural blend, we should remember that jazz in itself is a music of blend. Similarly, as will be discussed, soon,

Israeli and Jewish musical styles, too, are styles formed as a result of blend and transformation through interaction and integration of diverse influences.

THE COMPLEX “LOCAL”

What influences us? The hummus and the za’atar and all these things…the music of the Bedouins, the deserts, the songs we grew up on, everything together, everything is a mix of the influence that comes from this place. We’re really close here to Arab music, its right next to us…another thing that I really think has an impact is the existence of the different edot here, each eda brings a certain style with it. The Yemenites, Moroccans and Romanians, etc…each eda has a music that it brings with it. (Salem 2015)

Speaking generally beyond the specific influences of one artist or the other, there seems to be broad range agreement among many Israeli jazz artists that the sounds of their childhood left a musical imprint:

The melody and harmony come from the history of what happened in Israel, and influential musicians, such as Matti Caspi, Shlomo Gronich, Sasha Argov, Ehud Banay, Margalit Tsa’anani. You know, everyone, including Zohar Argov […] We all came from this background. We all spoke this music. So, it’s a common language. (Ravitz 2014)

What Israelis think of as local influences extends far beyond Israeli music, and includes folk traditions from across the Arab world, Mediterranean, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and beyond. Several musicians cite the presence of Jewish ethnic groups that immigrated to Israel from vastly different locations in the world. Folks belonging to these edot, as they are referred to in Israel, brought with them the musical traditions from “home” and often preserved these traditions despite decades of suppression or lack of support from official Israeli channels. In 118 multiple interviews, Israeli jazz musicians referenced the influence of these musical traditions by way of familial and communal contact, or more broadly through the general soundscape of daily life in Israel. In addition, many artists connected the sounds of place, which include the distinctly local sounds of communities living in Israel-Palestine:

The thing here is, that as you know, we are exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, because there are so many people from different places. So nothing is entirely foreign to us. Its not foreign even for a total Ashkenazy [European], who only listens to those kinds of things. We hear the muezzin.52 We hear all sorts of Arab music. All kinds of stuff. (Mor 2015)

The following pages describe several shared threads of influence and some of the ways in which Israeli jazz artists weave these influences into their original compositions.

From Shirey Eretz Israel to Songwriters of the 1970s and Beyond

The first thread of influence that plays a significant role in the transcultural weaving that Israeli jazz artists pursue involves songs belonging to the world of Israeli popular music that is centrally connected to the tradition and legacy of Shirey Eretz Israel (Songs of the Land of Israel, SLI).53 SLI is a canonical set of popular songs composed primarily from the 1920s to the 1950s. Associated with and representative of Israel’s establishment and mainstream narratives of cultural identity (i.e., secular Ashkenazy/European segment of Israeli society), these songs dominated the Israeli airwaves until the 1970s. Indeed, they continue to hold a

52 According to Merriam-Webster dictionary the muezzin is “a Muslim crier who calls the hour of daily prayers”. 53 The Zionist enterprise of early Jewish settlers in Palestine was concerned with inventing and normalizing a new, “native” Jewish cultural identity centered around a new “Hebrewism”. This involved both a separateness from local Palestinians and rejection of the diasporic (galut) way of life. This invention of the new “Hebrew Culture” (Tarbut Ivrit) was particularly evident in three cultural spheres - the use of the Hebrew language in everyday life as well as in works of writers and poets belonging to the dor ba-aretz (generation in the land), and the invention of the Hebrew “folk song” by way of the SLI repertory. These songs served not only an artistic purpose but were viewed by political and cultural leaders at the time as key tools in the process of socialization for new immigrants and new generations of Israeli born sabras. (Regev and Seroussi 2004).

119 place of central importance in contemporary Israeli society, are sung frequently in school ceremonies and public gatherings, and have experienced various waves of resurgence since the

1960s (Brinner 2009). For example, the lyrical tradition of the SLI was extended by a second generation of Israeli songwriters that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Musicians such as

Chava Albertstein and Arik Einstein performed the SLI repertory in new arrangements that incorporated aspects of jazz, rock, bossa nova, and other global influences.

Stylistically, the SLI repertory is very eclectic. This eclecticism mirrors the diverse nature of the Jewish community before and after the establishment of the state. Ethnically varied, immigrants arrived from all over Europe and the Middle-East, settled in a variety of settings (urban, rural) and lived various lifestyles. As a result, they created music that drew on a variety of traditions connected both to their “old land” and new home. Nonetheless, as many of the composers of these songs came from Eastern and Central-European backgrounds, the musical language was directly connected to Russian ballads, Eastern-European rhythms,

Western Art Music (WAM), as well as Yiddish music (Regev and Seroussi 2004). As part of the broader effort to create a new Hebrewist culture connected to the place itself as well as to the “return” to the land of Israel, SLI composers sometimes appropriated local elements from the neighboring Arabs and newly immigrated Arab-Jews by utilizing melodic fragments that invoked Arab Makams (Eliram 2006).

In her extensive study of 170 songs that belong to the SLI (following an elaborate set of criteria), Talila Eliram reports on her discovery of a remarkable and noteworthy characteristic:

147 of the 170 songs are in minor mode.54 Eliram cites a study from the University of Essen in

Germany which details the ratio of songs in minor vis-a-vis those in major across six different folk traditions. The Israeli SLI stands alone as the one tradition that has an overwhelming

54 Only seventeen are in major, and the remaining six are not definitive one way or the other. 120 tendency towards the minor. That this has become a mark of Israeliness for at least some is suggested by the comments of music critic Hanoch Ron, who says of Israeli songwriter Shalom

Hanoch, “Hanoch was born into a clear Israeli style, into the broad, epic of the Russian sentimental song, into the aching minor, the melodic glow of emotion, that which envelops you in a kind of elated minor” (in Eliram, 2006:67 and transl. by the author).

Flutist Ilan Salem believes that the songs of the SLI have had a considerable influence on the musical palette of Israeli jazz musicians:

It’s a mix that really influences…the Israeli composers…Bracha Tzefira, David Zehavi, Yehuda Sharet, Mordechai Zeira, Nachum Nardi, Immanuel Zeira, Nachum Admon, you see? …you won’t believe what kind of material there’s in there…there’s no doubt that there is a very strong influence from these songs on Israeli jazz musicians. (Salem 2015)

The SLI composers that Salem cites above belong to the older generation of musicians who wrote music in the pre-state days of the 1920s and 1930s. Other jazz performers cite composers that contributed canonic songs in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, pianist Anat Fort spoke of her love of Sasha Argov and . Gilad Abro recounted his visits with bassist

Avishai Cohen, who according to Abro is similarly influenced by Argov specifically and the

SLI more generally:

He was really involved with the old Shirey Eretz Israel (SLI). Very much so. He has lots of collections and he knew it by ear, through recordings…when I would come over I would sometimes witness his process with this material, and it was incredible to see it. “Abro, come see what a beautiful song this is”, and he would sing it to me with all the words, on the piano, like some Sasha Argov song from a recording that you can’t even find. “dig this Abro, and here look, I’ve added a few chords” and then plays these chords that you can scarcely believe are real because they are so gorgeous. (Abro 2015)

Pianist Shai Maestro, who performed for several years with Avishai Cohen compares the deep knowledge that he and his Israeli peers have of the SLI songs with the way in which some

American jazz pianists study standards originating from Broadway musicals: 121

Our DNA, the DNA of all the things we mentioned, is from Arik Einstein, Shlomo Gronich, , certain harmonic and rhythmic languages. A certain feeling, that you want to impart when you write a song in the spirit that touches the world of Arik Einstein …Its like all the jamaa here [in NY] that play,55 there are some really heavy guys that play jazz, standards, they go to libraries and they check the Broadway scores. Brad [Mehldau] does it, does it…really heavy guys that sit down and play a standard…and its like a crazy world of oboes and flutes…and you hear the guys approach it, you hear the history behind it, even if they just hint at it slightly, but it comes from a place that’s real, from the source. And Avishai [Cohen] brings “Lo Bayom ve’lo Balaylah” or “Sahki, Sahki” or other songs we did…and I know [Mordechai] Zeira man. So you play with a different depth compared to someone who doesn’t know it and who didn’t grow up on it and doesn’t understand it. (Maestro 2014)

Many of the musicians I interviewed emphasized the influence of a new generation of singer/songwriters that emerged in the 1970s and whose songs incorporated both the SLI tradition and as well as “cosmopolitan” styles such as rock, jazz, bossa nova and samba. These influential artists include Matti Caspi, Yoni Rechter, Shlomo Gronich, Shem-Tov Levy and groups like , and their music was widely adored for its ability to remind listeners of home.

The list of players who cited Caspi, Rechter, et al. as influences is too long to include here, but a few examples will suffice to convey their pronounced impact on the current generation of Israeli jazz musicians. Saxophonist Eli Degibri cites American jazz saxophonists

Sonny Stitt, Charlie Parker and Cannonbal Adderley as his “holy trinity” but also lists his

Israeli influences as follows:

I am influenced more from the western side of Israeli music, most definitely I am influenced by Yoni Rechter and Matti Caspi. I am also influenced by Chava Albertstein and the arrangements of Menachem Wisenberg, from this romanticism. (Degibri 2015)

55 Jamaa: Arabic slang for guys. 122

In fact, Degibri recounts how when he was young he had to choose between playing at the

Village Vanguard for the first time or appearing for a CD Release concert in Israel with Yoni

Rechter:

I was living in NY and pianist heard me play and asked me to join him for a week long stint at the Vanguard, which was a great opportunity obviously as I had not played there yet. At the same time, the album with Rechter was coming out and he [Rechter] was doing a CD release concert [in Israel] and he invited me to come sing this song with him. It turned out to be on the exact same dates as the concerts at the Vanguard. In the end, I chose to go sing the song with Yoni Rechter…from that point on I haven’t play with Eric Reed because he was so angry with me, but thankfully I played the Vanguard many times with Al Foster. But look at this decision, I don’t know. Brave, stupid…whatever you want to call it, an emotional decision. (ibid)

Similarly, Shai Maestro highlights the influence of singer/songwriters such as Arik Einstein,

Chava Albertstein, Yoni Rechter, Shlomo Gronich and particularly Matti Caspi:

Arik Einstein and the rest; it’s all there and it all comes out in the way that it does. I can’t point it out and tell you in what way I am Israeli. So I can’t pinpoint it in my recent compositions. But in my earlier compositions I can tell you, yes, it’s like all Matti Caspi. I guess as I become more mature it becomes more and more blurred, and it just becomes music. But it’s there, you know, everything is there. (Maestro 2014)

Drummer Amir Bresler, who has toured extensively with Avishai Cohen (bass) and pianist

Omer Klein, shares the same sentiment:

To this day, I can listen to Kaveret all the time. Matti Caspi, Yoni Rechter, too, but there are others like The Dudaim, Gesher Hayarkon Trio, and Sasha Argov. These are the ones I don’t get tired of listening to. (Bresler 2015)

Indeed, songs belonging to the SLI and songwriters of the 1970s left a big impact on subsequent generations of Israeli jazz musicians.

This influence manifests in a number of ways, but perhaps most singularly in the strong sense of melody and particular harmonic language used by many Israeli jazzers.

I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but because everyone probably heard and Shem Tov-Levy on the radio. There’s something in these 123

Russian melodies…there’s something in the aesthetic, in the harmonic moves. (Friedman 2015)

Time after time, the musicians I spoke with, described the paramount importance of and

reverence they feel for the song itself, whether they were creating original music or interpreting

songs belonging to the SLI or other repertories. Flutist Hadar Noiberg expresses the centrality

of the melody to her musical life in the following way:

Its just what moves me the most, a really strong melody, that’s what touches me the most. A melody that is really strong and good, and beautiful harmony that accompanies it or a line that accompanies it. At the end of the day I probably simply do what moves me the most. (Noiberg 2015)

Eli Degibri articulates the same sentiment, but in even stronger terms, “My god is the melody,

always. That’s the thing, and every piece that I’ll write, always what needs to be elevated is the

melody because in my soul I’m a romantic” (Degibri 2015). Saxophonist Jonathan Greenstein

expands on this line of thinking:

I think that a lot of Israeli jazz musicians really write songs, and if my non- Israeli friends will forgive me, much prettier songs. It’s as though there is great importance to a beautiful song with Israeli guys. The songs in jazz began as Broadway songs, but many of them were just an automatic springboard to solos and today that’s even exacerbated.[…] We [Israelis] somehow have less of that… somehow we come from a tradition of great song writers. (Greenstein 2015)

In addition to highlighting the importance of a strong melody, the musicians I interviewed also

outlined how their harmonic sense is rooted in the SLI, and the popular music of the

songwriters of the 1970s and 1980s:

I feel that I deal with melody first and foremost …and my melody is really influenced, sometimes, by Hebrew melody, in its simplicity, or in the coherence of a line that I try; and also in its basic harmony that can also be very Israeli in my eyes. (Cohen 2015)

When I asked Cohen to elaborate on what he thinks most characterizes this “Israeli” harmony,

he found it challenging to define it in purely musical terms: 124

It’s usually diatonic, it usually seems really natural. It won’t be much of a surprise [and] it will transmit something familiar to you. It’s a bit problematic to say this because everything that I just said could also work on the harmony of a standard, for which one could also say it seems natural. There is something really accessible and simple in it…I haven’t defined anything…I don’t really know what Israeli harmony is. (Cohen 2015)

Bassist Gilad Abro also believes that one distinct characteristic of the Israeli jazz sound is the prevalent use of harmonic progressions that are tied in to the harmonic language of the SLI:

The chords are often based on songs by composers like Sasha Argov, on the atmosphere he created in his writing and his use of chords. For example: i – V – VI – III – iv – V/V7 – V. That’s an example of a progression in minor. Many jazzists connect with these chords and worked with Musiqa Eretz Yisraelit (SLI). Not necessarily the stuff you hear on the radio but from the past […] it had a kind of innocence to which people found a connection through the harmony. (Abro 2015)

Like Cohen and Abro the artists I interviewed often alluded to a shared harmonic language as a distinct characteristic of the Israeliness of the music created by many Israeli jazz musicians. Yet, when asked to provide a specific description of what constitutes the “Israeli” harmonic language it was difficult for them to pinpoint precisely what were its most distinct musical characteristics. Nonetheless, almost all agreed that they could hear it and fundamentally traced it to the continuum of Israeli popular music that starts with Russian songs, western European classical music, continues through the songs of the SLI, further continues with the music of singer/songwriters such as Yoni Rechter, Matti Caspi, and Shalom

Hanoch and finally culminates with the influence of the first and prominent generation of

Israeli jazz musicians such as Avishai Cohen, Omer Avital and the influential group Third

World Love.

One general characteristic that many of my interlocotours seem to agree on relates to the high percentage of compositions by Israeli jazz musicians written in minor keys. Recall

Talila Eliram’s finding about the SLI songs and their exceptional tendency towards minor. 125

According to noted Israeli critic, producer and festival director Barak Weiss the vast majority of the pieces composed by Israeli jazz musicians that evoke this so called Israeli sound reside in a minor harmonic realm.

There is a much more prevalent use of minor scales. The Great American Songbook is mostly in major, and these minor scales [that are used by Israeli jazz musicians] give the music that feeling of prayer, which can be like a piyyut or klezmer, and the old Hebrew, Russian songs [ed. referring to SLI] of Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana Ve’hatova (good old Land of Israel) which has lots and lots of minor in it. I think this is unique. (Weiss 2017)

Weiss makes the point that this language diverges substantially from the harmonic language of the Great American Songbook, which often resides in major. Flutist Hadar Noiberg’s reflections similarly focus on possible differences between the harmonic language of Israeli jazz musicians’ compositions and that of the Great American Songbook and conventional modern jazz compositions by American peers:

When you are born in Israel and you want to learn to play jazz, you really do immerse yourself in that tradition, but you can’t ignore what’s around you all the time - what’s on the radio or what’s around you at home…I think that there’s something in the Israeli songs, you know theow minor and major triads, which is something that I see in my music and in the music of many other Israeli jazz artists. There is something simpler in the harmony, but really beautiful; not the flat ♭9,♭13 (which is also beautiful) but something else. So I feel we bring - if I can use the term in a very general way - some sort of Israeli tradition along with the desire to be a jazz player. (Noiberg 2015)

Noiberg speaks in general terms, but does identify one characteristic, the use of triads, as a marker of difference compared to the seventh chords and extensions so typical of conventional jazz harmonic language. Similarly, other Israeli artists have pointed to the extensive use of triads instead of seventh chords and the absence of extensions as a marker of the Israeli jazz sound that is directly connected to the SLI song tradition and the music of the songwriters of the 1970s: 126

I have had the chance to work with pianists who are less connected to this music (ed: SLI). Yes, sometimes you need to tell them to simplify things. So you might have to tell the pianist: “No, it’s not in there (extensions), it’s just a triad”. (Friedman 2015)

The use of triads and specific inversions, coupled with a unison bass line between the left hand of the piano and the bass is quite prevalent among Israeli jazz musicians. Not only do triads dominate the harmonic landscape, but the composer often demands the pianist to play the triads in a precise inversion and the bass player to play a specific line. Indeed, Israeli jazz performance practice is often characterized by prescribed treatment of the compositions with a fixed piano and bass part.

Again, this stands in contrast with more conventional jazz performance practice and is, rather, more typical of pop or classical music.56 Saxophonist Amit Friedman describes how he sometimes approaches directing pianists in his band about performing his own compositions:

Play the way it’s written. […] I don’t hold my piano playing in high regard, but what can you do, sometimes you play a chord in a dumb inversion…but that’s the way it should sound. (Friedman 2015)

An examination of the Head In for Amit Friedman’s composition “The Archeologist”

(Friedman 2012) demonstrates well the various points discussed above:

56 It should be noted that many contemporary jazz compositions are similarly characterized by precisely written bass lines, and even at times include fixed piano voicings. The point is not to suggest that Israeli artists are doing something that isn’t done at all by non-Israelis but rather to highlight a stylistic characteristic that seems to be shared and is pervasive among this generation of Israeli artists. 127

128

129

Figure 4.1 Head In from “The Archeologist” by Amit Friedman

Friedman’s piece is an excellent example of the compositional specificity that Israeli jazz musicians often employ in their original compositions. The entire Head In is through composed. The piece opens with the piano solo playing the “A” section as written, and the piano introduces the primary melodic “hook” of the tune. Its qualities are very song like, while, at the same time, the changing meters add rhythmic complexity. At “B”, the soprano saxophone carries the melody, while the left hand of the piano is doubled by both double bass and oud to create a contrapuntal texture. As noted above, this piano/bass unison playing is a favored texture among Israeli jazz musicians. This orchestration continues throughout the Head In.

The harmonic language is emblematic of the characteristics identified so far. The song is in minor, utilizing triadic harmony, mostly diatonic with occasional secondary dominants. 130

Throughout the entire Head In, Friedman uses inversions and voice leading extensively in a manner that is indebted to WAM and the SLI canon.

Ultimately, the musicians I spoke to seemed to believe that much of the music they and their peers create is imbued with an ephemeral, hard to define “spirit” (helech ruach) that comes from the songwriting tradition of the SLI and the songwriters of the 1970s. Yuval Cohen compares it to understanding the Blues:

Its like, what’s the blues? There’s the changes, there’s the blue note, but at the end of the day it’s also a feeling…there’s this line that Billy Taylor says about the blues. He says - “blues is in so many things, it’s there even without you asking for it, it’s in the spirit”. Maybe this is also true for Hebrew music. In some sense, its not a state of mind, it’s a state of being. (Cohen 2015)

The reverence for melody, the harmonic language at play, and the particular lyrical sonorities that permeate the music of many Israeli jazz musicians can, I would argue, be traced directly to the influence of the SLI and songwriters of the 1970s and 1980s. This melodic and harmonic sense is so pronounced that several pieces by multiple artists could easily be classified as

“Songs Without Words” that sound very much like instrumental offspring of the Israeli songwriting tradition.

Songs Without Words

As detailed above, the pervasive influence of the SLI and the songs of the 1970s touches the music making activities of many Israeli jazz musicians active in the past twenty years in a variety of ways. In some instances, the influence is subtle, perhaps even barely perceivable. In other cases it is clearly evident in the melody, harmony, or texture of a song.

We can identify a type of composition that provides the most pronounced demonstration of this lyrical tradition’s influence within the broader repertoire of original compositions created by this generation of musicians. I propose viewing these compositions as the jazz equivalents to 131 the WAM Romantic period “Songs Without Words” genre type.57 They are melodically, harmonically, texturally and structurally rooted in the SLI tradition and the songs of the 1970s.

Furthermore, though the pieces by Israeli jazz musicians are instrumental, they usually behave very much like popular music songs from the SLI and Israeli songwriting traditions. Among their characteristics are: arpeggios (rather than blocked chords) in the piano, triadic harmony that utilizes voice leading and inversions, bass and piano left hand doubling, pronounced melody, straight eighths rhythmic language, limited soloing if any, and that particular atmosphere—helech ruach.

On several occasions, my interlocutors highlighted their decision to limit soloing in order to highlight an underlying approach that privileges “the song”. Here is flutist Hadar

Noiberg talking about her set list:

When I hear a song, even an instrumental one, I really love that I can remember its melody, and I can really feel as though it has words. […] This is something that’s really important to me. […] It’s a kind of combination of miniatures that don’t have any solos on them [like] a small piece for trio with pieces that are more open and jazzy. (Noiberg 2015)

Guitarist Gilad Hekselman goes even further in talking about his compositions:

It’s no secret that much of my music is songs without words, or in some cases with words. I think that to jazz it up, that is, to superimpose improvisations on it sometimes neuters it. There’s something really beautiful in a song that is simple, and it’s just a song. (Hekselman 2015)

We can find numerous examples of pieces that can be described as “Songs Without Words” within bassist Avishai Cohen’s quite prolific output. One such example is his piece “Elli” from his 2006 album Continuo. Performed by pianist , Cohen on bass and Mark Giuliana on drums, the piece prominently features many of the characteristics discussed above. Most

57 According to Grove Music Online “Songs Without Words” are short lyrical pieces. Felix Mendelssohn coined the German term and used it extensively in his piano music. In the WAM tradition the term usually refers to piano music (Brown and Hamilton n.d.).

132 notably, the piece features right hand arpeggios in the piano part throughout, coupled with the left hand root motion that is doubled by the bass. The piano/bass doubling is a signature characteristic of much of Cohen’s original music. As with most Israeli jazz songs (and SLI), it is in minor and the harmony is primarily triadic and diatonic. Here is an excerpt from “Elli”

(Cohen 2012):

Figure 4.2 Excerpt from Head In of “Elli” by Avishai Cohen

Cohen’s music, as noted, has had a tremendous influence on younger Israeli jazz musicians

(Friedman included) and thus his use of SLI harmonic characteristic reinforces the influence of these traits. Taking a closer look at the “D” section of Amit Friedman’s “The Archaelogist” reveals a similar distinct “Songs Without Words” texture: 133

Figure 4.3 D Section from Head In of the “Archeologist” by Amit Friedman

Looking at the score we notice exclusively triadic harmony, arpeggios in the piano part, and a lyrical melody which is first carried by the soprano saxophone (mm. 45-52) and then by the piano (mm. 53-60). The harmonic progression for the eight bar phrase moves as follows: Gm -

Gm - Dm/F – Dm/F – Esus – E – Asus – A. The song is in the key of D minor, and the phrase begins on the minor iv, moving to a first inversion i chord. Then the last four bars behave like a

WAM cadence that utilizes standard suspensions (4-3), first on the V/V (E triad) and then with the V chord.

A key observation regarding both the excerpt from Cohen’s “Elli” and the Friedman excerpt above is the significance of the minor iv chord. My analysis of numerous SLI songs reveals that the prevalent use and significance of the minor iv chord is one of the distinguishing 134 harmonic features of the SLI tradition. The iv chord holds an important place in and of itself and is often the first move away from the tonic in many SLI songs. Additionally many SLI songs modulate to or tonicize the relative major. The iv chord serves as a pivot chord, and behaves as the ii in a ii-V progression that moves to the relative major key. This move to the relative major occurs in a very high percentage of the SLI songs I analyzed and it is the primary harmonic destination in terms of tonicization. The examples above are emblematic of the prevalent use of the minor iv chord by Israeli jazz musicians’ compositions and thus a concrete example of the influence of the SLI.

Thus far our exploration of the local threads of influence has focused on the influence of the SLI and the music of popular songwriters starting in the 1970s. These influences manifest primarily in the harmonic language, the privileging of the melody or the “song” and a kind of ephemeral “spirit” (helech ruach). The next local thread takes us in a very different direction, equally omnipresent in the same Israeli context, and similarly very much a part of this generations’ musical consciousness.

Musiqa Mizrahit, Arab Classical Music, and Andalusian Music

A second umbrella of musical styles that significantly influences the original compositions of Israeli jazz musicians is music belonging to and connected to the Arab world and the Maghreb. These varied genres, include the Israeli musiqa mizrahit (a type of popular music), Arab Classical Music, and Andalusian music from Algeria and Morocco. These influences manifest in two primary ways: first, the wide-ranging use of grooves that are derived from various Middle-Eastern and North African sources; second, the presence of a melodic language that clearly references these sources through its styling and ornamentation. 135

Translated literally to mean Eastern music, musiqa mizrahit refers to an Israeli popular music genre that emerged in the 1970s, primarily out of the musical practices of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries, or what in Israel is sometimes referred to as ‘edot ha-mizrah (the Eastern communities).58 The genre incorporates an array of musical influences originating from various corners of the Near East, North Africa, and the

Mediterranean, including most notably Yemenite, Greek, Moroccan, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish and Persian influences into popular song forms and styling. The genre’s ascent from an underground, marginalized “other” in the 1970s to a prominent fixture in the Israeli popular music landscape (from the late 1990s to the present) parallels the broader cultural awakening of

Mizrahim [lit. Easterners] as part of the cultural and political challenge to the hegemonic

Ashkenazy [European] variant as defining of Israeliness.59

Numerous Israeli jazz artists noted in their interviews that they love songs by the early pioneers of musiqa mizrahit, for example singers like Zohar Argov, Haim Moshe and groups such as Tsliley Hakerem. Guitarist and oudist Amos Hoffman reflects this well:

I have to say that the whole thing of musiqa mizrahit [that] I call Israeli music - like Aharon Amram, Zehava Alani, Zohar Argov - you have things in there that I grew up on that I really love. And in that music you can hear Yemenite and Kurdish influences, lots of Kurdish influences. (Hoffman 2014)

When driving from Toronto to Montreal with Hoffman during a 2016 tour we were doing together, I was amazed when he began singing from memory along with numerous songs from an album of Zohar Argov classics. Hoffman included the particular inflections and ornamentations (silsulim), and Argov’s famous nasaly tone. Hoffman also expertly displays in

58 As Regev and Seroussi note, Mizrahim (“Eastern” Jews) “were relegated by the dominant Western perspective to an ‘ethnic’ component of Israeli Jewish culture and typically occupy the less privileged socioeconomic position” (2004:191). 59 For more on musiqa mizrahit and its role as an agent for social change see Regev and Seroussi 2004; Nocke 2006; Saada-Ophir 2006; Horowitz 2010. 136 performance electric guitar stylings, pioneered by musiqa mizrahit guitarists such as Aris San and Moshe Ben Mush that imitate the Greek bouzuki.

Pianist Omer Klein, like Hoffman, has listened to a great deal of musiqa mizrahit, though he notes that he didn’t care much for it when he was growing up; that is until the songs of Zohar Argov drew him into appreciating this music when he was approximately eighteen:

It wasn’t part of my life when I was growing up, but thinking that was probably a mistake because apparently this Arab and North African rhythmic beat penetrated and somehow became a part of my blood cycle, just like the sun, the temperatures and the weather. Apparently it also harped on a string in me because after all half of my family are North Africans. After all, my mother’s parents immigrated to Israel from Tunisia and Libya. […] though I didn’t absorb this culture from them, something must have been there, because somehow around the age of eighteen, nineteen, I started discovering deeper things […] things that touched me not as though I am discovering something completely new like Schoenberg or Radiohead, but as though I am discovering something new that was already familiar. (Klein 2017)

In addition to Argov, Klein cites of the music of and earlier songs by singer

Haim Moshe as favorites. In particular, he recounts how illuminating it was to transcribe

“Ahavat Chayai” [trans. “The Love of My Life”] by Haim Moshe:

I remember the process of transcribing this song with all of the details of the melody and to learn it, and I also played it with Omer Avital. I remember it as a formative moment, when all of a sudden I saw that it was like when I lift a solo by Herbie Hancock; it changes me and enriches me as a pianist […] lifting this [music] does the same. (Klein 2017)

Similarly, Bassist Omer Avital emphasized his great affinity for the music of Zohar

Argov and its influence on his own musicmaking:

From my perspective Zohar Argov is simply a genius, of the highest echelons of shaping culture…his songs are the songs of soccer, the mix of Spanish, little bit of Arabic music, Tunisian music, little bit Ashkenazy. I think it’s the most Israeli music there is, I don’t think there’s better Israeli music…I transcribed his songs and went really deep into it, into the intricacies because he really moved me, also because I am Yemenite, and I grew up on him as a child, and there’s something really direct from my own cultural lineage in it. (Avital 2017) 137

Avital continues by underscoring the direct influence Argov’s music had on him while he was recording and producing his album New Song (2014):

I’ll tell you a secret, during the recording of New Song I was literally obsessed with Zohar Argov…I would listen between [recording] sessions, I would listen to him, to the haflot with the guitar,60 and I really wanted to bring it to “Hafla” and “New Middle East”,61 I wanted to bring this clean vibe of the drums, this clean groove, and these direct Mizrahi melodies. You know, it really spoke to me specifically on this album, that entire time I would immerse myself in it, also emotionally, feel it, feel the pride of musiqa mizrahit…it was my spiritual foundation you know on the inside of the soul when I was doing this record. (Avital 2017)

In addition to the pronounced influence of musiqa mizrahit, Israeli jazz musicians also cited an array of other musical genres and styles from the Arab world as direct influences. By no means a comprehensive or definite list, these might include: 1) Arab Classical music, such as music by Egyptian icons Oum Kulthum, Muhamed Abdel Wahab, Farid El Atrash or Iraqi

Jewish musicians such as Avraham Salman; 2) exposure through familial and congregational upbringing to secular and liturgical music belonging to different congregations of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa; 3) Andalusian music as transmitted by

Algerian or Moroccan Jewish immigrants such as oudist Nino Bitton, pianist Maurice El-

Medioni, oudist Samy El Maghribi or paytanim such as Rabbi Haim Louk;62 4) music from folk traditions that do not necessarily have a Jewish connection, such as Bedouin Haliji music,

Sudanese folk music, or Moroccon Gnawa.

Drummer Ziv Ravitz recounted how, after starting to work as the drummer for Omer

Avital’s band and the Omer Klein trio, he immersed himself, by way of intense listening, in a myriad of styles of what he calls Arab music. Though he recalls listening to some of this music

60 Hafla (s), Haflot (pl) are “celebrations consisting of food and entertainment on various occasions” (Regev Seroussi 2004). Hafla is one of many Arabic words that is used as slang in Hebrew. 61 Two of Avital’s original composition from the 2014 album. 62 Paytan (s), paytanim (pl) translates into singer or reciter of piyyutim. 138 growing up, for example, while visiting his grandmother’s house (his mother’s side of the family immigrated to Israel from Egypt), it was his collaboration with Avital and Klein, two musicians who actively integrated elements of middle-eastern and Arab music into their original music, that prompted his focused study of these styles:

They [ed. Avital & Klein] gave me piles and piles of Arab music. These are things I listened to at home, at my grandmother’s, but to understand and to translate the rhythms, I had to study a lot by listening online, and I sat with people like percussionist Itamar Doari […] I listened to Oum Khultum which is classical, and to all sorts of contemporary people, like Taksim Trio from Turkey. Wow, I can’t remember names, but my iPod is full because of Omer [Avital]. Full of music, even random, like a singer from Morocco that only one hundred people in the world know. One of them is Omer, because he’s really deep into it. He knows it and so he exposed me to it. (Ravitz 2014)

Indeed, several musicians cited Avital’s comprehensive knowledge and intense study of Arab classical music, Andalusian music, and other North African styles such as Moroccan Gnawa.

Speaking about Avital, Omer Klein notes:

He underwent a true process of academic study of this subject: He learned to play the oud, he studied makamat, he can play on makam and he has behind him hundreds of hours of listening to Arab and North African music. (Klein 2017)

Much like Ravitz, Klein also credits Avital for exposing him to this vast world of music that grew to influence his work. The same holds true for trumpeter Itamar Borochov who underscores not only Avital’s mentorship and professional support, but also the way in which he “hipped him” to new musical styles such as Andalusian music:

He brought me to play with Rabbi Haim Louk in Israel and through that I learned a ton of Andalusian music […] we would always be listening to music, and he would always tell me “check this out, check this out”. (Borochov 2015)

Another important dimension involves direct exposure through family, congregation, and one’s surrounding community to the musical traditions that Jews brought with them to 139

Israel from their old homes across the Middle East and North Africa. Omer Klein recalls one such experience that revealed his affinity and connection to this particular world of sounds:

I remember one formative experience in the Tripolitean synagogue near my parents’ house in Netanya,63 at my youngest brother’s Bar Mitzvah…I was twenty one. All of a sudden I heard them sing melodies that really, really touched me during his Bar Mitzvah portion. I came home and I played them from memory, and till this day I sometimes remember them and play them…and it opened in me a window that hasn’t closed since. (Klein 2017)

Itamar Borochov also thinks that the time he spent as a child in various Sephardic synagogues during some Sabbaths and holidays, as well as the Bukharian songs his father sang at home left an imprint that would resurface in his adulthood when he became interested in incorporating

Maqamat into his trumpet playing:

When I started dealing with this in a musical sense, say in the last five years, it just really penetrates the soul. And it was also really immediate for me. When I started playing makamat on trumpet, it was something that I never really had to work on very much. I mean, there was the year or two of figuring out technically how I do it on the trumpet. I became more and more interested. I listened and studied makam more – it was a kind of study period. I would go and sit with Victor Uda, a Kanun player, when I was visiting in Israel or I would sit with Baber El Maghribi in Jaffa…I don’t know how to explain it to you. It was like totally automatic. It was really easy for me to learn this music and perform it. Jazz is a music that I love and have been listening to my whole life, and I’ve worked really hard to learn how to play its language. Yet, somehow, makamat came to me totally naturally. Like I didn’t have to exert myself to do it, and I think it’s somehow related [ed: to early exposure as a child]. (Borochov 2015)

Other artists have been particularly drawn to the rich and varied musical styles emerging out of the Maghreb. The past two decades in Israel have seen a revitalization of the Andalusian music tradition, with several older master musicians who had immigrated to Israel from North Africa decades prior finally receiving much deserved (and belated) recognition for their artistry.64 For

63 Synagogue for Israeli Jewish community of immigrants originally from Tripoli, Libya. 64 Jewish musicians were prominent carriers and contributors to the development of the Andalusian musical traditions in Algeria and Morocco. Many of these musicians arrived as immigrants in the newly formed state of Israel in the 1950s. In their new country, which was dominated by Ashkenazy culture, many of 140 example, jazz pianist Omri Mor’s original music and improvisations demonstrate the active integration of Andalusian music. Mor mentored for many years under the guidance of

Andalusian music oudist Nino Bitton. Here he recounts how he got into this music in the first place:

I don’t have a North African background or anything like that. But, when I was about fourteen years old, I met an oud player named Nino Bitton in Jerusalem and somehow I got sucked into this music. In the beginning there was this project that bassist Omer Avital played with Nino, and I simply started coming to rehearsals. I became enchanted with Nino’s playing, with his qualities as a musician, and with the sound of this music that I didn’t know. After a few years I found myself playing a lot of this repertoire. (Mor 2015)

It is not possible, nor even desirable, to identify and point to every possible way in which these influences have affected the music made by Israeli jazz musicians. Nonetheless, it is useful to highlight two particularly obvious features that reflect the impact these sources have had on the Israeli jazz soundscape. The first dimension has to do with the rhythmic vocabulary that is being incorporated and the second involves the type of melodic writing that permeates the music.

Rhythmic Vocabulary/Grooves

As with every aspect of the original music created by this generation of Israeli jazz musicians, the use of grooves and rhythmic vocabulary, usually derived from different Middle-

Eastern and North African sources, is incredibly varied and highly personal. Though my interlocutors did identify a few grooves that were commonplace and shared by a wide swath of

these professional musicians (who in some cases were famous stars in their previous homes) had to give up their musical careers, and lived in relative anonymity and poverty. For more on the Jewish musicians’ involvement in the Andalusian musical traditions read the volume edited by Ruth Frances Davis titled Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas (2015).

141 players in this jazz scene, these generalizations by no means cover the entire gamut of grooves and rhythms that Israeli jazz artists incorporate into their music making.

The malfouf, a groove that has many variations in the Arab world, was recognized by several interlocutors as a kind of quintessential Israeli jazz groove. Some referred to it as

“groove falafel”. Here is the notated malfouf rhythm in its simplest form:

Figure 4.4 Malfouf rhythm

Ziv Ravitz, relates that there is a unique Israeli way of playing the malfouf that is discernable, though hard to describe or define:

There’s some sort of breath inside the groove. Its not a drum machine…every culture that plays this groove plays it with a different breadth…and the Israeli groove has a very, very specific breath that’s hard to explain in technical terms. While it is really easy to show it, even after you show it, it’s not necessarily easy to play it, and that’s why a lot of Israeli players are attracted to play with other Israelis. (Ravitz 2014)

There are numerous excellent examples of Israeli jazz musicians utilizing the malfouf. Indeed, it is featured prominently in many songs by the group Third World Love, bassist Omer Avital, pianist Omer Klein and many other artists.

Another influence from North African and Arab music is the prevalence of 6/8 grooves.

As bassist Gilad Abro put it, Israeli jazz musicians play 6/8 in various ways according to the specific influence from various traditions (i.e. Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria or

Turkey):

There’s more of an Arab association to the grooves…you can say the groove belongs there, and you have drummers that play even more exaggerated in that direction…you certainly hear this type of 6/8 in the playing of many guys. (Abro 2015)

142

Odd meters are also common and, again, approached with subdivisions that are typical of Arab and Turkish music. For example, the 7/8 dasa groove, which subdivides into 3+4, is used in a number of songs. Or similarly, Amos Hoffman incorporates a 15/8 groove on his composition “Hamsa” from the album Evolution (2008), as a variation on a Moroccan groove that typically occurs in 12/8.

Though we can point to specific sonic markers, such as the malfouf, dasa or 6/8 grooves, the rhythmic influence of music from the Arab world and the Maghreb comes across most clearly through the festivity that the music imbues. When describing the way in which

Israeli jazz musicians play middle-eastern grooves, drummer Amir Bresler refers quite directly to their festive quality with the Hebrew word for celebration, hagiga. Other Israeli musicians speaking on the same topic use the Arabic word for party hafla: “When there is this atmosphere of hafla, there is this feeling of a party… and there is something in it that really brings hearts together, and it has the association of family” (Abro 2015).

A festive feeling evoked in the music is also a direct link between Israeli jazz and musiqa mizrahit, which emerged from performances by Mizrahi Jews at their haflot and subsequent circulation of cassette tape recordings of these parties. Regev and Seroussi report that some of the ways in which musiqa mizrahit has been described in conversation reveal its festive qualities: “Native terms used to describe the music…kef (fun); toseset (effervescent); malhiva (exciting); meshaga’at (drives one crazy); mefotzetzet (explosive)” (2004:208). Not surprisingly, several Israeli jazz artists invoke the idea of festive celebration directly with titles given to their original compositions. Hadar Noiberg features a song named “Hafla” on her 2010 album Journey Back Home while Omer Avital’s 2014 album New Song opens with a different 143 song bearing the exact same name. Uri Gurvich has a piece titled “The Hagiga Suite” on his

2013 record BabEl while Alon Farber’s ensemble is called “The Hagiga Sextet”.

Several musicians not only highlighted the festive dimension of the music, but also connected it directly to the Israeli temperament.65 Further, they explain that this warmth in the music differentiates it from much of the jazz that they have come across in NY and Europe:

I think that its related to the Israeli temperament, which I, of course, have much criticism of...but let’s just say…I have a hard time connecting with European jazz, because it doesn’t have the warmth, and sometimes [this is true] in NYC too. You hear music and its just, you feel that its really really cold. I think that the key word is heat, there’s warmth in the music. (Friedman 2015)

Gilad Abro agrees:

It’s why you often see Israeli guys on stage look into each other’s eyes a lot, and smile at one another. In NYC, you may see this looking into the eyes a little bit, but it’s a little bit cold and alienating, you know. And that also has to do with the music. (Abro 2015)

Amir Bresler speaks of the same warmth and speculates that it is the place itself, with its climate, topography, food, and people that drives the music in this direction:

I think there’s something about the Israeli desert-ness that has made the jazz here a little more ballsy…you know, hummus and there are all these hangs in bars where people are actually dancing…so suddenly you have to play something danceable, so you begin to blend it. I don’t know, I just think that something in the Middle-East really influences Israeli jazz, its edginess…that there’s Moroccans and Yemenites here…they come from certain cultures, or even if their parents were born here (ed. in Israel) it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a history or something that comes with them. (Bresler 2015)

During my fieldwork in Israel I attended a CD release concert by saxophonist Yonatan

Cohen. To close the concert, the ensemble performed a Cohen original titled “Waterfall”. The

Head In had several contrasting sections, including one passage that had an overt and obvious use of the malfouf rhythm, which is often called the “falafel groove.” In the Head Out, after an

65 The implication is that the warm temperament is tied in to Israel’s locus in the Middle-East. 144 exciting drum solo by Daniel Dor, the falafel groove reappeared and extended into a prolonged

Coda. Bassist Gilad Abro started dancing, bouncing up and down, his aura emitting unbridled joy. It evoked for me the kind of celebratory dancing you might see at a Chassidic wedding or a hafla. It immediately translated in my mind to Laasot (Let’s make it joyous).

Spontaneously, the audience clapping for the drum solo transformed into a rhythmic clapping that synchronized with the groove the band was playing. All of a sudden – the joy, the happiness, became spontaneously participatory in a way that today’s jazz concerts rarely do.

This rhythmic clapping also represents the enthusiasm that exists in Israeli concerts.

The joy and warmth emanating from the groove and the response it elicits from the audience, evokes a dimension of Israeliness that may not be easy to capture with technical descriptions of time signatures or melodic fragments, yet nonetheless captures something of the essence of the experience of performing and listening to jazz in Israel. It’s built into the audience’s entire approach to the evening. It helps explain a little bit about where this music came from and where it grew. A little bit of the hafla has entered into the jazz club, much as it has entered every aspect of life in Israel, for good or bad.

Melodic Language

The influence of various musical styles derived from the Arab world and the Maghreb on original compositions by Israeli jazz artists is also indicated by the prevalence of melodic language that is derived from Arab classical music, musiqa mizrahit and Andalusian music.

Amos Hoffman’s album Na’ama (2006) features an entire recording deeply indebted to Arab

Classical music, filled with examples of Taqsim and compositions using Arab Classical song forms such as the Samai and Longa. Similarly, Omer Avital’s melodic writing is often imbued with reference and influence of Arab music and musiqa mizrahit. Take as an example the “call 145 and response” interlude of the composition “New Middle East” (Avital 2008) from the album

New Song that starts at measure 226 below:

Figure 4.5 Call and response interlude from “New Middle East” by Omer Avital

As Avital told me in our interview, this section, both in its melodies and in its call and response, clearly references Egyptian classical music: 146

It’s very Hijaz, which is an Arabic scale, here it’s really Egyptian music, really Arab music. It could be played by an [Arab] orchestra, super Egyptian music. Really like Farid El Atrash and things like that. (Avital 2017)

An oft shared melodic characteristic among Israeli jazz musicians is the frequent use of silsulim. In their discussion of musiqa mizrahit, Seroussi and Regev (2004:204) translate silsulim as “waves or spirals” and refer to them as “vocal inflections of long pitches”. I suggest we use the term silsulim as the Hebrew word given to describe vocal or instrumental ornamentations that are typical of performance practice of many musical traditions (folk and classical) found across the Middle-East, North Africa and Central Asia.66

Trumpeter Itamar Borochov’s composition “Bgida” (trans. Betrayal) (Borochov 2010) from his 2014 album Outset demonstrates well the use of silsulim by Israeli jazz musicians:

66 Instrumental silsulim can be thought to be imitating the effect created by the human voice. 147

Figure 4.6 Excerpt from Head In of “Bgida” by Itamar Borochov

Notice the repeated use of the sixteenth note ornamentation, the silsulim, in mm. 9, 12, 17, 25, and 28. The “Arab music” influence is also distinctly clear by way of the utilization of the malfouf groove as indicated by the bass line (and drums in the recording).

Another great example of the use of siluslim comes by way of flutist Itai Kriss’s composition “Sahadi’s Serenade”. Kriss provided me with the flute part (melody) for the piece

(Kriss 2012):

Figure 4.7 Melody excerpt from “Sahadi’s Serenade” by Itai Kriss

According to Kriss (2015), this melody is undoubtedly influenced by “Arab music”, and a first read of the chart clearly reveals that sonic influence. However, my transcription of the actual performance of this melody by Kriss and his group Televana demonstrates how the use of silsulim propel the melody from referencing the sounds of Arab music to clear participation in 148 performance practice associated with the style and tradition, thus giving the music a much stronger Middle-Eastern “flavor” than the written chart indicates:67

Figure 4.8 “Sahadi’s Serenade” excerpt with silsulim

THE COMPLEX “GLOBAL” PART II: “WORLD” MUSIC

In addition to African American jazz and the myriad of local influences discussed above, Israeli jazz musicians are also heavily influenced by classical, folk and popular music traditions from around the world. While, the specific traditions and the degree of influence vary from artist to artist, the incorporation of elements from musical styles beyond jazz, Israeli and

Mediterranean music is broadly shared among the three waves of Israeli jazz musicians who stand at the center of this study.

Perhaps the most substantial and pervasive influence is derived from the world of Latin

American popular and folk music, particularly Afro-Cuban and Brazilian styles. These influences can be understood as the result of both indirect and direct exposure to these traditions. Various Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music practices are already interwoven into several genres that have been discussed as having pronounced influence on these musicians.

Certainly, the presence of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian popular music in the jazz tradition is well documented. Inevitably, as part of a broader jazz training and internalization of jazz traditions and repertoire, Israeli jazz musicians were exposed to, investigated, and in some cases became enamored with Afro-Cuban and Brazilian styles. The indirect influence of Brazilian popular

67 Performance of this composition by Kriss and his group Televana was published by the YouTube channel Congahead on July 23, 2017. 149 genres such as bossa nova, and samba can also be understood as the result of their pronounced presence in the music of influential Israeli popular music songwriters such as Matti Caspi and

Yoni Rechter and on the genre more broadly (including SLI of the late 1960s and 1970s).

You look at Matti Caspi…so many songs [influenced by bossa nova and samba] and these songs really influenced the mindset when you grow up here…also the innocence in the sound, the style of presentation, this feeling that you have a ground and the melodies are on the off-beat, so you hear this in Avishai’s (Cohen) writing and in Omer [Avital] and everybody. [demonstrates melody that’s on off beat]…you know in a Brazilian feel. (Abro 2015)

Anat Cohen echoes this reality when she reflects on possible reasons for how at home she felt when she first started playing Brazilian music:

Growing up in Israel on a lot of Matti Caspi and the music that he brought, and probably other people too bringing music from Brazil in the most natural way …with Hebrew lyrics and I think you know, I grew up hearing those rhythms, so it always felt natural when I heard those songs and some of the samba feel on the radio.68 (Cohen 2017)

Complementing the indirect influence of Brazilian and Cuban music via jazz and Israeli popular music, a substantial number of prominent Israeli jazz musicians became directly involved in the New York Afro-Cuban and Brazilian choro music scenes. Such involvement has played a central role in the professional growth and musical development of several artists and has considerable influence on the original music that these artists compose and perform.

For example, during his first decade of activity in NYC, (a period of time that contributed greatly to the development of his distinct voice), bassist Avishai Cohen was a highly sought after bass player in the Afro-Cuban scene. Additionally, he worked for several years as the sideman for pianists Chick Corea and Danilo Perez, both of whom play music that often incorporates Afro-Cuban and Brazilian, and in the case of Perez, Panamanian influences.

68 My interview with Anat Cohen was conducted in English. 150

Drummer Amir Bresler, who played in Cohen’s band for several years, comments on Cohen’s connection to Afro-Cuban music:

He has a fluency in Cuban music at incredible levels…he played with the greatest [musicians]…one of the things that helps his music breath is his knowledge of Cuban music…they [Cuban tradition] see rhythm in a way that is really deep and wise, they, ashkara,69 know when and how to make you feel like your body is being stretched and then to give the right hit in the right place that will make everyone say yoaw (wow), its something that really drives complex music…its something that I think really glues a lot of his rhythms and combinations. (Bresler 2015)

Bassist Gilad Abro, who was taken under Cohen’s wing when he was seventeen and who has spent a considerable amount of time hanging with and absorbing music from Cohen, also feels that the Cuban influence plays a crucial role in a sort of rhythmic glue that unites and connects his other disparate influences (SLI, Ladino, jazz, etc):

I know that in New York, Avishai was first call in the scene…even more than the Cuban bassists, so all these combinations in his music reach a place of how to push the music forward with a strong salsa vibe…and when he plays music you also see this vibe with kicks and this forward motion interpretation that’s like Salsa, its really influenced from there, and even when he plays time signatures like 9 or 7 and all those sorts of things, you see that often it also touches a bit of a groove tumbao in types of bass playing. (Abro 2015)

Cohen’s long running involvement in the Afro-Cuban scene in NYC and the influence that these experiences had on his musical development might be also partially responsible for the extensive use of ostinatos in his original compositions. Though Cohen rarely writes music that directly evokes Afro-Cuban montunos,70 many of his compositions include lengthy ostinato passages, with precise and repeating piano rhythmic figurations and bass lines that underlie a

69 Slang from Arabic for truly! 70 montuno refers to “the vamp or ostinato section of most styles of Cuban music. It has also been extended to refer to the vamp section of any or all styles genereally associated with Afro-Carribean music, so that the vamp of any style may be referred to as the montuno” (Mauleón-Santana 1999).

151 soloist, serve as a transition, or as a contrasting section. One such example is the closing passages of his composition “Dreaming” (Cohen 2012):

Figure 4.9 Ostinato from “Dreaming” by Avishai Cohen

Flutist Itai Kriss started playing Afro-Cuban music with the Israeli band Tipico even before moving to the US. When he was ready to move to NYC, bassists Avishai Cohen and

Omer Avital told him that upon arrival he absolutely had to seek out Cuban musicians Ray

Santiago and Aivey Rodriguez and sit in with their band, telling him “They’ll be crazy about you” (Kriss 2015). Indeed, Kriss sat in for several weeks and was subsequently hired as a regular member, playing on a weekly basis for nearly six years at the NYC venue Forbidden

City. He continues to perform regularly in the Cuban, Latin and Latin jazz music scenes

(including collaborations with Puerto-Rican, Colombian, Venezuelan bands and musicians), in bands such as Los Hacheros, Gato Gato and with Colombian pianist Edmar Castaneda.

Similarly, woodwind player Anat Cohen has been deeply invested in Brazilian choro and samba for over a decade. She has explored numerous collaborations with Brazilian musicians and has incorporated numerous choro compositions and other works by Brazilian 152 composers such as Milton Nascimento in her albums. For example, her 2012 release Luminosa,

Portugese for luminous, features several choro and samba pieces alongside several originals, including a tribute to Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell. Cohen remarks, “I flow between modern and traditional jazz, between samba and choro – all maybe in a week’s time.” (Cohen quoted in Bambarger 2017). In her early years in the US, she played in Brazilian ensembles such as the Choro Ensemble and Duduka Da Fonseca’s Samba Jazz Quintet. Most recently, earlier in 2017 Cohen released two of what she calls “Brazilian flavor” albums. One album

Outra Coisa is a duet with Brazilian seven-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves presenting their arrangements of music by Brazilian composer Moacir Santos. The second album, Rosa Dos

Ventos presents an array of choro pieces with her ensemble Trio Brasileiro.

Flutist Hadar Noiberg’s work also offers a striking example of an Israeli jazz musician who has been heavily involved in both the Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music scenes of NYC.

Noiberg reports that she began playing Cuban music while still in Israel, playing some with the

Jerusalem Salsa Band, and that though she originally planned to focus solely on jazz in the US, a chance encounter led to other results:

One day I was walking in the West Village and I heard Cuban music. I had my flute with me, and I asked to sit in. From there on my life flowed into a journey of intense playing of Charanga in Cuban music and Salsa for years. (Noiberg 2015)

A similar experience led to her involvement with Brazilian choro. As Noiberg tells it, on a different occasion she was walking down the street in the East Village and heard some

Brazilian music. She walked in to the venue and it was Anat Cohen playing. Cohen told

Noiberg that she “had to come back on Sundays, there’s a choro ensemble, you’ll love it”.

Noiberg recounts that though she didn’t quite know why Anat Cohen said that, it turns out she 153 was spot on. Noiberg subsequently came on Sundays non-stop and eventually formed her own choro ensemble, Regional de NY.

Some Israeli jazz musicians see significant commonalities between the rhythmic worlds of Latin-American music and various Mediterranean and North African styles that also have a pronounced influence on Israeli jazz musicians:

Many times in musiqa mizrahit, so called Mediterranean, this rhythm of [demonstrates the malfouf] is a rhythm that is super danceable and super groovy. It connects directly with everything that has to do with Latin American music. It’s essentially a half of a clave…take Salsa, there’s a lot that’s connected to so called Mediterranean music. (Hoffman 2014)

Several other musicians note that the popular middle-eastern malfouf rhythm also resembles the

Northeastern Brazilian rhythm baião and that such similarities have eased and enhanced their transcultural blending.

Flutist Itai Kriss’s band, Televana,71 is directly focused on exploring the interconnections between Israeli, Middle-Eastern influences and Afro-Cuban styles. The band is comprised of Israeli and Cuban musicians, and Kriss seeks to create original music that connects these two musical worlds:

I started from the compositions. They had a bit of a middle-eastern flavor, not all the way, because I didn’t really study Arab music and I’m not fluent in the Makams but I have these things in my ear and I love that sound and the rhythms…So it started when I wrote a few songs, songs more in an Arab style. But when I write it, it turns out a bit Latin…These are songs you can play with a jazz quartet. But I thought that it would be cool to take it all the way and to play them with Cuban musicians and with a percussion instrumentation and it worked really well. Also, the thing about the middle- eastern rhythms, you know, its really rhythmic music. Cuban music is also rhythmic but with a different taste. I really love the blend (shiluv). Somehow these rhythms work together … middle eastern music and Caribbean music have a lot in common. (Kriss 2015)

71 The name of the group combines the name of two cities, Israel’s Tel Aviv and Cuba’s Havana. 154

Going beyond the American continent, other Israeli artists are deeply indebted in the development of their particular transcultural practice to study and influence originating from other sources. For example saxophonist Oded Tzur has developed an innovative approach to jazz saxophone playing that is the result of intense study of North Indian Classical Music with master flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia. Saxophonist and vocalist Abate Berihun, who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in the 1990s creates a wholly unique style of music that integrates traditional Ethiopian modes and melodies with middle eastern rhythms, and jazz improvisational structures and approach.

SUMMARY BY WAY OF A CASE STUDY: AMOS HOFFMAN AND MULTI-LOCAL MUSICIANSHIP

Thus far, the analysis presented in this chapter focused on selected key threads of influence that shape the music created by Israeli jazz musicians. These complex local and global styles of music are transcultural genres in and of themselves. Israeli artists blend them in wholly personal ways, creating their own unique “blend of blends”. While endeavoring to emphasize the individualistic nature of this process of stylistic interweaving, I simultaneously surveyed their often overlapping, sonically perceptible and discursive characteristics.

Throughout, I sought to give as much space to the voices of the artists themselves.

Whereas the particular blend varies from artist to artist, what is fundamentally shared among this generation of Israeli jazz artists is the blending itself. I return here to my conceptualization of the multi-local musician whose multi-locality is reflected through his or her musical “Rituals”, “Relationships” and “Restrictions”. The Israeli jazz musicians that stand at the center of this dissertation are “locals” in several disparate musical homes spanning varied geographies and historical temporalities. Their lives are colored by musical “Rituals” and 155

“Relationships” that reflect this embrace of a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan “contact zone”

(Kun 2005) while “Restrictions” simultaneously limit their tangible realities. How does this process of integration actually work? What might this multi-local musicianship look and sound like? Answering these questions is not only essential for understanding the transcultural nature of jazz, but doing so also serves as an excellent way to summarize the analyses presented in this chapter. I chose to do so via a case study exploration devoted to the work of Israeli jazz oudist and guitarist Amos Hoffman.

Hoffman’s original compositions integrate bebop, hardbop, Israeli popular music,

Bedouin Folk, Afro-Cuban, North African and Arab Classical music. His music clearly exemplifies ways in which many Israeli jazz artists follow the commonly heard directive to

“play their own voice” to the tune of music blending diverse local and global sources.

Ultimately, Hoffman’s stylistic polyphony supports the case for transcultural jazz as an audiotopia of multi-local cosmopolitanism.

Born in 1970, Hoffman grew up in Israel and moved to NYC in the early 1990s with the hope of becoming “the most killin’ jazz guitarist in the world” (Hoffman, 2014). He established himself as an in-demand sideman and a regular at the well-known Small’s jazz club scene in downtown NYC, often playing in jam sessions with the likes of Brad Mehldau, Joshua

Redman, Peter Bernstein along with his Israeli compatriots Avishai Cohen and Omer Avital.

Hoffman is perhaps best known for his work as the oudist on many of bassist Cohen’s most successful albums. Indeed, Hoffman’s oud is one of the defining and most recognizable features of these recordings, and became synonymous with the emerging Israeli jazz sound.

Whereas Hoffman is recognized internationally for his innovative and distinctive oud playing, his musical worlds can be viewed along a continuum. On the one end lies straight- 156 ahead bop inspired music, and on the other is Arab classical music. Of his five albums, two (his first and last) fall strongly within the domain of “straight ahead”, whereas his second release

Na’ama (2006) can be placed on the Arab classical music side of the continuum. His third and fourth releases Evolution (2008) and Carving (2010), fall somewhere in between, or to borrow

Fellezs’s term, in the “broken middle” of transgeneric music. When I spoke to Hoffman about these two different worlds, he relayed that he feels both are deeply a part of him:

I live both of these worlds. Perhaps for some people that sounds unnatural or doesn’t make sense but for me that’s who I am. I am the combination of the two, both musically and personally. I have both sides and I love them equally. That’s who I am, you can’t fight it. These past four months I had one performance on oud. I have no problem with that. I’m happy to play straight ahead, I love it, it’s a passion of mine. But, let’s say another time I will have a period that I only play oud, or only compose on oud. (Hoffman 2014)

In the context of transcultural music making, it is perhaps a bit surprising that Hoffman feels the distinctions and polarities between the two worlds so strongly. Whereas much of his original music clearly relays the process of internalization-transformation that is so characteristic of various types of stylistic blends, his discourse articulates the pronounced difference between these two musical worlds.

As noted above, Hoffman spent his earlier years cutting his teeth as a sideman and in the jam sessions of NYC, and sought opportunities to play with the older masters of the straight ahead jazz tradition. When American saxophonist Jay Collins urged him to start bringing his oud out to gigs, he decided to dedicate himself to the study of Makam and Arab Classical

Music via lessons with Lebanese musician Bassam Saba and by making transcriptions of recorded music:

You start something but you realize you don’t know anything about it. So that’s what motivated me to study, so I went and took lessons. I got into it really, really deep, learned the oud, learned the Makams. I started transcribing like mad, solos by Riad Al Sunbati, Abdel Wahab, you know all the Egyptian 157

classics. I completely got sucked into this world of Arab Classical Music. (Hoffman 2014)

Serious study of these traditions is so important for Hoffman that he cannot help but criticize younger Israeli musicians who create music that blends Middle-Eastern and jazz vernaculars without having dedicated enough time to investigating them:

I think that sometimes people take shortcuts. Take for example Avishai Cohen or Omer Avital, take me for example, each one of these players is a jazz musician that can stand on stage…and if Roy Hargrove calls me for a gig, which unfortunately doesn’t happen, but if it did, I can play a solo after him on any standard, and I won’t say that I’ll kick his ass, but I’d be able to hold my own. You need to be able to do that before you release an album of Arab grooves…you need to be able to seriously play something with a tradition of its own, you can’t be a branch that grows without a tree underneath it. (Hoffman 2014)

Here Hoffman underscores his belief in the necessity of immersion and internalization of musical traditions as a catalyst for stylistic blend and transcultural music making.

In order to contextualize Hoffman’s approach it might be useful to reflect on the perspective of another guitarist with a history of transcultural genre blending and in fact, a noted pioneer of transgeneric music – John McLaughlin. McLaughlin’s incorporation of Indian classical music in his group Shakti is regarded by scholars, critics, musicians, and fans as truly ground-breaking. He provides poignant commentary on the notion of stylistic polyphony when he says that “fusion can only exist inside an individual” (In Fellezs 2011:145). In other words,

McLaughlin views effective transcultural fusion as a product of an internalized and embodied blend of two or more musical practices. It is not sufficient to put together instruments from two different cultures (or as McLaughlin puts it, a “saxophone and guitar and tabla and blahblahblah”) and play some music together. Instead, a process of internalization and integration over time may ultimately yield a “fused” musical expression. 158

For Hoffman, the desire to go deeper and deeper into the source material exists alongside and leads to the liberty to create anew using these internalized and processed sources.

To use his own metaphor, he continues to water the roots of his various trees, so that his own branches may grow. On the one hand, he remains committed to the study of each musical tradition. On the other hand, he views the creation of his original music as the most “authentic” representation he can make. As he does so, he also aspires to record a straight ahead solo album, to be able to play a concert of Takasim, to continue work on his traditional Arab classic orchestral piece, and all the while allow himself the freedom to create his own music without worrying about where it falls within generic or stylistic boundaries.

While acknowledging the limits of his aspirations and abilities within the traditional world of Arab Classical Music, Hoffman is simultaneously aware of his contributions and innovations in the incorporation of the oud into jazz:

There are masterful oud players in the world today. There have been many greats in the past, and there will be many more in the future…As an oud player who tries to play traditional music, I don’t know if I’ll reach that level. On the other hand, precisely because I come from the other world [ed. referring to jazz] I can play things on the oud that a lot of incredible oud players, players that are far superior to me on oud cannot play. I think that’s part of the sound, that the oud is somehow not in its usual place. (Hoffman 2014)

Thus, as noted previously, many Israeli jazz musicians share the practice of blending a variety of already blended styles in their own way. In many cases, they draw from similar threads of influence. These often overlapping and shared “localities” have contributed to growing stylistic similarities among these artists. Yet, when describing any artists’ stylistic polyphony, it is important to remember that they work with specific and particular sets of influences. It is not adequate or precise to describe Amos Hoffman’s music as a blend of “Middle-Eastern”,

“Israeli” and “American jazz” influences (though these kinds of reductive labels provide a 159 useful short hand when trying to promote one’s music to festivals, labels, and the general public). Rather each of these monikers needs to be understood, as, diverse and complex musical worlds—something that Hoffman himself stresses. So for example, the gloss “Middle-Eastern influences” in Hoffman’s music might better be stated as the music of Egyptian masters such as

Riad Al Sunbati, Abdel Wahab, Oum Khulthum, Leila Morad, the music of Jewish-Iraqi kanun master Avraham Salman, musiqa mizrahit, Bedouin Haliji music from Saudi Arabia and the

Sinai desert, Sudanese pop and Morrocan Gnawe. Of course, one can always increase the resolution of inquiry and name specific artists, grooves, melodic, and harmonic moves and motifs that serve as influences for any artist under examination.

Departing for a moment from our singular focus on Amos Hoffman, recall that the many other Israeli jazz musicians whose voices have been heard throughout this chapter provide evidence for the extent to which they reside in multiple musical localities. As multi- local musicians, their rituals and relationships often involve musical traditions related to their

Israeli and middle-eastern roots, as well as, the various musical homes they adopted and adapted to over the years. Almost all share an early and fundamental groundedness in the

African-American jazz tradition. For many, this is their primary adopted musical locality.

Second, each musician brings with them the specific locality of their Israeli and Mediterranean roots. However, as we go beyond these two fundamentally shared localities, we discover that the gamut of additional localities now expands and varies with each musician.

Take pianist Omri Mor, for example, whose intense internalization of Andalusian music manifests in his original compositions and his improvisational language and has taken him not only to new imagined geographies and temporalities but also to corporeal collaborations with

Algerian and Moroccan musicians in North Africa and in France. Or flutist Itai Kriss who has 160 been a mainstay in the Cuban and Latin music scenes in NYC and whose daily musical rituals and relationships involve regular collaboration with Cuban musicians. Take saxophonist and vocalist Abate Berihun, whose multiple musical localities, in addition to jazz and various middle-eastern influences include music (secular and religious) from his birth home of

Ethiopia. These are but a few examples that scratch the surface of this generation of Israeli jazz artists.

Returning to Hoffman, we note that he is “at home” in several musical localities. He is a local in the straight-ahead, post bop language of Horace Silver and Wes Montgomery, as well as the cutting-edge downtown scene of the 1990s in NYC. He lives and breathes the African-

American jazz tradition. At the same time he is just as much a local in a wide variety of Israeli pop from the 1970s and 1980s and the sounds of Egyptian classical music from Oum Khulthum to Abdel Wahab. In this way, for Hoffman, as well as many other Israeli jazz musicians, the audiotopias of multi-local musicianship cut across space and time.

Listen here as Hoffman responds to my question about whether he feels “at home” with

Arab classical music or whether it still feels like the music of a different culture; his response is revealing:

When I engage with a musical tradition, and it feels very close to me, and I am really enamored with it, then it becomes a part of me. For me, maybe because I’m a musician, I can be moved by musical styles and traditions that I didn’t grow up with from infancy. For example, Afro-Cuban music; I can feel it, it can move me as much as the music that I grew up listening to since I was a child in Israel. It’s the same feeling. I can feel that it is also mine, even though it isn’t. Arab classical music is also not mine, and jazz is also not mine. None of these traditions are mine. Even classical music isn’t mine. So is only Arik Einstein mine? So either I am a lame imitator or they are all mine. (Hoffman 2014)

When Hoffman references Arik Einstein, he is referring to one of the most well-known Israeli pop singers who sang canonical SLI songs since the 1960s that are synonymous with the 161 dominant narratives of Israeli national culture. He is using Einstein symbolically, to ask whether because of his ethnic and national background as an Ashkenazy Jew who grew up in

Israel, his own musical identity can be reduced to this one category and that is the only style that he can rightfully claim as his own? Furthermore, a deeper investigation of Einstein’s music itself reveals that it too is a blend of diverse musical influences: old Russian ballads, western

European harmony, early rock and Brazilian bossa novas, and of course each of the categories listed above are mixtures and blends of their own.

I am not advocating the view that any musical style or tradition that an artist dabbles in and chooses to incorporate into their sonic vocabulary automatically becomes another locality in their bag. Rather, I am suggesting that we should consider seriously Selasi’s suggestion to reflect on the parameters of “rituals, relationships and restrictions” in the lives of musicians.

Perhaps asking where a musician comes from is less important than what their “musical rituals” are. What do they live, breathe, and dream of musically? What kinds of musical relationships do they have?

This chapter has investigated the wide array of already blended, complex, local and global influences that Israeli jazz musicians draw upon, each in their own way, to create their original compositions. These original pieces are varied, diverse, individually crafted “blends of blends” that draw upon particular sets of personal influences, experiences and histories. Still, in examining the totality of the music making activities of Israeli jazz musicians operating in the international jazz scene since the 1990s I have identified and analyzed several important overlapping sets of musical influences and characteristics that are shared.

Furthermore, these successive waves of Israeli jazz musicians share the fundamental practice of creating transcultural jazz pieces by blending already blended styles in their own 162 personal way. As multi-local musicians these artists’ musical practices are grounded in intense training, study and internalization of varied musical traditions and styles from multiple localities. Each, in their own way, process these internalized styles and integrate them to create their own unique expression, thus following the jazz imperative of “playing their own voice”.

The chapter that follows continues this analysis by shifting attention from original compositions to an examination of the ways in which Israeli jazz musicians arrange pieces and songs belonging to several “Israeli” and “Jewish” repertoire reservoirs to further expand their own creative activities and practice of transcultural jazz music making.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE SAND AND THE SEA: NAVIGATING THE ARRANGEMENTS OF ISRAELI JAZZ MUSICIANS

I always felt a profound attraction to Hebrew music. It has an infinite vastness and honesty; an innocence woven into wisdom and complete commitment. I remember myself as a child playing the pioneers’ songs from my mother’s sheet music and feeling an inexplicable connection to the simple, lyrical melodies that envelope gentle and heartfelt texts.

David Zehavi’s music represents Israeli rootedness from which deep exhilaration of creativity, aesthetic beauty and perfection flow.

Over the years I was exposed to more styles of music, and I especially fell in love with American jazz. Throughout, I continued to seek the feeling of being “at home” provided by Hebrew music [as it] enables me to stop momentarily, as a profound ease spreads throughout my body.

This album is a personal effort to connect these two loves: the Hebrew music of David Zehavi and jazz, to create my interpretation for the feelings and possibilities that are contained within this music. I hope that this integration expresses even a modest amount of the beauty and pleasure that lives in David Zehavi’s music. (Cohen 2014)

In this excerpt from the liner notes to his album Hakol Zehavi, saxophonist Yuval

Cohen articulates the motivation behind his efforts to explore the integration of Israeli music

(what he refers to as Hebrew music) and jazz. Cohen cites his rootedness in and the omnipresent influence of his early exposure to Israeli songs, while simultaneously affirming an equal dedication to the traditions of American jazz. As noted throughout this study, many of

Cohen’s Israeli contemporaries share this love for a wide and diverse array of practices that can broadly be labeled “Israeli music”. A recurring trope in interviews with artists is their underscoring the ways in which they have been influenced by songs and genres that they associate with Israel.

Whereas original compositions generally make up the largest portion of music performed and recorded by these musicians, a second, smaller yet substantial portion involves 164 arrangements of pieces that belong to various Israeli and Jewish repertoires. These consist of songs included in the SLI canon, piyyutim, folk songs sung and performed by various Jewish communities worldwide, and songs by popular music singer-songwriters, largely from the

1970s and on in Israel. Seemingly, in the constant search for new source material, Israeli jazz musicians go to familiar and familial repertoires. In my conversations with a significant number of these musicians, it appears to me that for the most part the decision to incorporate Israeli music into their repertoires is not motivated by a desire to promote a nationalist discourse, but rather as a solution to the ever-present need to more clearly define their individual voices and to carve out a niche within a jazz world that favors “newness” and “uniqueness”.

As multi-local musicians, Israeli jazz artists are each “local” in their own set of musical traditions originating from differing cultures, geographies and time periods. The variegated

Israeli and Jewish repertoires that these artists draw upon to create new jazz arrangements are, in and of themselves, derived from transcultural sources: already blended musical practices that come from many locales around the world. The creation and performance of these arrangements is in fact a performance of multi-locality, the result of an internal musical meeting in the audiotopic “contact zone” that Kun writes about. Taking a close look at how these performers arrange Israeli and Jewish music by analyzing select examples provides a direct route to better understanding the ways in which Israeli jazz artists seek to blend Israeli and Jewish musical sources and influences with their jazz practice.

INDIGENOUS JAZZ STANDARDS: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The impetus for performing and recording arrangements of Israeli and Jewish songs as a way to expand repertoire should be seen in the context of broader developments in the jazz 165 world since the 1960s. Jazz musicians worldwide have actively sought new source material and various other ways to explore new directions in composition and improvisation. In doing so, these artists draw from a wide array of inspirations including: western classical music and experimental contemporary music; non-western folk traditions and “world music”; as well as pop, rock, funk, r & b and hip-hop. While much of this influence comes to bear on original compositions, many of today’s internationally recognized jazz artists in North America and beyond complement their repertoires with choice arrangements of pieces derived from these same types of non-jazz sources.

Moreover, the practice of Israeli jazz artists drawing upon local repertories has precedent in other jazz communities around the world. Scandinavian jazz musicians are one interesting example, as starting in the 1960s several leading artists localized jazz by drawing upon local folk-music repertories. Up until the 1960s, most jazz artists’ repertoires worldwide were primarily focused on presenting American based repertoires.72 In Scandinavia, Swedish jazz musicians led the way. In 1964, pianist Jan Johansson released Jazz på Svenska (Jazz in

Swedish), an album featuring jazz arrangements of Swedish folk songs that remains, today, as the best selling jazz album in Sweden.73 Featuring Johansson on piano and Georg Riedel on bass, the renditions tend towards a quiet, spacious and pastoral re-imagination of the Swedish

72 According to Atkins (2003) the process of localizing jazz and transforming it in ways that suited the particular circumstances and conditions of each locale was happening across the globe as soon as the genre arrived in various new spots. Transcultural styles were developing long before the 1960s. This is evident in numerous examples, such as the development of the South African piano style (Ballantine 1993) or the guitar playing of Django Reindhardt in France. As Holt (2016) notes, initial efforts to indigenize jazz in Sweden for example began as early as 1936 with yodeling vocalist Alice Babs, but one cannot really point to a movement towards localization until the 1960s. Indeed, the pervasive mindset, particularly as it pertains to repertoire was a US centric, imitative approach. We can situate the beginnings of a concerted effort to incorporate folk and indigenous repertoire in Scandinavia, Japan and other countries as beginning in the 1960s. 73 Johansson’s selections all came from an anthology of Swedish folk songs titled Svenska låtar (Swedish melodies) Interestingly, Holt argues that Johansson’s interest in Swedish folk songs was influenced by the American folk revival of the early 1960s (Holt 2016). Thus, one can argue that even this effort towards localization in Scandinavia was actually inspired by trends in the US. 166 landscape, both external and internal. The folk songs are presented plainly, contrapunctally, simultaneously utilizing WAM voice-leading and harmonic progressions, as well as blues inflected melodic phrasing. Constant allusions to the Head melodies are woven into the improvised passages. Johansson’s approach reflects the influence of Cool and in Scandinavia at the time and also foreshadows the “Nordic Tone” (with its evocative sound painting of Scandinavian landscapes) that would in subsequent decades become a distinct marker of the particular transcultural jazz practices originating from Northern Europe.

Johansson’s album was one of several released by Swedish jazz musicians in the 1960s during a period that saw increased popularity for folk-jazz explorations (Holt 2016).

In the early 1970s, internationally celebrated Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted

Pedersen released two duo albums (aptly titled Duo and Duo 2) with African-American pianist

Kenny Drew that featured mostly Danish folk songs. Pedersen’s approach differs from

Johansson’s, more clearly employing jazz harmonic language as part of the arrangement process, and situating these melodies in a more straight ahead jazz style, such that the localized element is reduced to the origins of the melodies but not necessarily their treatment. Operating since the late 1960s, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek has drawn on folk-music repertories from diverse regions of the world, recording several albums featuring Norwegian folk melodies. Garbarek’s incorporation of these local sources within his oeuvre does not receive special treatment. His interpretation of these source materials is consistent with his broader

“global roots” approach and his particular and distinct tone on the saxophone and voice as an improviser: a fairly complex web of circumpolar, medieval and global folk music influences

(ibid). 167

This trend continued into the 1990s and 2000s with Scandinavian artists not only engaging with indigenous folk materials but also relating to and referencing the pioneering work of local jazz musicians such as Johansson. For example, Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren, who recorded albums featuring all American standards, released a 1997 album of Swedish folk songs entitled Swedish Standards. Similarly, Danish saxophonist Hans Ulrik released an album titled Danish Standards in 2003 (ibid). In both cases, Lundgren and Ulrik present Scandinavian folk songs as new kinds of “standards”, serving as vehicles for interpretation and improvisation following conventional jazz practice for American “standards”. Folk tunes turned into jazz tunes, simultaneously paying tribute to their Scandinavian predecessors and asserting the viability of local sources as repertoire for jazz performance practice.

Around the same time that Jan Johansson released Jazz på Svenska in Sweden, Japanese artists also began presenting jazz arrangements of Japanese folk melodies as a way to indigenize jazz in Japan. Historian E. Taylor Atkins (2001) claims that these musicians, riding a wave of cultural nationalism in the 1960s, were interested in carving their own niche both aesthetically and economically. This led, in his view, to their advancing a distinct “Japanese” jazz sound.

Interestingly, some groups performed more “Americanized” styles at home, but featured primarily “Japanese” themed music and arrangements of Japanese folk-melodies when performing overseas. According to Atkins, artists such as Shiraki Hideo and Hara Nobuo were motivated by the idea of “creating something new that would earn esteem as a genuine innovation within the modern jazz idiom” (Atkins 2001:240). Clearly they felt that rather than presenting imitative pieces of well-established styles, showcasing a program of traditional 168

Japanese songs would help their performance stand out and generate greater appreciation for

Japanese artistry.

In Israel, aside from a couple of attempts to indigenize jazz in the late 1960s and early

1970s there was no real momentum for such explorations until the late 1990s.74 Nonetheless, starting in the 1990s, much like their Japanese and Scandinavian counterparts had previously done, Israeli jazz artists began incorporating arrangements of choice songs from local repertories. In exploring potential musical areas to draw upon, these artists sought to utilize non-jazz musical sources and traditions that have impacted and/or “speak to” them, including

“their own musical heritage”.

ISRAELI SOURCES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM: KEY REPERTOIRE RESERVOIRS

Israeli jazz musicians draw primarily on three reservoirs of songs, which they arrange according to their creative visions. Many select directly from the large repertoire of songs belonging to the SLI canon. Yuval Cohen, for example, has included one or more arrangements of SLI songs in most of his CD releases to date, and his latest album, Hakol Zehavi consists entirely of arrangements of songs by composer David Zehavi, a musician whose music features prominently in the canon.75 The excerpt from Cohen’s liner notes to that album that opened this chapter reveals the degree to which this canon has been central to his musical life. His words underscore a powerful emotional connection that is rooted in childhood experiences and

74 In Chapter Three I discussed two recordings, released in 1969 and 1972, by Israeli jazz musicians that showcased arrangements of traditional folk music and SLI songs. 75 The title Hakol Zehavi is a play on words, on the phrase “Hakol Zahav” which in Hebrew translates into “everything is golden”, or more colloquially, “Everything is good!”. Instead of Zahav, Cohen uses the last name of the composer David Zehavi. 169 memories, yet his incorporation of the songs themselves reflects this connection through his jazz vocabulary.

Like her brother Yuval, clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen is also drawn to SLI songs, as suggested by their presence on several of her recordings. Her album Poetica released in 2007 includes SLI classics: “Agada Yapanit” (), “Hofim” (Nachum Heiman),“Eyn Gedi”

(Dov Shalom Aharoni), and “Nigunim” (David Zehavi). Similarly, saxophonist Daniel Zamir included SLI songs in his albums, including works by Moshe Wilensky and Heiman.

Other Israeli jazz musicians prefer to present their interpretations of traditional folk melodies and liturgical songs from various Jewish congregations that immigrated to Israel from the Maghreb, Arab world, Iran, Central Asia, and Ethiopia. Bassist Omer Avital includes traditional Jewish Yemenite songs on both his albums as a leader and on his recording with the successful collaborative group Third World Love, which he co-led with trumpeter Avishai

Cohen and pianist Yonatan Avishai. Pianist Omri Mor has created jazz arrangements for piano trio of Moroccan Andalusian compositions. And, saxophonist and vocalist Abate Berihun has been performing jazz arrangements of Jewish Ethiopian prayers in a variety of settings, including in collaboration with Yisrael Borochov’s East-West Ensemble.

In addition to SLI songs and folk melodies, some artists also draw from the work of

Israeli singer/songwriters from the 1970s and on. For example, the Avi Lebovich Orchestra (led by the trombonist himself) has been heavily invested in collaborations with well-known Israeli singer/songwriters for several years. These projects showcase 12tet arrangements for much beloved Israeli popular music and have included concerts and recordings dedicated to the songs of Shem-Tov Levy, Matti Caspi, Shalom Hanoch and others. Guitarist Gilad Hekselman recorded two songs by prominent popular music singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist 170

Matti Caspi: “My Second Childhood” and “Dove Song” and saxophonist Zamir covered songs by equally influential popular singer/songwriter Yoni Rechter and popular music artist Arkadi

Duchin.

A few of the musicians I spoke with focus on only one of these repertoires, but many draw eclectically from several or all of them. On Wild (2011), flutist Ilan Salem presents two songs by prominent SLI composers, Moshe Wilensky and Mordechai Zeira as well as an

Algerian prayer, “Zameru”, from his family’s own Passover Seder ritual feast. In our interview,

Salem explained his connection to and decision to perform this familial song:

It’s a prayer that we sing in the Seder, and for years we’ve been singing this prayer before I recorded it. I was really taken with this melody and I would sit at home the day after the Seder … harmonize it and go crazy (mitcharphen) with its beauty … and I come with my jazz background and I … harmonize it in a certain way and I enrich it … we always moved on and I always said, wait, you don’t understand what a gem this melody is. (Salem 2015)

Salem encapsulates the deep connections and feelings he and the other musicians I interviewed feel for these songs and aim to express in their arrangements of them. Indeed, for many, if not all, these ancestral melodies have been a part of their lives since infancy. Thus, the wealth of material existing in these varied and culturally diverse repertoires are but another source from which to cull pieces to which they feel connected, and for many, compelled to arrange and perform. Though the vast majority of the pieces discussed to this point are songs with lyrics, the instrumentalists discussed above generally perform them instrumentally. This practice is consistent with jazz musicians’ treatment of songs from the Great American

Songbook or other popular music.

Though original works make up the majority of his repertoire and are the basis for his renown, bassist Avishai Cohen like many of his Israeli contemporaries, also incorporates arrangements of Israeli and Jewish songs into his recordings and performances. In doing so, he 171 draws from a wide array of Jewish communities and musical traditions, including Yiddish,

Ladino, and the SLI. Seven Seas (2010), for example, features mostly original compositions but is complimented by three arrangements: “About a Tree [Oyfn Weg Shteyt A Boym]” was composed by early twentieth century Russian-yiddish poet Mark Warshavsky; “Two Roses

[Shnei Shoshanim]” by SLI composer Mordechai Zeira; and the traditional Ladino song “There

Were Three Sisters” [Tres Hermanicas Eran]”. Cohen seems to be particularly drawn to the

Ladino tradition, as other recordings have also featured Ladino songs such as “Morenika” and

“Noches Noches”. Aside from the Zeira song listed above, Cohen has also presented songs by

SLI composers Moshe Wilensky [“Southern Lullaby”] and Nachum Heiman [“Kefel”] on the album Almah (2013).

Notably, Cohen is an exception to the general convention of creating instrumental arrangements of vocal songs. The bassist has, in fact, sung arrangements of these songs himself or in collaboration with other vocalists. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that his incorporation of these songs into his repertoire has gone hand in hand with emergence of singing as a prominent feature of his later recordings and concerts. In 2008, for example, he released an entirely vocal album titled, in Hebrew, Shaot Regishot [Sensitive Hours].

The album features folk melodies primarily from the Ladino tradition and several piyyutim. Each song in the album differs in instrumentation, moving from sparse instrumentation (vocal, piano and bass) to larger ensembles featuring both a jazz rhythm section, and select woodwind and brass instruments. The closing piece also includes a string section. Sensitive Hours was released by Avishai’s own label, RazDaz Recordz, and appears to be an attempt to expand Cohen’s audience and cross-over into the Israeli popular music market, as the album is packaged and presented like a pop album. The songs are of shorter duration 172

(“radio friendly”), with only a couple of the songs featuring improvised solos more typical of a jazz album. The production is clearly rooted in a pop aesthetic. It is heavily layered, tightly arranged and the vocal tracks are manipulated using various digital effects. The packaging is all in Hebrew, with complete lyrics included in the liner notes. Unlike his jazz albums, which are packaged in English and intended for mass distribution around the world, the audience for

Sensitive Hours is clearly Hebrew speaking and Israeli.

Similarly, prominent saxophonist Daniel Zamir integrates singing into his performances and recordings. In 2003, five years before the aforementioned release by Avishai Cohen, Zamir released an all vocal album titled Ha’zamir Shar (pop!) [Zamir sings (pop!)].76 Much like

Cohen’s release, this album clearly only targets an Israeli audience, as it employs Hebrew packaging, song lyrics in liner notes and Israeli distribution. Most of the songs on the album are originals, but Zamir also includes pop style arrangements of songs by singer/songwriter Arkadi

Duchin and Rabbi Chaim Hecht. In subsequent releases Zamir has continued to incorporate vocal tracks in two primary ways: as lead singer and by collaborating with well-known vocalists from the popular music world, such as: Yoni Rechter, Eviatar Banai, Barry Saharoff, and Matisyahu.

THE POLITICAL-ECONOMY OF JAZZ IN HEBREW

ECM recording artist, pianist Anat Fort, primarily performs and records original music.

Her recordings are more clearly tied to jazz piano trio and “ECM sounds” than to any distinguishable Middle-Eastern or Israeli influence. Yet, over the years she has also consistently incorporated arrangements of Israeli songs into her performances and has even dedicated complete programs and concerts to them (these include songs composed by Sasha

76 This is a play on words, as his last name “Zamir” is Hebrew for a songbird. 173

Argov and Shalom Hanoch). In addition to these thematic concerts, Fort also incorporates such arrangements into her piano solo and trio concerts, as well occasional concerts mixed with classical chamber ensembles. While arrangements of Israeli songs are not the focus of her work, Fort notably said they are nonetheless “with me all the time” (Fort 2015).

Like Fort, flutist Itai Kriss has also presented a complete program dedicated to the songs of one SLI composer, songwriter . The story behind this project is revealing:

Kriss was invited by Barak Weiss, an Israeli producer and festival director, to present a concert in a series entitled Jazz B’Ivrit (Jazz in Hebrew). Sponsored and hosted by Beit Avi Chai.77 The series, which ran between the years 2011-2016 presented thematic concerts dedicated to the music of various Israeli popular music composers and songwriters. As Kriss explained to me:

Barak Weiss asked me if I wanted to do Jazz B’Ivrit, which is all about taking Israeli music and doing jazz arrangements for it, and I said yes, great (achla) … he said you have to come with a concept, focus on something, and so I looked around and searched and in the end we decided on Nurit Hirsh, together, I mean I kind of wanted to do but it was taken (laughs), someone else already chose her. (Kriss 2015)

So, it came about that in 2014, the series Jazz B’Ivrit featured a bevy of Israeli jazz artists living in NYC returning to their homeland to present concerts dedicated to Israeli songs:

Saxophonist Uri Gurvich presented the songs of Sasha Argov; trumpeter Itamar Borochov dedicated a concert to Ahuva Ozri’s music; and, as referenced by Kriss, guitarist Nadav Remez performed his arrangements of Esther Ofarim’s songs. The album with which we started our

77 Beit Avi Chai located in Jerusalem was established by the American philanthropic organization the Avi Chai foundation. Their mission according to their website, “Beit Avi Chai seeks to collect and publicize the various facets of Israeli-Jewish society, provide them a forum, and let them influence Israeli society and culture… The Jewish People is the focal point of the story told by Beit Avi Chai: the Jews in Israel and abroad and the Jews with their various trends, stormy disputes, variations, memories, and dreams.” The foundation sponsors a wide array of cultural activities in Israel, including jazz, that showcase and promote the diversity of Jewish culture. For example, Beit Avi Chai has been a leading force in the revitalization of various musical traditions rooted in Jewish cultures from the Middle-East, North Africa and Central Asia, such as the piyyut tradition (Beith Avi Chai n.d.).

174 discussion at the top of this chapter, Yuval Cohen’s Hakol Zehavi also came out of a Beit Avi

Chai concert commission. Cohen noted in our conversation that what started as an invitation to prepare a program of jazz arrangements for a concert turned into a project of much larger scope.

In addition to the various concert series and project commissions that Beit Avi Chai supports, several annual festivals in Israel in recent years advanced programming with Israeli and Jewish music at their center. Recent festivals provided a visible, high profile platform for jazz artists to showcase their work. Among them are The Piyut Festival, Festival Ha’Oud [The

Jerusalem International Oud Festival], Mekudeshet [Sacred] and the prestigious Israel Festival.

Invitations to perform at these events often stipulate presenting concerts that engage directly with “Israeli” and “Jewish” musical content, either by way of arrangements or original music.

While these festivals provide opportunities for jazz artists, they are also inseparable from exploding interest in middle-eastern folk traditions and “ethnic music” in general in Israel since the 1990s (Brinner 2017). The impact of ongoing revitalization of such music is not limited to the festivals but has, rather, informed the practices of Israeli jazz musicians in terms of entirely new projects and ensembles. For example, as part of a renaissance of Andalusian music in Israel, bassist Omer Avital led the multi-year project Ahavat ‘olamim (Everlasting

Love), which was dedicated to presenting piyyutim from the Algerian and Moroccan traditions inflected with elements of jazz among other genres.78 In the performances and recording, Avital directed a cross-cultural ensemble, called The New Jerusalem Orchestra. The ensemble

78 Since the 1990s, as part of a broader cultural awakening and resurgence of Mizrahi Jews there has been a revitalization of Andalusian musical traditions in Israel by way of several orchestras dedicated to performing the music; transgeneric collaborations such as the project by Omer Avital detailed above or pianist Omri Mor’s jazz arrangements of Andalusian pieces; and renewed interest in the lives and music of these oft-forgotten musical stars from the Maghreb (many of whom are passing away) by way of print and digital media as well as growing audiences for live concerts and recordings. 175 included Rabbi Haim Louk as the paytan and a variable group of Israeli and American jazz instrumentalists, western classical string players, and performers of traditional middle-eastern instruments such as ney, kamanche and kanun. The project, which developed out of a 2010

Israel Festival concert, was documented with a double-CD recording released in 2012 by the

Jewish Music Research Center at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Similarly, trumpeter Itamar Borochov teamed up with his father Yisrael Borochov and brother Avri Borochov to present a concert at the 2015 Piyut Festival that presented all new jazz arrangements of Bukharian sacred music (Shirat Ha’zohar). Itamar recalled that preparation for this familial affair (the Borochovs are Bukharian from the father’s side) involved a fair amount of research into Bukharian musical tradition:

The Bukharians have an entire genre of Zohar readings, and they have scales used only for this practice. Very strange scales. They are not part of the Bukharian shashmaqom… so our work involves research: including retrieval of various recordings from national archives, discussions with family members, and sitting in the synagogue in the Shapira neighborhood. (Borochov 2015)

Several of Anat Fort’s Israeli song projects were also instigated by commissions to participate in jazz concert series with thematic programming relating to the music of SLI composers and songwriters of the past. She told me that her concert dedicated to the music of Shalom Hanoch came about largely out of an invitation by a jazz concert series in Tel Aviv called “Jazz

B’Mishkan”.

Fort’s example is especially illuminating in that it begins to suggest the complexity of these types of jazz-Israeli/Middle-Eastern/traditional musical fusions as they relate to revivals and related concert events. While Fort participates in them and benefits from doing so, she is also critical of them. In particular, she expressed concerns about assumptions by promoters and concert series directors in Israel’s jazz scene that in order to draw larger audiences every 176 concert has to have a theme, either a tribute to a legendary American jazz artist or a tribute to an Israeli composer or songwriter:

When I did Shalom Hanoch at the Mishkan, it’s the same thing. Now, Shalom Hanoch is, maybe, my favorite artist in the whole world so I had no problem with it. I was longing to do something with his music, but still […] this guy at the Mishkan, who doesn’t work there anymore, told me “I can no longer just bring your trio for you to do your own stuff, I can’t, they won’t let me. It has to be around a tribute” […] So I thought let’s do the person that I wanted to do the most, and luckily that’s what happened. But this is what is going on…in order to get a gig somewhere, in something that’s more than Beit Ha’Amudim it has to be a gimmick.79 (Fort 2015)

Indeed, as Anat Fort indicated in the quote above, some of the highest profile gigs available for

Israeli jazz artists in Israel are concerts focused on tributes to SLI composers or certain folk and liturgical traditions from various Jewish congregations. And, they are well attended, which speaks powerfully to a yearning, or perhaps curiosity, that attracts Israeli Jews to attend concerts and purchase recordings that showcase these song repertories. It is equally interesting to note that these same artists rarely perform these thematic concerts in their tours in North

America or Europe, where they focus more extensively on their original music or on their more

“regular” and continuous projects. In light of the fact that many of these thematic projects are commissioned by the philanthropic organization Beit Avi Chai or prepared as one-time concerts especially for a jazz concert series or festival, it is fair to ask whether the catalyst for the engagement with these non-jazz repertories are less a matter of creative impulse, personal connection to the music, or issues of identity and more pragmatic and opportunistic as a means to make the most of the agendas and/or interests of funding agencies and festival promoters?

Regardless, there is no doubt that the repertoire of songs belonging to the SLI, the folk and liturgical traditions of Jewish communities around the world as well as the music of songwriters from the 1970s and 1980s has truly been influential and important for these

79 Beit Ha’amudim is a small jazz club in Tel Aviv. 177 musicians. These songs left a distinct musical impression on them from a young age. Their influence, in particular their harmonies and melodies, is ever present in a substantial portion of the original music that Israeli jazz musicians compose and, as we will discuss later in this chapter, also a powerful reference in their aesthetic preferences and related discourse. Indeed, these musicians’ practices are not reducible to one thing, but instead a complex tangle of many facets and considerations, internal and external, ranging from memories, identity, musical training, and career pragmatics.

ISRAELI STANDARDS?

The practice and discourse surrounding the incorporation into jazz contexts of Israeli and Jewish repertories, among the other sources from which they draw, differs among the

Israeli musicians with whom I spoke. Several of my interlocutors identified the songs from

Israeli repertoires as “our standards” while also juxtaposing them with songs from the

American songbook. They spoke of the deep respect and love they feel towards American

“standards”, but they admit that they do not fully identify with them in the same way that they connect to the Israeli repertoire. For example, in speaking about his arrangement of the song

“Neula” by Mordechai Zeira, flutist Ilan Salem noted: “Americans have their standards, [but] what are standards? Standards are basically American songs, like these songs, you understand?

They took them and turned them into standards and they play them. So, often we say, the Israeli guys, we say why don’t we take our songs and do the same thing. And that’s what we do”

(2015). Anat Fort’s views about these Israeli repertoires and their place in her musical world are equally revealing: “I’ve always viewed the Israeli songs as my standards. I’ve always approached them that way” (2015). As she elaborates on her relationship, over the years, with 178 this repertoire, we gain insight into the ways in which Fort views these “Israeli standards” as different from the American “standards”:

When I came to the US and I had to play, actually even before that, when I had to play “How High the Moon”, “Stella By Starlight” and “All the Things You Are”, it was foreign. Today it isn’t foreign, but it will never be as familiar as, you know, Shalom Hanoch or Sasha Argov or whatever it may be. It is in my DNA, it so engrained. That is why I don’t see any reason not to do it. It’s the most basic and right thing. Just like an American does American standards…it’s totally organic for me to do. (ibid)

Pianist Omri Mor also considers his arrangements of Andalusian songs as “jazz standards”. In liner notes attached to two of his songs that appear on the 2014 compilation, curated by bassist

Avishai Cohen, entitled All Original: Best young Israeli jazz, Mor stated: “I’ve chosen to present on this album two titles that reflect the music I’ve been creating over the last few years…both tracks are arrangements of Moroccan music. We have treated them as though they were ‘jazz standards’, improvising, whilst keeping in mind the traditional sound, and trying to do them justice”(Mor 2014).

In contrast to Salem, Fort and Mor, saxophonist Yuval Cohen does not view or refer to these pieces as “standards” though he shares the others’ appreciation for the songs as repertoire to be incorporated into his overall music making. His reservations are connected to his view of

“standards” in the jazz tradition, in general, as primarily vehicles for improvisation: “OK, I’ll take [as ensemble leader] “Hevenu Shalom Aleinu” or “Shibolet Ba’sade” […] and let’s open, lets play the song like a standard, and then play solos, yeah? Not really. So, OK, maybe let’s do a reharmonization, let’s make the changes more interesting. OK, great, so it’s not really a standard. It’s different” (Cohen 2015). As Cohen continued to elaborate, his thoughts seem to center on the idea that to simply take these Israeli songs and play them in the formulaic manner of Head In, Solos, Head Out would not work for him: 179

So, don’t take “Shibolet Ba’sade”, as many people do … with the melody and then solos. This kind of bothers me. It’s simplistic in my eyes. If I don’t have the time to do something a little bit more interesting, to give it the right touch, then I won’t do it. That’s my opinion. So, to me, they aren’t standards. [Rather] I call it some sort of a musical DNA. It’s some sort of Israeli spirit (he’lech ruach) that lives in these melodies, in this sound, that is very specific to here. Even if originally … these songs are Russian, or something else, they are still imbued with something local through the transformation here. But to call it Israeli standards, I am careful about that. (ibid)

Cohen’s reservations about labeling repertoire choices as “Israeli standards” seems to hinge on, first, a critique of applying a conventional approach – melody & solos – to these songs; and, second, his view that these are interpretative opportunities to connect with their “musical

DNA” and interpret these songs, “standards” of an Israeli repertoire, via creative arranging. For

Omri Mor and others, treating the pieces as jazz standards, means that they are malleable enough to serve as templates for improvisation, and in improvising on them the artists must strive to honor their tradition and “do them justice”.80 Yet in expressing his reservations about labeling these arrangements of Israeli songs as “Israeli Standards” Yuval Cohen focuses on the function of the standard as a piece that belongs to a shared canon of songs among a group of musicians.

Faulkner and Becker (2009) described ways in which professional musicians share enough of the repertoire that they can complete a performance or a job: with little or no rehearsal. Musicians “create and recreate the jazz repertoire as they play” at parties, hotels, and restaurants (2009:2). This partial overlap allows them to then negotiate in real time the constantly unfolding repertoire selections for that specific performance. Admittedly, the role of the musicians’ work in the contexts that Faulkner and Becker studied is generally to perform background music or provide entertainment for a party, a dance, or a meal.

80 Much as a jazz musician is expected to understand, and signify on previous renditions of standards as well as perhaps their original version. 180

Paul Berliner (1994) analyzed the way standards have come to be learned and shared among American jazz musicians, for several generations: Conventionally, American jazz musicians study standards through recordings and in-performance, on-the-bandstand demonstration versions of these shared songs, and over time often codified embellishments of previous rendition/s into a fixed composition. Berliner cited the example of Thelonious Monk’s composition “’Round Midnight” which was gradually transformed and codified by way of incorporation of performers’ improvised embellishments and modifications. For example, it was initially recorded by Cootie Williams in 1944. Later, Williams’s added embellishments were included in published sheet music of the song. Dizzy Gillespie’s introduction and coda in his 1946 recording were replicated by other performers, including Monk himself; and finally

Miles Davis further added an interlude that too became a formal feature of the composition in renditions by future musicians (ibid). This self-referential process does not seem to be happening with these Israeli arrangements.

American standards belonging to the Great American Songbook can be seen as shared repertoire, including a large subset that has been canonized and agreed upon over decades of practice by performers in the United States and beyond. Performers agree on a common base of knowledge that allows these pieces to be performed spontaneously (and from memory) by musicians whom have never played before together, thus improvising and playing together. In contrast, Cohen made it clear that because of his conviction that Israeli songs demand thoughtful arrangements, he does not want them to function per the American “standards” template. Rather, his preference is for harmonic, metric and structural changes that the arranger might produce to be idiosyncratic and thus require performers to know the ins and outs of the specific arrangement in order to perform the pieces well. 181

Cohen further asserted that more often then not, Israeli jazz musicians choose to put their own arranging “touch” on these pieces, either by way of re-harmonization, changing their meter, form, adding solo sections, etc. In this respect, these pieces’ arrangements are particular to each performer or ensemble much as Cohen prefers. This draws attention to the fact that, unlike typical jazz practice in the US as discussed by Faulkner and Becker (2009) for example, in the Israeli scene when it comes to arrangements of Israeli or Jewish songs there is no commonly agreed upon or shared repertoire, and even if there are overlapping songs, there are no agreed upon arrangements of them.

A key point is that the reliance on shared standards and standardized arrangements of them has diminished in recent years. Indeed, many American and European peers of the Israeli artists I interviewed choose to put their own “stamp” on any work that is not original, whether it comes from the American songbook or not. Thus, American “standards” tend to serve as a common and shared repertoire in casual gigs, jam sessions, and spontaneous collaborations.

However, efforts to penetrate larger markets and become established as a high level artist tend to privilege original music and personalized arrangements for any repertoire selection as a way to create a “unique voice”. Thus, internationally renowned artists such as Brad Mehldau,

Joshua Redman, and the like do record and perform renditions of well-known standards, such as “All The Things You Are” or “How Deep Is The Ocean”, but they often tend to explore the very same kinds of rather extensive transformations that Cohen alludes to: reharmonization, new meters, formal modifications, and so forth. Thus, in such a paradigm, where individuality is championed and each artist seeks to develop his or her own repertoire, overlapping material is less likely. 182

Whether they consider Israeli songs as part of a collection of “Israeli Standards” or not, the musicians I spoke with shared a commitment to honor them with their musical and aesthetic choices. This is familiar discourse in the context of their more conventional US oriented jazz training, tradition, and practice. Think of the recurring jazz tropes that encourage musicians to

“respect the music”, study in detail the different renditions of “standards”, learn lyrics and verses of standard tunes (Faulkner and Becker 2009).

Both Cohen and Mor, in the quotes above, underscore this orthodoxy. For Cohen, making sure that “there is a point” is centrally connected to the idea that the songs are already gorgeous in and of themselves, and that unless the arranger has something to add, then he might just as well leave them alone. His view is that these songs cannot simply be treated as “jam tunes” (as some standards sometimes are, often nightly, by many jazz musicians), and rather, that they require some thought and careful work in order to respect them. Mor’s attitude is not far removed from this even as he sees the repertoire he focuses on in a manner more akin to standards for improvisation. Thus, he seeks to ensure that his harmonization supports the original Andalusian melody and that his improvisation stays true to the maqam.

While I encountered musicians with rather strong and differing positions, there are also those whose views about the meaning and place of Israeli songs changes. After spending years deconstructing American standards, Ilan Salem decided that the best way of honoring the melodies of his Israeli songs is to not mess with them too much: “Today, I look at it differently.

I don’t like it when people do that [mess with the tunes]. I think that a song, it has its place and you need to give it respect. So in Wild I did an homage to these songs. I didn’t touch them”

(Salem 2015). Nevertheles, when listening to Salem’s renditions of these songs, it is clear that the melodies have been harmonized (in the case of “Zameru”) or reharmonized in the case of 183

“Neula”. He did arrange the pieces, but his point remains true if not taken literally. His arranging efforts did not alter the melody or obscure the underlying emotional intention of the pieces as he understood them to be. The harmonization, or re-harmonization instead, helps the pieces to translate more comfotably into a jazz realm especially by opening up doors for improvisational exploration.

Whereas many of the musicians I interviewed share the practice of incorporating arrangements of Israeli and Jewish songs, the practice of arranging and corresponding discourse surrounding their work varies. The ways these musicians engage with their chosen repertoire differs according to their view about the role such arrangements play in their own output as artists. Furthermore, the aesthetic choices they make as arrangers reveal the views they hold about the repertoire itself, its role in the jazz context and their own approach to arranging. The following examples crystalize these issues while also showcasing two of the repertoire reservoirs identified above.

ANALYSIS OF REPERTOIRE EXAMPLES

The two examples that follow demonstrate the various issues discussed thus far in this chapter. In order to highlight the diversity of repertoire used for arrangements I analyze representative pieces from two of the three key repertoire reservoirs identified. Ilan Salem’s

“Zameru”, originally a Passover prayer from the Jewish Algerian community serves as an example of incorporating folk or liturgical music from Jewish congregations from across the globe. Yuval Cohen’s “Eli, Eli” exemplifies the prevalent incorporation and arrangement of

SLI classics by Israeli jazz musicians. These two examples also contrast the differences in approach to these “source materials” and the arranging process itself. Salem’s arrangement is 184 fundamentally concerned with transforming a simple liturgical melody into a jazz tune, creating a form that enables improvisation. As already discussed, this approach, shared by many others, views these new sources of inspiration as “our standards”. In contrast, Yuval Cohen’s arrangement of “Eli, Eli” exemplifies his (and others’) view that these pieces cannot be treated like “standards” and must undergo more elaborate arrangement. It should be noted that there is no correlation between the repertoire reservoir and the arranging approach utilized.

Ilan Salem’s Zameru

As noted earlier in this chapter, Ilan Salem’s decision to arrange the familial Passover piyyut “Zameru” for his 2011 album was years in the making. Salem has memories of being enchanted with the song as a child and notes that the melody would make a yearly appearance in the opening stages of the Passover Seder ritual of his family home. According to Salem, his family performed the Seder according to customs typical of Jewish Algerian treatment of the ritual and “Zameru” is a distinctly Algerian prayer and melody that doesn’t occur in other versions of the Seder as practiced by other communities.81

Salem stated explicitly that he “didn’t touch the melody” (2017), or in other words, he was intent on not altering the notes of the tune. Similarly, he made no substantive alterations to the overall structure of the song, stating that he preserved the AB (verse-chorus) form of the song. Nonetheless, in transforming a single line melody sung communally into a jazz tune that can serve as a catalyst for improvisation he employed four primary arranging tools: use of fixed meter, harmonization, instrumentation and rhythmic feel. Here is Salem’s chart for this piece

(Salem 2011):

81 There are distinct variations of prayers, melodies and even text between different communities across the Jewish world. 185

Figure 5.1 Head In for “Zameru”, arranged by Ilan Salem

According to Salem, when the piyyut is sung during Passover it doesn’t fit into a fixed time signature, with length of notes or phrases varying and altering the meter from rendition to rendition. In order to situate it within jazz performance practice, Salem settled on 3/4 Time

Signature, which he felt to be the natural fit, while also establishing fixed and repeatable note and phrase lengths.

The harmonization that Salem employs is clearly designed to support the given melody while simultaneously providing a comfortable springboard for improvisation. The piece opens with two exact repetitions of a four bar melodic phrase. Throughout these eight measures, 186

Salem utilizes a B♭ pedal point to create a sense of buildup in advance of the resolution that arrives with the turnaround at measures 9 and 10. This turnaround utilizes a minor iv, minor v cadence very typical of the SLI repertoire and Israeli jazz musicians’ original compositions.

Though the harmony of the A section, consisting of the first ten measures is entirely diatonic, Salem’s use of the pedal point allows him to simultaneously avoid root position diatonicism and invoke a more contemporary jazz sound by way of slash chords and inversions.

Particularly noteworthy in this context is the A♭/B♭ chord that occurs twice, at measure 3-4 and again at 7-8. This chord simultaneously functions as a diatonic passing pedal point chord and a V/V, secondary dominant. Indeed, viewed in such a way, A♭/B♭ could also be spelled as B♭sus13. The sus13 sound is quite open and self-sustaining in the jazz context, both behaving functionally within a chord progression and working independently as an island of referenced scalar and harmonic sounds. The harmony that follows in measures 11-14, A♭maj7 to B♭13 is designed to create harmonic relief from the building tension of the minor harmony of the A section and again provides a nod towards more typical jazz harmonic language.

The melody for “Zameru” is a short, relatively simple melody that has many repeating sections. In order to maintain interest for the listener and create a sense of unfolding narrative

Salem treats the melody with varied instrumentation. In the first A section of the Head In, the tune is carried by flute and bass doubling with piano and drums accompanying. The absence of low frequency roots from the bass, and its function as a melody-carrying instrument is texturally spacious and leaves room for textural intensification. Indeed, the second A section introduces the oud for the first time, joining the flute in carrying the tune while the bass assumes an accompanying role laying down roots. The oud takes liberty with its rendition of the tune, adding ornamentations idiomatic to the instrument as it is used in Arab classical 187 music. Not coincidentally, the bass doubling of the melody and the oud’s presence are two examples of instrumentation choices that are consistent with sonic features prevalent among

Israeli jazz musicians that have been discussed in Chapter Four.

Finally, the arrangement’s rhythmic feel, a compositional feature of Salem’s efforts, plays a central role in transforming this piyyut into a jazz tune. The original piyyut would have been sung a capella and without rhythmic accompaniment. Salem’s indicated rhythm for the pianist and drums in measures 1-10 (A section) is as follows:

Figure 5.2 “Zameru” Rhythmic feel

Speaking broadly, this rhythm and the drummer’s interpretation of it situates the piece in a straight eights jazz sonic realm. At the same time, the instructed off-beat piano accompaniment evokes a texture reminiscent of SLI songs and WAM. Again, this is a stylistic nod to “Israeli” sources of inspiration, consistent with both arrangements and original compositions by Israeli jazz musicians.

Structurally speaking, the song form remains unaltered, though Salem makes one small adjustment. He increases the number of repeats for measures 11-14 to four times from an ambiguous yet smaller number of repeats. When we spoke about his arrangement he noted that the B section has a “chorus” like function in the traditional rendition of the prayer. He couldn’t remember exactly how many times it repeated when they sang it during Passover, but in our interview he suggested that his choice to repeat it four times was a modification.82 In speaking about his arrangement Salem also refers to this section as the “Bridge”, meaning that in this

82 As a point of reference, this passage seems to consistently repeat twice in a recorded version of this prayer sung by a Jewish-Algerian congregation that is available on YouTube (Gardaya 2014). Without having access to a recording of the variation that Salem’s family sang at their own Passover celebration it is not possible to say definitively how many times this section was repeated in Salem’s familial home. 188 new jazz context it serves as a contrasting and connecting section (Salem 2017). Indeed,

Salem’s harmonic choices (already discussed) and the in-performance texture of these four bars reveal a desire to create contrast. The pulsating off-beat infused groove that so typifies measures 1-10 stops as both piano and drums play spaciously. The ensemble uses the ensuing repeats of this four measure phrase to gradually build rhythmic propulsion and dynamic intensity as they are readying to return to the top of the form.

The song is performed in a conventional manner: Head In --- Solos --- Head Out. The form is never broken, with all repeats upheld throughout the solos. The solos are brief, and the soloists’ vocabulary sits squarely within today’s pluralistic “jazz language”. In total, only two choruses of solos are performed, divided between bass (full chorus), piano (Two A’s) and Flute

(B 4Xs). Salem’s choice to limit solos appears to be consistent with his overarching desire to give the song itself a place of prominence in the listener’s ear. As noted in Chapter Four, many of the Israeli jazz musicians I interviewed, highlight what they might refer to as “the importance of the song”. Thus the tendency to have short solos in pieces that behave like

“Songs Without Words” is typical and reflective of such an aesthetic.

Yuval Cohen’s Eli, Eli

Among the renditions of well-known David Zehavi songs in his 2014 album, Yuval

Cohen’s arrangement of “Eli, Eli” is a particularly illuminating example of how Israeli artists transform Israeli songs and folk melodies into elaborate transcultural jazz arrangements.

“Eli, Eli” [lit. “My God, my God”], also known as “Halicha L’” (Walking to

Caesarea) is, arguably, among the most canonic songs in the SLI. The lyrics are based on a poem written by Hanna Szenes, a Hungarian Jew, who immigrated to Palestine at the age of 189 eighteen, in 1939, and lived next to the sea in Kibbutz Sdot Yam located next to Caesarea.

During WWII, Szenes volunteered to serve in a special British Air-Force unit. In 1944 she parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Tito’s partisans, but was captured and executed by the

Hungarian police (Rothkirchen 2007). Written as a form of prayer, the song was composed by

Zehavi in 1945 using Szenes’s poem (Zeira 2013).

After Szenes’s death and in the period after WWII, efforts to commemorate her life and valor resulted in some of her poetry being set to music. According to historian Judith Tydor

Baumel (1996), Zehavi’s “Eli, Eli” was quickly incorporated into the song repertoire of Israeli youth movements. First, as Baumel noted, Szenes’s life and death were mythologized in several stages throughout the decades following the war, and the pervasiveness of “Eli, Eli” was certainly one prominent example of this process. “Eli, Eli” is taught to children in grade school, sung in communal singing gatherings (shira betsibbur), and performed in public ceremonies that commemorate the Holocaust. It is a powerful example of the way some SLI songs have become so synonymous with Israeli national culture through socialization mechanisms that they are deeply embedded in the consciousness of the broader public.

However, “Eli, Eli” wasn’t originally conceived as a “national song”. Szenes’s poem is deeply personal and existential, as she marvels at the beauty and mystery of the world and existence itself. Here is an English translation of the song’s lyrics:83

My God, my God May these wonders never end The sand and the sea, the rustle of the water, the light of the sky, the prayer of man

83 Author’s translation אלי אלי שלא ייגמר לעולם החול והים, רשרוש של המים ברק השמיים, תפילת האדם

190

Saxophonist Cohen related to me that the 2014 version of “Eli, Eli” was not part of the original collection of arrangements that he premiered in a Beit Avi Chai sponsored concert. He admitted that he was hesitant at first about dealing with it precisely because of how loaded it was in Israeli society:

The recording needed another song, and I perceived Halicha L’Caesarea as a song that I wanted to do but I was a bit afraid to do so…because it’s a song of Holocaust Remembrance Day. And I definitely didn’t want to do it like [ed. the way its done] so I started playing with it and searching for what to do with this song. Basically, Hannah Szenes composes this poem, obviously, before she dies and before there’s a Holocaust. Her poem is in praise of existence more or less. So I went with that feeling. True, in the middle it gets a bit dark for a time [but] then it becomes optimistic again. It changed. And that was entirely out of choice and I worked on it for a really, really long time…it was clear to me that I was dealing with something explosive. (Cohen 2015)

Cohen makes several noticeable and significant modifications that fundamentally re-shape the song into his own wholly personal statement. His work clearly reflects an effort to stay deeply indebted to the source while also delivering an interpretation that situates canonic material in a new framework.

His arrangement thus retains the profundity and melancholy of the original version, yet also artfully positions it in a modern jazz context. First, the entire tenor of the song is transformed from slow and solemn to vibrant and at times stormy. He performs the piece at a faster tempo (quarter note equals from c.70-80 to 150) and moves it through several meters.

Cohen’s innovative treatment of the melody, modulating harmonic progressions, contrapuntal interlude and additional narrated text - all demonstrate a wide-ranging, comprehensive re- imagination of this Israeli classic. 191

Undoubtedly the most recognizable and distinguishing feature of the song is the melody. Here is a lead sheet for a typical SLI rendition of “Eli, Eli”:84

Figure 5.3 “Eli, Eli” Lead Sheet

Set to a much faster tempo than the original, Cohen takes the first three bars, changes the key center (From E minor to C minor) and condenses them to fit into one measure of 13/4. Here is that melodic fragment as it would appear in the key of C minor in the original Zehavi setting, in

4/4 time, played slowly:

Figure 5.4 “Eli, Eli”: first three measures transposed to C minor

Here is how it appears after its metamorphosis, from 4/4 to 13/4:

84 The lead sheet below is taken from the International Jewish Songbook (1994). Several other Israeli song collections have identical notated versions of the song. 192

Figure 5.5 “Eli, Eli” melody transformed by Yuval Cohen to 13/4

The melody is still immediately recognizable as “Eli, Eli”, yet it has been transformed from Zehavi’s prayerful melancholy to an energetic ostinato figure that references Afro-Cuban montunos. Since the melody’s pitches are unchanged, the song’s longing quality is maintained, yet it has now taken on additional emotional terrain that is far more upbeat and festive as a result of the rhythmic propulsion and vitality that the ostinato figure provides. Pianist Gadi

Lehavi adds a small ornamentation (silsul) on the D natural that occurs on beat 10 of this 13 beat measure. This seemingly minute detail gives the ostinato pattern a middle-eastern flavor.

As some Israeli jazz musicians might say, he added a little bit of spice to it. The silsul is not written into the score, and must have been an in-performance addition.

The ostinato pattern encapsulates within it three features that are fairly representative of sonorities that Israeli jazz musicians utilize in their music: the use of odd meters, the influence of Afro-Cuban music, and a bit of Middle-Eastern “flavor”. When we spoke about this arrangement, Cohen agreed with such an assessment but resisted any hint that this might have been calculated in any way:

I understand what you mean about its Mediterraneaness, and it also becomes a bit of a Salsa through that. But again, the idea wasn’t necessarily to stick a 13/4 in there, that’s what was demanded, it was a kind of compression of the melody into a sort of ostinato format, and that’s how it turned out. It wasn’t about how I can make it rhythmically interesting, but rather the opposite. You arrive at the rhythm by searching for what was interesting in there. (Cohen 2015)

The melody makes this first full appearance as an ostinato by way of the piano in m.13 but Cohen also expertly prepares its arrival in the preceding measures. The bass opens the piece 193 with several repetitions (in rubato) of the first four notes of the melody. In this opening, which includes the potent octave leap, the slow somber mood more closely resembles a more traditional rendition of the song:

Figure 5.6 “Eli, Eli” - Yuval Cohen arrangement bass opening

At m.7 the trombone enters with the immediately recognizable and striking octave leap that starts off the melody. When the tenor saxophone enters at m.9, the piece is in tempo and additional fragments of the Zehavi melody emerge in the two-part counterpoint between trombone and saxophone:

Figure 5.7 “Eli, Eli” tenor saxophone entrance

When the melody finally does appear, Cohen sets a bass line counterpoint that foreshadows the vamp that will close the piece at letters K and L. The implied harmony of the bass line, suggests the following chord progression: G7 – Cm – Cm/E♭– Fm – F♯dim7.

Ingeniously a resolution to the tonic occurs in the middle of the bar on the Cm chord; this gives the phrase a sense of tension and a lack of closure: 194

Figure 5.8 “Eli, Eli” piano and bass counterpoint

Indeed the entire song is set in a distinctly WAM harmonic language. It is replete with

minor triads and often situates the triads in second inversions (as 6/4 chords), an inversion type

that rarely occurs in standard jazz repertoire, and has a distinct WAM evocation. Cohen’s

harmonic choices are clearly in tune with the original spirit of the song, which is undoubtedly

rooted in such an aesthetic.

The octave leap that opens the song continues to play a central role in Cohen’s

arrangement. Cohen interpolates this fragment, utilizing a contrapuntal texture involving the

three horns on top of the repeated rhythm section ostinato, eventually modulating to a new

tonal center (B♭ minor) and settling on a six bar harmonic progression that serves as a

repeated section for improvisation. At the moment of arrival on the B♭ minor, the meter shifts

from 13/4 to 7/4. The harmonic progression that grows out of this melodic statement blossoms

into the first soloing section. This chordal template for improvisation alternates second

#inversion ˙minor™ triadsœ withb˙ passing diminished7bœ chords.œ Once again,œ this progression is 7typical & c œ ™ œ œ œ œ ˙™ œ 4 of late nineteenth century romantic harmony but rare in jazz:

5 B¨‹/F Aº7/F C©‹/G© Gº7 B‹/F© Fº7 # 7 & ™4 + + ™ + + ™ + + ™ + + ™ + + ™ + + ™ ™

Figure 5.9 “Eli, Eli” first blowing section 11 # & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

15 # & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

19 # & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

23 # & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

27 # & ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

31 # & ∑ ∑ 195

Thus, the harmonic language of this first open solo section is clearly grounded in a

European aesthetic and deeply connected to the harmonic language of Zehavi himself and the

SLI in general. Nonetheless, this stormy progression for improvisation departs from the harmony of the original song, and demonstrates Cohen’s interest in saying something as an arranger, thus taking the piece to new directions. For example, the three horn players exchange lyrical solos, alternating choruses on this cyclical and deceptively challenging six bar phrase.

The piano accompaniment further suggests a nineteenth century romantic aesthetic, as pianist

Gadi Lehavi accompanies the soloists with continuous, flowing, and rhapsodic arpeggios more typical of a Chopin Etude than traditional rhythmically punchy jazz comping techniques.

After this solo section, we hear the piano ostinato in 13/4 after which Cohen presents yet one more variation on the opening fragment of the melody. Here, a slightly different ostinato is held by the piano and bass while the drums improvise soloistically around it:

Figure 5.10 “Eli, Eli” piano and bass ostinato for drum solo

After the brief drum solo, the piece undergoes another meter change, transitioning to

4/4. We now hear a new portion of the original melody, this time played by the bass, with sparse accompaniment from the piano and drums. The melody of measures 5-10 of the original

Zehavi song setting is rhythmically augmented, contributing to the sparseness by creating a stagnant feel. This hearkens to the mood of the song as it is most commonly performed. Still,

Cohen does not leave the conventional material unchanged, and instead alters the harmony with a series of tense chords that resist calm and resolution: 196

Figure 5.11 “Eli, Eli” melody quote in bass part

This iteration of the melody by the bass then leads to the second blowing section of the arrangement, providing another harmonic progression that opens up, this time for a piano solo.

As the piano solo tails off, the rhythm section itself goes silent. Then, a seven measure, contrapuntal, horn passage repeats in a loop as a sonic foil for the narrated text, which takes center stage:

Figure 5.12 “Eli, Eli” three horn contrapunctal loop 197

With distinct fragments of the melody heard in the soprano sax line, this contrapuntal section references the solemnity and heaviness of the original version of the song more strongly than any other section of the piece.

It is no coincidence, then, that this contrapuntal texture and tense harmonic background accompany the additional Hebrew spoken text that Cohen inserts in dialogue with the words of the original poem. The new text, shown below in Hebrew and English, is narrated by Itai Perl:

אלי אלי, מתי תיגמר בעולם צביעות האדם, אלימות האדם, שנאת האדם את אחיו האדם. מתי כבר ייגמר בעולם סבל האדם וכאב האדם ודם.

אלי אלי, כמה דם עוד ישפך בעולם וימלא את החול וימלא את הים. והעולם? גם אותו יעלים האדם. זעקות הכאב שמחרישות כל רשרוש, ברק ותפילה.

אלי, אלי, אתה מקשיב? אתה בסביבה?

אלי אלי שלא ייגמר לעולם החול והים, רשרוש של המים ברק השמיים, תפילת האדם

והאדם והעולם

My God, my God, when will there be an end in the world to the hypocrisy of man, the violence of man, the hatred of man of his brethren. When will there finally be an end in the world to the suffering of man and the pain of man and the blood.

My God, my God, how much more blood will spill in the world and fill the sand and the sea? And the world? It too, man will destroy. The cries of suffering that deafen any rustle, light and prayer.

My God, my God, are you listening? Are you around?

198

My God, my God That these wonders may never end, The sand and the sea, the rustle of the water The light of the sky, the prayer of man

And man, and the world.85

The arrangement choices suggest strongly that the new text is a commentary on the

Szenes poem, through its use and reference to much of the same language. Distinctly recognizable melodic fragments set in the accompaniment are “uncomfortable” and dissonant, yet still evocative of the original song. This manipulation further enhances the perception that the pleading mood of the original has been replaced by a forcefully worded lament.

This is a clear political message, particularly when considering the fact that “Eli, Eli” represents one of Israel’s most central national narratives and rituals, namely the commemoration of the Holocaust. Yet, Cohen’s subversive move flips the script, using one of the most identifiable shared and “ritualistic” songs to ask when will such senseless violence and suffering end. His cyclical, repetitious and contrapuntal texture underneath the narration seems to highlight a kind of unending loop, which brings to mind the unending cycles of violence that have so typified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I spoke to Cohen, he confirmed the political nature of his message:

It was part of a broader engagement with this song, to do something there, to go with a certain kind of gloominess and to still insert myself into this song. It [ed. the added text] is a sort of paraphrase on the original words…and yes to say what I think about the violence and the militancy. It’s political but it’s also universal, it stakes a position, it doesn’t address someone specifically. It can address all the actors in the field, and kind of tell them, guys, no violence here. (Cohen 2015)

85 Text by Yuval Cohen, translation by the author. 199

After the narrated the text, we hear a brief reprise of the central ostinato line, and the piece comes to an end with that most poignant octave of “My god”, ringing in the piano in the form of an unanswered question.

SUMMARY

This chapter focused on the various Israeli and Jewish sources drawn upon and incorporated by these musicians over the years even as the majority of their work focuses on original compositions. Moreover, as important as Israeli and Jewish songs are, we must not lose sight of the fact that they are one of several important repertoires to which Israeli jazz musicians gravitate.86 As multi-local musicians who are local in various musical traditions, many incorporate pieces from repertoires that extend beyond Israeli and Jewish sources. Some draw upon standards from the Great American Songbook or “jazz standards” (compositions by the likes of Monk, Ellington, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman) in their recordings and performances.

Others have drawn from diverse sources such as Brazilian choro, Bulgarian choir music, Afro-

Cuban, French Chanson and contemporary pop/rock. Thus, depending on the particular artistic preference and direction of the individual, the repertoire combines original music, standards, jazz standards, Israeli or Jewish songs and selections from an array of other sources.

Whereas the degree to which these artists privilege Israeli and Jewish repertoires and influences in their music differs from musician to musician, hardly any advocate an approach that privileges these repertories at the expense of other sources, jazz or otherwise. Their

86 For example, earlier we noted that on her album Poetica Anat Cohen recorded arrangements of four SLI songs. On that same album Cohen also performs John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament”, “Le Chanson Des Vieux Amants” by Jacques Brel, a choro piece by Brazilian composers Nelson Cavaquinho and Guilhereme De Brito entitled “Quando Eu Me Chamar Saudade”, two original compositions and a piece by her collaborator and album co-producer Israeli jazz bassist Omer Avital.

200 discourse is generally inclusive, underlining simultaneously the importance of the jazz tradition, their jazz training and vocabulary (as well as any other important influence, on a case by case basis) and the influence of Israeli or Jewish sources. In this sense, they frame stylistic expansion and the broadening of their sources as fundamentally rooted in the jazz imperative:

“find your own voice”. Thus, I found that their incorporation of Israeli sources is not pursued due to a nationalist agenda or desire to make “Israeli jazz”, but rather it is, again, a by-product of artists’ pursuit of their own unique expression as multi-locals operating in the global jazz world as performers and composers.

In fact many of the artists that I interviewed highlighted the importance of the jazz tradition as the foundation that allows them to re-visit and explore these localized sources. Ilan

Salem, for example, argued that his extensive jazz training gave him the tools to approach this music with greater skill, maturity, and creativity:

When we come to treat these things with our jazz background, I think we come to it with tools that give us freedom to take it to other places and to use it as raw material. I think that if it was done in reverse it would be much more difficult: It is much easier for me to come with the jazz background and everything that I have learned and did in the jazz world, and to come back to these things and to treat them, to really give them their place, not to destroy them but to cultivate them, to preserve them, to imbue them with something else. (Salem 2015)

As discussed in Chapter Four, almost all of the musicians I interviewed highlighted their rootedness in African-American jazz traditions, practices and vernaculars. Regardless of their physical whereabouts they practice “rituals” and live “relationships” that demonstrate their locality in this musical place. At the same time, they carry with them an intense locality in an Israeli musical landscape, replete with its deep seated familial, psychic and identity forming

“rituals”, “relationships” and “restrictions”. Beyond this Israeli locality, these musicians, each in their own way, are also local in a wide array of Jewish musical traditions, which are 201 transcultural in their own right. Some artists have also become locals in additional musical traditions that extend beyond jazz and Israeli/Jewish musical practices. As chronicled in the previous chapter, these include musical traditions from Latin America, India, Ethiopia and other locales.

In returning to our overarching concern with repertoire, at present, there is no shared

“Israeli Standards” repertoire to which we can point. Though, admittedly, there is substantial overlap in the kinds of sources from which Israeli jazz artists pull their pieces (i.e. SLI, folk melodies, singer/songwriters). Each artist draws from these varied sources and creates their own arrangement for the pieces. Even in cases where artists have performed renditions of the same pieces (which is a rarity) their performance shows no indication of referencing or being in dialogue with one of their contemporaries’ renditions.

Since this practice of performing jazz arrangements of Israeli songs and Jewish folk melodies is still in its infancy, it is possible that over time some shared repertoire might develop, and circular self-referentiality might begin to occur. However, due to the relative small size of the Israeli jazz community and the diversity of repertoire that is sourced and arranged it is unlikely to ever reach the type of widespread pervasiveness as standards reached in the jazz world of the US and the world, over the course of the twentieth and early twenty- first centuries.

202

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION: “FALAFEL JAZZ” AND THE POLITICS OF GENRE AND CULTURE

I was in the audience for bassist Or Bareket’s performance at the New York jazz club

Cornelia Street Café where, in the summer of August 2016, he played with his band as part of the monthly spotlight series on “Israeli jazz”. Bareket introduced one of his original pieces as

“Shosh”, a composition titled after his grandmother. In fact, Bareket revealed that both of his grandmothers were named “Shosh”. He explained that one grandmother, named Shoshana

Bohlman, came from Poland and the other, who came from Iraq, was named Shosh Kahti.

Bareket pronounced the word Kahti somewhat humorously with an exaggerated Arabic/Hebrew

“Kachh” sound. He closed this brief spoken introduction for his piece by explaining that it was dedicated to his Iraqi grandmother, and employs a 10/8 Iraqi rhythm called hibri. Later in the evening, before playing an arrangement of a Matti Caspi song (“Eem Kol Haguf”), Bareket provided some background information about the legendary Israeli songwriter who has been a part of the Israeli music scene since the 1970s. That same night, however, the band also played an Argentinian song. While this might seem out of place on a program dedicated to “Israeli jazz”, Bareket, who now lives in NYC but grew up in Israel noted that he spent his very early childhood in Argentina. That residence was not, however, the source of his familiarity with what he called “wonderful contemporary Argentinian music.” Rather, he told us he discovered it when he was on tour in Argentina with Israeli jazz guitarist Yotam Silberstein.

Performing on “Israeli jazz” night at a prominent NYC jazz club, Bareket reinforced the

Israeliness of the event on several occasions. He often did so in expected ways. For example, he noted jokingly that he and the band spent all day together working on the music and “eating hummus actually…it’s a stereotype … but stereotypes come from something”. At the same 203 time, Bareket’s spoken interludes also revealed his multi-cultural and multi-local autobiographical and musical roots, which align with the kinds of Israeliness I have been associating with Israeli jazz musicians, and contemporary culture. Accordingly, his band’s set expressed this multi-local sensibility in sound, referencing styles and influences ranging from

“North American” jazz to Iraqi classical music, contemporary Argentinian music and 1970s

Israeli popular music.

Much like Or Bareket, many of the Israeli jazz musicians discussed in this dissertation live as multi-local musicians, through their “relationships”, “rituals” and “restrictions”. Their music is rooted simultaneously in various jazz traditions, a diverse array of “Israeli” and

“Jewish” musical traditions as well as numerous other musical styles and influences. Their

Israeliness often manifests through multi-local cosmopolitanism, drawing simultaneously upon a myriad of influences that shaped their multi-cultural upbringing and ancestral roots. By focusing on the music making and discourses surrounding the activities of these Israeli jazz musicians who have been thriving on the international stage since the 1990s, then, this dissertation should be understood as a case study of musical transculturation in contemporary jazz performance and composition. Like Bareket, numerous other multi-local jazz musicians from Israel and, I would argue, many other nation-states, draw upon specific influences and sources from diverse and already fused musical traditions to create their own unique personal blend of transcultural jazz.

Perhaps more particular to the transcultural musical practices of the Israeli jazz musicians discussed here is that their multi-localism manifests primarily through creation of original compositions and arrangements (perhaps others drawing on different traditions might lean more heavily on the blending of blends in their improvisations). While there was a great 204 variety of approaches through which each creates his or her own musical voice by blending disparate sources, they all share the act of blending itself. More particular to Israeli jazz too is that all the artists I encountered draw upon musical traditions that connect to their childhood home in Israel as well as a variety of other musical traditions that come from various parts of the Jewish world.

Thus, Chapters Four and Five concentrated on these repertoires as a way to illuminate and understand the “local” and “global” influences embraced by Israeli jazz musicians. As I noted, they share an abiding respect for and solid grounding in African-American jazz traditions. Simultaneously, they view the jazz ethos as one that calls for them to “play their own voice”: an invitation, if not imperative, to express themselves as authentically as possible even if that means deviating from more rigidly “traditional” approaches to jazz sounds, repertoire, and performance practices on one hand and Israeli music on the other hand. Thus in the spirit of multi-local music making and longstanding jazz traditions, they utilize “global” influences, including Western Art Music, Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, Indian, and Balkan musical traditions and specific local influences; chiefly, “Israeli”, “Jewish” and circum-Mediterranean reservoirs as a way to express their Israeli jazz voices through their compositions and arrangements.87

To be sure, my interviews, analysis, and experiences demonstrated that original compositions and arrangements were the primary ways in which Israeli jazz musicians found and expressed their sound. This is why I focused my analysis on these aspects of their music.

Still, it is true that an important aspect of their music making activities and, indeed, jazz, was left under-explored, namely their improvisations. While there would likely be much to gain from analyzing various improvised solos, the more I explored various compositions and arrangements by different artists the more it became apparent that focusing on them would

87 I use the term circum-Mediterranean following Brinner 2009. 205 provide the clearest way to demonstrate the transcultural and multi-local nature of their practice and that which largely defines Israeli jazz and an Israeli sound. In fact, with a few notable exceptions,88 I concluded that most Israeli jazz musicians’ improvisatory language is fundamentally rooted in more conventional jazz vocabularies and less in transcultural blends that draw upon local influences from Israel and the Middle-East. Nonetheless, I believe that there is likely much to learn from explorations and analyses of solos by Israeli jazz artists, especially in relation to, for instance, the musical competences (Brinner 1995) necessary to improvise on their compositions and arrangements.

Such an endeavor remains for a future project. In the remainder of this chapter, I propose three additional areas for future research that might emerge from the foundations established by this dissertation.

THE POLITICS OF GENRE: THE CASE OF FALAFEL JAZZ

In his book about jazz-rock fusion, Birds of Fire (2011), music and cultural theory scholar Kevin Fellezs proposes we understand genre as culture, and transgeneric music as

“performance of transculturality”. He cites Fabian Holt’s ideas about genre formation, noting that performers and listeners utilize genres to demarcate sonic and performative conventions, musical boundaries and membership. Similarly, popular music scholar Keith Negus asserts that genre can be usefully understood as sets of “codified rules, conventions and expectations, not only as melodies, timbres and rhythms but also in terms of audience expectations, market categories and habits of consumption” (1999:28 Quoted in Fellezs 2011:17).

88 A few musicians such as Amos Hoffman and Omri Mor often display improvisations that are simultaneously rooted in jazz and middle-eastern vocabularies. 206

One of the predominant genre demarcation lines in the Israeli jazz music world revolves around the label “falafel jazz”,89 a term used by some Israeli and non-Israeli musicians as well as critics to describe the blended music made by Israeli jazz musicians. While no one I spoke to knows exactly how the term originated or who coined it, most agree that it emerged at some point in the early 2000s and was used as a denigrating way to refer to jazz performed by Israeli musicians that has overt middle-eastern rhythmic and melodic characteristics. The term also elicits strong responses as illustrated by flutist Ilan Salem’s comments:

I hate this label…I think falafel jazz is a term by Israeli jazzists who don’t like what we do…I have respect for every kind of music, if it’s good or wonderful. The connotations of falafel jazz I always thought came from a hard core group of jazz musicians that aren’t willing to compromise, who believe that jazz happened between 1940 and 1955…and that everything that happened after that isn’t as good. I can’t connect to that approach when it comes from a place of dismissal. I really think that when people do something and really do it from their heart you can’t disparage it. (Salem 2015)

As this quote suggests, the vast majority of musicians that I spoke with viewed the label unfavorably and would not use it to describe their own music. Many also rejected its use to describe the music of their Israeli peers. Discussion of this label was often accompanied by laughter. Indeed, the physical and emotional reaction when prompted on the subject ranged from mild embarrassment and discomfort to outright rejection. The much-shared sentiment is that the term is reductive, simplistic, used too loosely and carries with it an air of dismissiveness.

In Israeli society, falafel is commonly thought to be a cheap, simple, unsophisticated street-food, a kind of food of “the people”. Equating jazz created by Israeli musicians with falafel was perceived by most Israeli jazz musicians I interviewed as a dismissal, an assertion that their music was too commercial and cheap. As flutist Hadar Noiberg told me: “I feel it’s a

89 Falafel are “Fried patties made of either garbanzo beans or fava beans and eaten with hummus. Israelis stuff pita bread with falafel to which tahini sauce and a chopped vegetable salad is added” (Gvion 2012). 207 derogatory term…like you wanted to do music that’s deep but you settled for something light that sells and is commercial” (2015). Gilad Abro articulates a similar view:

It’s really natural that everyone wants to be an individual. Nobody wants to be associated with a genre label, that’s natural. People want to say, “jazz” and that’s it. So what if its falafel jazz; so what if it’s hard-bop; it’s jazz. Somehow to define it as falafel, as a food, there’s something about it that is diminishing, to see it negatively… whereas it could be music that the composer is really serious about. (Abro 2015)

Omri Mor echoes the same point:

I dislike this label, maybe only because I don’t want to be included in it. But I am sure that there are lots of people that characterize what I do as falafel jazz. Look, it’s a matter of connotation and association. My association and connotation with falafel jazz is as something that is cheap and for the masses (laughs) and as such it’s not a good thing. But, let’s say someone comes from Germany and hears my music and music by someone else from what’s also called falafel jazz and he won’t see much a difference…he’ll put it under one label… I don’t like this term, but it doesn’t matter. There are also lots of people that don’t like the word jazz. Duke Ellington didn’t like it. From my perspective, I hope that what I do isn’t falafel jazz. I think at the end of the day what is important is the integrity of the music making and I strive to be faithful to that. (Mor 2015)

Indeed, as Mor rightly points out, the word jazz has long been mired in debate, often in relation to its placement vis-a-vis binaries, such as “high” versus “low” culture, “art music” versus

“popular music” (Levine 1988; DeVeaux 1991; Porter 2002) that implicitly question its quality.

Similarly, the label “falafel jazz” seems to mark the accessibility of the style, its danceable rhythms and catchy melodies as “too commercial” for jazz.

Yet, a few interlocutors viewed the term falafel jazz favorably. For example, in speaking generally about this label, saxophonist Eli Degibri said:

Unlike the detractors I think it (falafel jazz) is nice. I think it’s the exact opposite of insulting. I think it’s another branch of jazz, not just Israeli jazz, but jazz. If today folks like and Ben Street know what falafel jazz is then it’s good for us. I know of all those tiring folks who get angry 208

when they hear it but I think it’s a very positive thing. After all, everything can be done well or poorly. (Degibri 2015)

Similarly, flutist Itai Kriss is comfortable with the label “falafel jazz” being applied to music making by his band - Televana:

Falafel jazz…is like taking elements from musiqa mizrahit and combining it with jazz, something that you can clap your hands to (claps his hands) and jazz with a flavor of you know cumin, parsley, garlic, olive oil…I say this with affection. You can say falafel jazz, oh that’s something cute (mithanhen) but I like it. Yeah, it’s kind of a stupid label but I enjoy it, if the music is done right…Televana is very much falafel. It’s falafel with salsa. Empanadas with falafel inside (laughs). (Kriss 2015)

Other Israeli jazz musicians believe that the term is neutral and refers simply to a certain sub- genre of jazz pieces that Israelis sometimes perform which have specific musical characteristics. For instance, the Arab malfouf rhythm, which is frequently used in pieces by

Israeli jazz musicians is also known as “groove falafel”. In this usage “falafel” is a kind of shorthand, a quick reference to a particular rhythmic language shared among many Israeli jazz musicians. For example, one interlocutor noted that he can turn to his drummer on a gig in the middle of a tune and simply say, “bring the falafel”. In response, the drummer will begin to play the malfouf groove. Embracing both interpretations, drummer Amir Bresler described

“falafel jazz” as a groove and a style of music:

It has a certain kind of groove and a melody that has a kind of jazzy Zohar Argov-like sound…90 it has this borderline negative connotation when people say it but its not. It’s just this genre, with this groove and these Israeli-like simple melodies. It’s hard for me to explain. (Bresler 2015)

“Falafel jazz,” thus, elicited a range of perspectives; but so too did the label Israeli jazz.

First and foremost, the feeling among most was that such reductive labeling disguises the immense diversity of stylistic directions and personal styles developed by each musician.

90 Zohar Argov is one of the iconic singers of the musiqa mizrahit genre. 209

As Amos Hoffman told me:

One of the most beautiful things about the history of jazz is that it’s a music that is constantly evolving and changing… and the emphasis is on the originality of each artist. I think everyone needs to come from a place of finding their original voice. This is why the term Israeli jazz or Israeli sound doesn’t sit well with me. I’ll give you an example: Compare Anat Fort (pianist) with Omer Avital’s sextet. They are so different from one another. If you asked me for …”don’t belong to any club, just do your own thing״ advice, I’d say Maybe there is a kind of shared sound that I might be partly to blame for … and if you want to outline it musically, you can say that it’s music with a kind of harmony, with a groove, with lots of Latin American influences, African influences, funk. But, it also has middle-eastern flavors, and also references Russian and Ladino songs as well as Greek and Turkish influences. On the other hand, I think that this labeling pegs a lot of things that don’t really resemble one another or that are different enough that they wouldn’t occupy the same spot. It’s like you’d say that jazz is traditional jazz. There are so many different styles. Like you’d put Art Blakey and Wes Montgomery under the same label. These are different people, they wrote a different style. (Hoffman 2014)

Much like their positionings with respect to the term “falafel jazz”, the overarching concern I heard repeatedly expressed by these musicians was that they are chiefly interested in creating their own individual sound, not in belonging to a shared stylistic direction. Most of them are wary of being pigeonholed as “Israeli jazz” artists, even as they all mentioned the significance of their rootedness and connectedness to jazz and its various styles and traditions.

However, they all stressed that their sound worlds and creative output encompasses many influences and that their music extended beyond “Israeli music” and music from the Jewish world. Each was careful to articulate that while “Israeli” and ”Jewish” influences might be important or play a role in shaping the music they make and their identity, Israeli jazz cannot account for all of what they do and in many cases isn’t even at the core of what they do.

Secondarily, these artists made clear that their incorporation of “Israeli” and/or “Jewish” influences was not a result of a conscious attempt to be a part of an “Israeli jazz” wave, the 210 creation of a new sub-genre, nor an effort to advance “jazz nationalism”. Rather their music making is the result of their own individual process of searching for “their own voice”. Thus, their incorporation of these sources is personal and individualistic and can be seen as a response to the” jazz imperative” to authentically express themselves as jazz musicians. Bassist

Omer Avital encapsulates this aspect of this jazz ethos when he says:

I am disappointed when someone comes and says falafel jazz or hummus jazz and thinks that its something that’s different than jazz, when I am really a jazz musician. You know what I am saying? My ability to bring something different into jazz only exists because I can play “A Night In Tunisia” really well…and if I am able to find myself in it, it’s because I have a particular story. Mark Turner, too, has a different story, and everyone else has their own story. That’s art. You put your life into it. (Avital 2017)

Finally, the “Israeli” and “Jewish” influences must be seen within a broader more nuanced understanding of the multi-local, cosmopolitan reality that is characteristic of the

Israeli musical landscape. These Israeli jazz musicians draw upon a wide array of influences that come from the diverse musical cultures present within Israel and from the broader Arab and circum-Mediterranean musical styles that have influenced Israeli culture and music for many years.

Indeed, throughout this dissertation, I demonstrated how these artists, rooted in jazz, construct their own individual blends that incorporate musical influences from a myriad of stylistic and generic sources. Utilizing the conceptualization of the multi-local musician, I outlined the ways in which these blends are grounded in deep immersion and practice of musical traditions that originate from multiple locales and temporalities. Avital’s multi-local musicianship illustrates this well; he is simultaneously rooted in African-American jazz traditions, Arab music, musiqa mizrahit, Yemenite folk and liturgical musical traditions,

Andalusian music, Shaabi, Berber and Gnawa from Morocco, the SLI and Western Art Music. 211

His music is the product of a long process of internalization, integration and transformation of musical influences and materials, and results in a personal style that is immediately recognizable as distinctly his even as it is steeped in other traditions, especially jazz:

You can’t label my album New Song or the tune “New Middle East” as falafel jazz. You can label it but you have to understand that it’s built on Dizzy Gillespie. Otherwise there’s some sort of mistake. You can’t separate me from jazz, because I am also jazz…and in the same breath my music is more than just Arab music, I am not just influenced by Arab music, I know it, I can play Arab music…you can feel the strong Arab, Mizrahi influence in my music, but I am also New York City jazz. I live in NYC, that’s how I live my life. All this blending is part of an attitude towards life. It’s less important to me whether it is Arab or not, whether its falafel or hummus [jazz]. Rather I care about what are the chords you write; how you relate to your band members; what’s the quality of the solos; does the music groove? Is it fresh? Does it move me? (Avital 2017)

Yet Avital’s music has also been very influential on the waves of Israeli jazz musicians that came after him suggesting a certain degree of generic coherence in what I have been calling, however problematically, Israeli jazz. Avital thus reminds us that while labeling and generic demarcations play a role in the discourse surrounding their work, the overarching concern for these musicians is with making music that excites them, fellow musicians and audience members. He also illustrates, however, that certain musics resonate more with the musicians and audiences with whom he is most interested in sharing that excitement.

With this in mind, it is clear that future research on genre politics and the meanings and implications of labels such as “falafel jazz” and “Israeli jazz” could be quite productive. For instance, how do Israeli jazz musicians navigate such labels surrounding their music and the music of their peers? Are there generational differences in views about these labels? To what extent do such designations and their accompanying associations of “high” and “low” impact the ways Israeli jazz musicians seek to position themselves with their Israeli and non-Israeli musician peers, audiences and critics? Such research could also include analysis of the 212 contradictions between the rather outspoken rejection of the terms and the simultaneous usage of these labels for PR and marketing purposes by these same artists.

FALAFEL, MUSIC, AND CULTURAL POLITICS

In addition to querying the implications of “falafel jazz” as a genre label, plumbing the interrelationships between jazz and cultural politics, in general, and Israeli music making in particular is another potentially fruitful avenue of research. The pairing of jazz and falafel, is rich with layers of meaning related to ethnic and socio-economic dynamics within Israeli society as well as the complicated relationship of Israel’s Jewish inhabitants with their non-

Jewish neighbors across the Middle-East.91

In her book Falafel Nation (2015), performance studies scholar and artist Yael Raviv details the unique case of the falafel: its origin as a meat substitute during certain holidays for

Christian Copts in Egypt, its spread across the middle-east and into Palestine, its appropriation by the Jewish settlers in the early twentieth century, through to its transformation into a staple of Israeli cuisine. Raviv writes “It has not assimilated into Israeli society by a long, slow, natural process; rather, its transformation into an icon-of-Israel status was rushed and deliberate, groomed by the national movement as a signifier of Israeli pride. The case of falafel also generated a unique controversy, since it became embroiled in the Arab-Israeli political conflict” (2015:15-16).

In pre-state Palestine, interactions by newly arrived Ashkenazy immigrants with local

Palestinian culture yielded a complex, often troubled fascination with local Arab culture and

91 In addition to the already cited books by Regev and Seroussi 2004 as well as Brinner 2009 there have been quite a few articles and books written in recent years about musiqa mizrahit and cultural politics in Israel. These include Nocke 2006; Saada-Ophir 2006; Regev 2007; Horowitz 2010. Similarly, in food studies there have been several interesting and relevant works on cultural politics and food in Israel: Ariel 2012; Gvion 2012; Ranta and Mendel 2014; Raviv 2015. 213 musical traditions. For example, one of the cultural tenants of the Zionist movement involved a rejection of diasporic life and an embrace of life in Palestine. Raviv writes that early Jewish settlers were drawn to the falafel as it represented a simple, unrefined food, not a product of the bourgeois existence they sought to abandon in Europe. Similarly, the early settlers sought to imitate “certain Arab models that they perceived as related to the Jewish existence in the mythical biblical past” (Raviv 2015:17). Musically, this meant an effort to integrate and explore various Arab melodic, rhythmic and orchestrational features despite longstanding musical traditions from elsewhere and problematic relationships with local culture bearers

(Regev and Seroussi 2004; Brinner 2009).

However, an account of Ashkenazy Jewish engagement with the music and culture of their new home provides an incomplete account of the newly arrived Jewish population in

Israel. Shortly before and after the establishment of the state, huge numbers of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries arrived. For these Arab-Jews, musical traditions of their previous homes such as Arab Classical music, Andalusian music, traditional Persian and

Turkish music were their very own. As Edwin Seroussi (2006) notes, for centuries up until the establishment of the Israeli state, professional Jewish musicians played an integral role in the performance and development of musical styles all across the Muslim world, and were often among the most famous stars in the world of classical and popular Arab music. In my interview with him, Amos Hoffman reflected on this part of Israeli history:

Because of the political conflict, and this is a very problematic issue…on the one hand, one half of the citizens of the country are Arabs, they are Jews from Arab countries. But the establishment is all Western, and this approach over years has turned this music into the music of ‘the enemy’. But for one half of us, this is their music…take the Jews that came from Iraq. They arrived with astonishing musical wealth - musicians known all over the Arab world, and they buried them. We lost this. We really missed out here. (Hoffman 2014)

214

Indeed, for many, one of the great tragedies of Israeli culture is the way in which the diverse traditions of music that Jewish immigrants brought with them when they arrived from the

Middle-East, North Africa, and Central Asia, have been “buried” or repressed by the hegemonic Ashkenazy establishment that sought to create a new “Hebrewist” national culture rooted around eastern and western European music and culture.

The conflict that erupted with the establishment of the State of Israel between the newly formed Jewish state and its Arab neighbors turned the music of these diverse and large groups of Arab-Jews into “the music of the enemy”. Furthermore, the political and cultural

“establishment” of Jewish society in Israel, particularly in the years leading up to the 1970s, was dominated heavily by an Ashkenazy bloc that sought to position Israel as a Western-

European nation, advancing Euro-American culture and taste at the expense of middle-eastern and Arab culture, which again was associated with “the enemy”.

Though maintained privately by individuals and communities, the musical practices and traditions of Arab-Jews living in Israel were largely absent from public life for much of the twentieth century. The emergence of the Mizrahi pop genre, musiqa mizrahit, starting in the late 1970s, in parallel to a broader social, cultural and political upheaval in Israeli society, started to change this. Starting in the 1990s, a renaissance of Mizrahi cultural identity surged through Israeli society in parallel with the peace process and a greater openness of Israeli society to its Arab neighbors (Regev and Seroussi 2004; Brinner 2009). While musiqa mizrahit rose in status and became mainstream, the music world in Israel also saw an explosion of

“world music”, primarily by way of middle-eastern styles and traditions.92 Similarly, Israeli society has seen a reawakening of interest in the liturgical musical traditions of Mizrahi Jews,

92 Benjamin Brinner’s 2009 book Playing Across a Divide provides a comprehensive account of the “ethnic music” scene in Israel, and in particular collaborations between Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian and Palestinian musicians. 215 the formation of several orchestras dedicated to Andalusian music and a growing acknowledgment of the wealth of musical knowledge emerging from the Arab-Jewish world. In

2015, while I was doing my fieldwork for this dissertation, the soundscape of Tel Aviv’s cafes and restaurants were distinctly marked by the sounds of Arab music.

In returning briefly to Raviv’s accounting of the falafel’s transformation from an appropriated Arab street snack food to an important symbol of Israeli cuisine, she notes that after the 1948 war and Israel’s establishment, falafel was detached from its Arab origins by utilizing the immigration of Jews from Arab countries into Israel: “Since falafel could now be linked to Jewish immigrants who had come from the Middle-East and Africa, it could shed its

Arab association in favor of an overarching Israeli identification” (2015:18).93

Within this broader, historical cultural context, the “falafel jazz” food analogy is particularly spicy. Much of the music created by Israeli jazz musicians blends influences derived from musical traditions that come from the Middle-East and North Africa. Yet, much like the falafel itself, its roots lie firmly in Arab culture. Can we, then, speak of “falafel jazz” simply as an appropriation of “Arab music” or can we also speak of the process as one of re- connecting and representing musical traditions and practices that Arab-Jews have consumed and practiced for centuries? Further, does “falafel jazz” not also reflect a further fusion of additional transcultural influences?

There is certainly a problematic irony in the way in which “falafel” and “hummus” are celebrated and marketed internationally as “Israeli”, as doing so masks the history of

Ashkenazy hegemony and attendant denigration and appropriation of Arab and Arab-Jewish

93 As Raviv notes in her book tensions and arguments about cultural ownership of the falafel have been raging on between Palestinians and Israelis for decades. Raviv cites a New York Times article “it appears that today most Israelis acknowledge the Arab origins of falafel, whereas some Palestinians concede that falafel is a regional food and therefore is not “owned” by any one nation” (24-25). 216 cultural traditions and practices. Similarly, it is worth noting that much of the music made by

Israeli jazz musicians, and promoted by Israeli and Jewish festival promoters, embassy and consulate representatives as quintessentially “Israeli” is steeped in influences that come from

Arab musical traditions. Whereas, these cultural influences are in fact part of the heritage of so many of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel, there is also a cruel irony in the continued socio- economic and political marginalization of the Arab population, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that lives within Israel and beyond its borders.

Furthermore, as noted in my discussion about the politics of genre, the term “falafel jazz” lightly conceals an attack on the music these artists make as “cheap” and of “low culture”. Similar attacks have been leveled against musiqa mizrahit artists for decades. Thus, such criticism appears to be at least partially rooted in still pervasive racial, ethnic and cultural divisions within Israeli society. The lingering attitudes of institutions and individuals continue to situate the cultural practices of Mizrahi Jews and non-Jewish Arabs as somehow culturally inferior to the cultural practices of Ashkenazy Jews.

THE FUTURE OF ISRAELI JAZZ

Since my study focused primarily on the first two waves of Israeli jazz musicians, it invites sustained engagement with the work of players who belong to the Third and subsequent waves of Israeli jazz. Many of the younger musicians interviewed cited the pronounced influence of pioneering First Wave musicians such as bassists Avishai Cohen and Omer Avital.

Yet it is important to recall that when Cohen and Avital began blending, they were simply making their own music: There was no Israeli jazz sound, no “falafel jazz” label. In contrast, musicians who “came of age” after Cohen, Avital, Hoffman, Zamir and others, who established 217 themselves internationally creating these blended styles, grew up listening to and in many cases admiring the music of their predecessors. As much as they drew inspiration from those who came before, their examples also created challenges.

A dominant thread with these younger musicians then has to do, with issues of influence, individuality, and genre. How do they relate to and position themselves in relation to the music of Israeli jazz luminaries? How do they position their own music making vis-a-vis the music of these musicians and the generic expectations of the Israeli jazz sound? Did the success of these blended sounds mean that there was now a “stylistic target” that they aimed to capitalize on or move away from?

In pursuing such questions, albeit briefly, with my younger interlocutors, I heard multiple responses. Some aim to situate their own personal development in relative isolation from the influence of the music made by First Wave Israeli jazz musicians. For example, trumpeter Itamar Borochov states:

I don’t feel that I am a part of this Israeli jazz label in the sense that I wasn’t influenced by Avishai Cohen … nor by Omer Avital. I didn’t grow up on the style of music that these guys made. I had my own blend that came from home. I really loved Duke Ellington and I listened to Eyal Golan because it was on the radio and I loved it. So, somehow, my own blend emerged because I loved many different kinds of music. At a certain point I did become familiar with the music they were making and I loved it. When I listened to Omer Avital I loved him because he’s a great jazz player, the so- called middle-eastern side I had from home. My dad is a musician of traditional and world music and that’s what I was swimming in. So, this label [“Israeli sound”] doesn’t sit well with me. On the other hand it’s possible that every person who creates original music feel this way. I don’t really know. (Borochov 2015)

Others, like bassist Or Bareket, acknowledge the influence and feel they have a sense of responsibility to find out what they have to add to the mix:

It’s a sound, its definitely a certain sound for better or for worse…. now my generation has to deal with the fact that there are these older guys that created 218

this sound and made these substantial artistic and stylistic statements, and I have to understand what I have to add, if anything…I have to find the fine line between inspiration and imitation…lots of people, and I am one of them sometimes, won’t listen to a certain kind of music because its influence is really strong on your generation. For example, lots of guitarists prefer not to listen to Kurt Rosenwinkel because so many guitarists lift everything from him. I don’t go to the extremes, but I do try to stay minded about my influences, and I am also aware of what influences my peers. At the end of the day, it’s really easy to recognize honesty and authenticity, and that’s what’s important. (Bareket 2015)

Ultimately, it seems that what is shared by all the musicians I interviewed is valuing the search for honest and authentic musical expression. They privilege those values as the most important markers of artistic integrity and success.

Pianist Shai Maestro is an interesting case among the newer group of Israeli musicians.

Maestro melded into the international scene at a very young age as the pianist for bassist

Avishai Cohen’s bands. Indeed, he contributed a great deal with his piano playing to the now internationally acknowledged “Avishai” sound. Subsequently he has established his own career in NYC as a leader of the Shai Maestro Trio as well as a sideman for various bands. Maestro argues that for him authentic music making cannot be about aiming to line up with some stylistic target, but has to be an honest process:

I am not a huge fan of decisions. If now I said to myself - I want to create Mediterranean music. Jazz that is this kind of fusion. So, okay, you decided. You go to the piano, you start writing. What happens if you don’t feel it? What happens if you’re feeling a really beautiful chord that comes from the world of Stravinsky rather than from Nehama Hendel or Arik Einstein? You’re not going to write it cause you decided that you were going to be Mediterranean? I believe that music honestly expresses who you are as a person, with your entire history and your history isn’t just music. It’s the parents you grew up with, the food you’re used to eating, the mentality of your nation’s people, the things you watched on TV, how you deal with sickness, and I don’t know, everything that comes with being a human. And if out that comes a phrase that goes “na na na na nai” that sounds Mediterranean, so go for it, if it comes from a real and honest place. But, you know every time I decide I want to 219

make music that will sound like something… or any “decision”, it never proves itself as something that can last. I end up throwing it out, cause its not coming from a real place. (Maestro 2014)

Here Maestro is highlighting the importance of the personal search for one’s own voice and the creative imperative to express oneself as honestly as possible through one’s music.

This is a thread that has been woven throughout the pages of this dissertation. My reading of the prevalent view among Israeli jazz musicians is that ultimately, if such a search leads to a musical expression that is infused with the sounds of their childhood home, their adopted homes, their “imagined” ancestral homes and creates a blended, fused result then they embrace it. If not, interestingly, such a result is most welcome too.

In summary, as I outlined in Chapter Three, younger Israeli jazz musicians who arrived in the last ten years in North America or who arrive today benefit tremendously from the outstanding reputation for excellence that the First and Second Wave musicians established in

NYC and around the world. They also enjoy the support of older musicians and utilize professional and social “Israeli” networks built over the past twenty years. Still, artistically, the waves of Israeli jazz musicians that follow in the footsteps of icons such as Avishai Cohen and

Omer Avital each have to contend in their own way with the powerful stylistic statement these musical pioneers created. Like generations of alto sax players who followed Charlie Parker and had to contend with his profound influence on the genre and their instrument, these younger

Israeli jazz musicians are challenged to find their own original voice in the context of expectations among audiences and other musicians rooted in established stylistic expectations and genre demarcations.

Thus, research focused on younger Israeli jazz musicians might address issues such as the pedagogical impact of the return of First Wave musicians to Israel; the benefits and 220 challenges that arise from having grown up listening to and being influenced by First and

Second Wave musicians; the advent of greater exposure to a variety of styles and modes of instruction via YouTube; and based on initial impressions that I had from my fieldwork, how changing times might have changed understandings of NYC as the center for jazz.

AN AUDIOTOPIA FOR THE MIDDLE-EAST

Within complicated, painful and problematic pasts and presents, as well as interesting futures, I believe there remains much to be said about the multi-local musicianship of Israeli jazz musicians and the effects of their music. Beyond the general case for transcultural jazz as an audiotopia for a cosmopolitan view of humanity, the dedication of Israeli jazz musicians to

Arab Classical music, musiqa mizrahit, and North African idioms such as Andalusian music suggests a particular audiotopia that has more localized implications in the political sphere of the Middle-East. While Israel as a nation continues to be mired in conflict with its neighbors, these Israeli musicians, many of whom have mixed Ashkenazy and Mizrahi roots, embody a reconciliation of Jewish heritage along with a wholehearted embrace of Arab and Arab-Jewish musical traditions.

Take for example Amos Hoffman, an Ashkenazy Jew and son of a Hungarian holocaust survivor. He embodies this contradiction and offers us an audiotopic model of reconciliation, both in terms of internal Israeli divisions and an embrace of the “enemy’s music”. Or consider bassist Omer Avital, whose original music integrates post be-bop jazz vernaculars with influences derived from Arab classical music, the SLI, Andalusian music, musiqa mizrahit,

Yemenite and Moroccan folk and liturgical traditions. Whereas we know that Jewish musicians have been deeply immersed in practicing Arab musical traditions for centuries, the 221 circumstances of today’s omnipresent political conflict means that the audiotopias that

Hoffman and Avital’s music can create might have especially broad implications.

Much like Hoffman and Avital, the many Israeli jazz musicians at the center of this dissertation have answered the call of “playing their own voice” to the tune of music that blends often diverse and at times divisive sources from the world over in a wholly personal way. Many of the most innovative and exciting developments in jazz today continue to happen in the “broken middle” (Fellezs 2011) of transgeneric music. This transcultural, stylistic polyphony not only produces exciting sounds, but offers a vision of an audiotopia for a post- nationalist world that embraces the multi-locality of identity, and strives to go beyond the privileging of national identification. It provides a space and “place” for cultural exchange to occur. While particularism and local affiliations may retain their significance and influence, multi-locality as practiced by Israeli jazz musicians promises the possibility of engendering increased empathy and compassion for cultures other than one’s own and thus “a better way of living” (Levitas 1993). I cannot think of a region in the world that needs such utopian yearning and practical possibilities of realizing it more than the Middle-East.

222

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DISCOGRAPHY

Avital, Avi and Omer Avital. 2017. Avital Meets Avital. Deutsche Grammophon.

Avital, Omer. 2012 Ahavat Olamim: Andalusian Hebrew Song from the Maghreb to Jerusalem. Jewish Music: Research Centre The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. CD ______. 2014. New Song. Motema Music. ______. 2016. Abutbul Music. Jazz Village.

Borochov, Itamar. 2014. “Bgida”. Outset. Real Bird Records.

Cohen, Anat. 2007. Poetica. Anzic Records. ______. 2012. Luminosa. Anzic Records.

Cohen, Anat and Marcello Goncalves 2016. Outra Coisa. Anzic Records.

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Cohen, Anat and Trio Brasileiro. 2016. Rosa Dos Ventos. Anzic Records.

Cohen, Avishai (bass). 1998. Adama. Stretch Records. ______. 2001. Unity. Stretch Records. ______. 2006. Continuo. Razdaz Recordz. ______. 2008 Shaot Regishot (Sensitive Hours). Razdaz Recordz. ______. 2010. Seven Seas. EMI Music France: . ______. 2011. Aurora. EMI Records. ______. 2013. Almah. Parlophone Music France. ______. 2017. ‘1970’. Sony Masterworks.

Cohen, Avishai (trumpet). 2016. Into the Silence. ECM Records. ______. 2017. Cross My Palm With Silver. ECM Records.

Cohen Yuval. 2014. Hakol Zehavi. Anzic Records.

Degibri, Eli. 2010. Israeli Song. Anzic Records

Gurvich, Uri. 2013. “The Hagiga Suite”. BabEl. Tzadik Records.

Hoffman, Amos. 2006. Na’ama. Magda. ______. 2008. Evolution. Razdaz Recordz. ______. 2010. Carving. Razdaz Recordz.

Mor, Omri. 2014. All Original: Best young Israeli jazz presented by Avishai Cohen. Razdaz Recordz. Noiberg, Hadar. 2010. “Hafla”. Journey Back Home.

Pattituci, John. 2017. Irmãos de Fé. Newvelle Records.

Salem, Ilan. 2011. Wild. Razdaz Recordz.

The Jazz Workshop. 1972 (re-released 2015). Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu. Vizart Ltd.

Zamir, Daniel. 2000. Satlah. Tzadik Records. ______. 2004. Hazamir Shar (Pop!) [Zamir Sings (pop!)]. ______. 2006. Amen. The Eighth Note.

WEB RESOURCES

America-Israel Cultural Foundation. “Mission and Impact”. https://www.aicf.org/about/mission-impact/. Accessed July 28, 2017.

Bambarger, Bradley. 2017. “Anat Cohen Biography”. Anat Cohen. https://www.anatcohen.com/biography/. Accessed June 17, 2017. 229

Beit Avi Chai. “Who We Are”. http://www.bac.org.il/ENG Accessed July 30 2017

Brown Maurice J.E. and Kenneth L. Hamilton. "Song without words." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/subscriber/articl e/grove/music/26214. Accessed August 8, 2017

Gilbert, Andrew. 2012. “Noam Lemish: Swinging in Shangri-La”. Berkeleyside. http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/07/26/noam-lemish-swinging-in-shangri-la/. Accessed September 12, 2017.

______.2008. “The Israeli Jazz Wave: Promised Land to Promised Land”. JazzTimes. http://jazztimes.com/articles/18117-the-israeli-jazz-wave-promised-land- to-promised-land. Accessed July 22, 2016.

Jarenwattananon, Patrick. 2010. “Why Are So Many Jazz Musicians From Israel These Days?”. NPR Music, a blog supreme. http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2010/11/19/131451175/why- are-so- many-jazz-musicians-from-israel-these-days. Accessed July 22, 2016.

Kinor David. “Yeshivat Bnei Akiva – Kinor David.” http://kinor-david.co.il/. Accessed June 20, 2016.

Lemish, Noam and Ofer Globerman. 1998. IJO: Israeli Jazz Online. http://www.reocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/6189/. Accessed August 16, 2017

Mandel, Jonah. 2010. “New School Offers Music Training in a Religious Setting.” . http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/New-school- offers-music-training-in-a-religious-setting. Accessed June 20, 2016.

Selasi, Taiye. 2014. “Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local.” Ted Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_ i_m_a_local. Accessed August 11, 2017

Shalev, Ben. 2016. “Be’taut Tsamcha Po Ma’atsamat Jazz Ktana”. Ha’aretz. https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/music/.premium-1.2892437. Accessed March 29, 2016.

Silberstein, Yotam. 2017. “An Epic Moment Last Night.” Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100598283452307&set=a.5207669 86967.2056865.34603897&type=3&theater. Accessed August 5, 2017. ______. 2017. “A Very Special Reunion Tomorrow Night at the Django.” Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100599586520947&set=a.5234264 32417.2060675.34603897&type=3&theater. Accessed August 5, 2017. 230

The Center for Jazz Studies. “About the Program”. http://www.icm.org.il/jazz/. Accessed October 14, 2017.

Time Out Editors. 2006. “Omer Avital Group.” Time Out New York. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/omer-avital-group. Accessed August 2, 2017.

Tzadik. “Radical Jewish Culture”. https://www.tzadik.com/. Accessed October 14, 2017.

ONLINE VIDEO CLIPS

Gardaya, Algiers. March 2014. “Piyyut Zameru Shem Yotzer Harim”. Music Video on YouTube. Posted [March 2014]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr- GEwDh4zo. Accessed July 17, 2017.

Kriss, Itai and Televana. July 23, 2017. “Itai Kriss & Televana Performs Sahadi’s Serenade.” Music Video on YouTube. Posted by Congahead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPgeDeCmMA. Accessed June 20, 2017.

INTERVIEWS

Abro, Gilad. July 2, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Avital, Omer. August 12 and 14, 2017. Via Skype.

Bareket, Or. May 27, 2015. New York, NY.

Barnoy, Erez. June 28, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Beger, Albert. July 13, 2015. Dor, Israel.

Berihun, Abate. July 17, 2015. Rishon Letziyon.

Borochov, Itamar. May 26, 2015. New York, NY.

Brayer, Opher. June 26, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Bresler, Amir. July 19, 2015. Jaffa, Israel.

Cohen, Anat. August 7, 2017. Via Skype.

Cohen, Yonatan. July 6, 2015. Ra’anana, Israel.

Cohen, Yuval. July 21, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel. 231

Cohen Milo, Haggai. December 17, 2014. New York, NY.

Degibri, Eli. July 20, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Farber, Alon. July 7, 2015. Kfar Saba, Israel.

Fort, Anat. June 30, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Friedman, Amit. June 23, 2015. Tel Mond, Israel.

Ganor, Ofer. June 26, 2015. Moshav Nir Tzvi, Israel.

Gottfried, Dann. July 6, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Gurvich, Uri. May 28, 2015. New York, NY.

Greenstein, Jonathan. June 3, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Handelsman, Dan. June 25, 2015. Ramat Hasharon, Israel.

Hekselman, Gilad. May 29, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Hoffman, Amos. December 22-23, 2014. Columbia, South Carolina.

Homan, David. December 18, 2014. New York, NY.

Kimelman, Amikam. July 1, 2015. Ramat Hasharon, Israel.

Klein, Omer. May 11, 2016. Via Skype.

Kriss, Itai. May 25, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Lebovich, Avi. July 8, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Lenz, Dubi. June 18, 2015. Herzeliya, Israel.

Maestro, Shai. December 18, 2014. Brooklyn, NY.

Mor, Omri. July 7, 2015 Jerusalem, Israel. ______.July 20, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel.

Noiberg, Hadar. June 3, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Ravitz, Ziv. December 17, 2014. Brooklyn, NY.

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Regev, Yossi. July 6, 2015. Moshav , Israel.

Remez, Nadav. June 3, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Sagee-Keren, Alona. June 23, 2015. Ra’anana, Israel.

Salem, Ilan. July 16, 2015. Tel Aviv, Israel. ______. July 30, 2017. Via Skype.

Seroussi, Edwin. July 7, 2015. Jerusalem, Israel.

Shalev, Ben. July 2, 2015. Ramat Gan, Israel.

Sivan, Rotem. May 29, 2015. New York, NY.

Talmor, Ohad. May 27, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Tzur, Oded. May 28, 2015. Brooklyn, NY.

Weiss, Barak. August 6, 2017. Via Skype.

Zamir, Daniel. July 14, 2015. Giv’at Washington, Israel.