From Material Girl to Zionist

February 8, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture 

Madonna performing in Tel Aviv in 2009 with an Israeli flag draped over her.

Is it just the luck of the draw that the Queen of Pop, Madonna, has decided to open her 2012 world tour in Israel? I think not.

The Material Girl, who provided a spectacle-filled half time show for attendees and viewers of the Super Bowl on Sunday night, scored her own Hebrew touchdown this week when she announced that her mega-tour to promote her new album MDNA would kick off on May 29 at Ramat Gan Stadium.

In a press conference, Israeli promoter Shuki Weiss disclosed that the 54-year-old cultural icon will arrive in Israel two weeks before the concert, accompanied by an entourage of more than 300 people, to carry out intensive rehearsals for the show.

And since debuts of world tours of someone of Madonna’s caliber are international news events, hundreds of foreign entertainment journalists are expected to descend on the country.

This provides an amazing PR opportunity for Israel to gain worldwide exposure for a news event that has nothing to do with the things we’re usually in the news for: Iran, Palestinians, Hezbollah, separate seating for men and women, or any other of the issues that the foreign media tends to focus on when Israel is the topic.

How cool is it that instead of more of the same, this time we’re going to be seen hand in hand with the world debut of Madonna’s show that is going to travel to over 50 other cities in the world and probably one of the biggest-grossing tours of the year. While it may be a coincidence that the tour is starting in Israel, Madonna’s past indicates that she’s developed a real affinity for the country and its people ever since she performed here for the first time in 1999 at Hayarkon Park.

Since then, she’s returned a number of times for event as the Kabbala Center in Tel Aviv, and in September, 2009, she closed her Sticky & Sweet tour back at Hayarkon Park with two shows.

“It isn’t even a regular visit anymore when she comes,” Weiss said at the press conference on Tuesday. “It’s as if she is the process of making aliya.”

What he probably meant was that Madonna likely feels comfortable with the country and its lifestyle to the extent that she decided to use it as a base for two weeks ahead of the tour’s opening.

“Every time I come here, I get so supercharged with energy,” she said onstage in 2009. “I truly believe that Israel is the energy center of the world. And I also believe that if we can all live together in harmony in this place, then we can live in peace all over the world.”

By choosing to open her tour here and bringing the world’s focus to our small country, Madonna is doing a great service in promoting the above ideals and spreading the word that what we have here is indeed the energy center of the world, and proving that in addition to whatever other monikors that she’s had hoisted upon her, there’s one more that fits her to a T: Zionist.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Kol Israel archive open to all

February 5, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, education, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Technology 

As the child of a folksinger, it was more than exciting to read that the archive of American ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax has finally be digitized and 17,000 music tracks made accessible online through the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). Lomax’s research, books and investigative sprit were evident on my parents’ bookshelves and record collection. As the child of an Israeli folksinger, it was equally exciting to hear that the Kol Israel (Voice of Israel) music collection has also been digitized and made publicly accessible. Israeli folk songs were, of course, a part of daily life.

“Technology has caught up to the imagination of Lomax,” and his vision of a “global jukebox”, wrote the New York Times of the newly opened ACE storehouse of audio treasure. Locally, the same is true. Only a few weeks ago, Israeli nostalgia repository Nostal.co.il launched an online radio station of old Israeli songs. Late last summer, we reported on Shapam’s collection of old radio ad spots. And now, the largest collection of Israeli music from pre-State to recent times, has been made available to the general public.

The Kol Israel preservation project was conducted by the National Sound Archives which is part of the Music Department at the Israel National Library. The Archives has the world’s largest collection of ethnographic and commercial recordings of Israeli and Jewish music. The online collection is available both via the National Sound Archive and through the Israel Broadcasting Authority website.

In a radio interview on Friday, Dr. Gila Flam, Head of the Music Department and National Sound Archive, described the volume of the Kol Israel project. In 1983, 6,300 phonograph records belonging to Kol Israel to the National Library. The majority were recordings of radio broadcasts as well as commercial recordings. Flam noted that these were rare acetate master records produced specifically for radio broadcast.

An additional 20,000 records containing a variety of materials were transferred in 2002 of which approximately 5,000 were selected for cataloging and preservation.

Most of these records contain broadcasts from the 1950s and include many unique recordings, chiefly in the field of Israeli music. The labels, which were photographed and cataloged, contain relevant information, such as the name of the artist, production date, etc. There are speeches, such as Israeli Ambassador to the US Abba Eban’s speech on Israel’s 9th Day of Independence, holiday songs like Tu b’Shvat (a dolorous ditty but included here in honor of the upcoming holiday), Im Nin’alu performed by Yemenite immigrants (the song was later made famous in a dance-trance version by the late great Ofra Haza), and of course, no Israeli musicological collection would be complete without accordion renditions of folk dances like Simi Yadech b’Yadi (Put your hand in mine) and Hora Agadati.

There are curiosities as well, such as Arik Lavie’s HaSela HaAdom (The Red Rock) which is labeled quite plainly: “This record is forbidden from broadcast”. The reason for the banning? The song, which described a midnight trip across the border into what was once enemy territory, to visit Jordan’s legendary Petra, had apparently inspired many young people to make similar treks to their peril. And so, Israel Radio bore the national responsibility to quash the trend.

The Legacy Heritage Fund, which provided funding for the digitization project, states, “Because of their impaired physical state, the records cannot be played at all, even for research purposes. The majority are made of acetate and are considered to be at risk because of chemical processes which could cause them to disintegrate at any moment. According to the research and directives of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), these materials should be transferred to digital format immediately in order to preserve their content.”

“As part of this project the Kol Israel recordings, among others, are being transferred from analog to digital format. The Sound Archive includes studios equipped with instruments for optimal playback of old records and conversion to digital formats. After undergoing a cleaning and fixing process, the original materials are converted to both WAV files, for preservation, and MP3 files, to enable access. The preservation process is compliant with the IASA standards.”

Each month, dozens of new audio files will be added. The complete Kol Israel collection is currently being digitized and is scheduled to be uploaded by the end of 2012.

The library has also compiled collections of songs for ease of listening, such as a Nostalgic Hebrew Songs compilation.

The Music Department and National Sound Archive at the National Library welcomes public contributions and additions to the collections and knowledge database on any subject relating to Jewish or Israeli music and are happy to receive songs, recordings, manuscripts and any other material relevant to this field of study.

BTW: The ACE collection has almost no Jewish/Israeli content (Lomax researched the US, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain) but there is a radio show from 1948 that features part of this song, Dance the Hora: “Don’t be sad now, little one, little one / I command you to be happy / All our lives are sorrowful, sorrowful / Come forget your fears and troubles / Let’s have rhythm, let’s have dancing / Bring the music, bring the wine / Let the old and young clasp hands now / dance the hora /” etc. etc. It isn’t much of a folk song — or a song, for that matter — but the lyrics, sung in accented English to the accompaniment of an accordion (what else?) gives some insight as to the Jewish condition in that important year.

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In English or Hebrew, it’s Yael Deckelbaum

February 2, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture 

The number of Israel rock and pop artists singing in English in recent years has exploded. Between Assaf Avidan, Geva Alon, Tamar Eisenman, and a plethora of others, it seems sometimes like there’s more English than Hebrew out there.

So, in a refreshing change of pace, one of the first Israeli singers in English – Yael Deckelbaum – is bucking the trend and has just released her first exclusively Hebrew-language CD, Joy and Sadness.

A long-time fixture on the Israeli-Anglo club and festival circuit, Deckelbaum combines the folkie elements of Joni Mitchell and the bluesy wail of Janis Joplin into a cohesive whole. She’s the daughter of the late David Deckelbaum, who immigrated to Israel from Canada as a youngster and with his banjo led the bawdy folk/country/Irish Jerusalem legends The Taverners throughout the 1970s and 80. That’s where young Yael learned about music, and not even into her teens, she was joining her father onstage at The Jacob’s Ladder Folk Festival – Israel’s annual version of Woodstock.

By her early 20s, she stepped into the solo spotlight, and has been a live mainstay on Israeli stages – becoming even more well-known when she joined up with singers Karolina and Dana Adini to form the vocal trio Habanot Nechama.

After releasing her debut solo album in 2009 called Ground Zero, Deckelbaum began focusing on writing songs in Hebrew – her actual native tongue. And the result is Joy and Sadness, featuring a poignant photo of a young Deckelbaum riding on the shoulders of her father.

She promises she hasn’t abandoned writing and performing in English, and when she takes the stage for the album’s debut this month in Tel Aviv, she’ll be bi-lingual, and backed by two different bands – her own and special guests Mashina.

Whatever language Deckelbaum sings in, it seems to come out magic.

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Broza on board

January 19, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, Entertainment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Travel 

It’s clearly video week for me, but this does not mean I spend all my time on YouTube. That said, here is an absolutely fabulous one, of singer/songwriter David Broza giving an impromptu, private performance to a group of El Al flight attendants in the back galley kitchen.

A little background: From posts I’ve gathered from Facebook, emails and YouTube comments, Broza was flying to New York — his fiance, clothing designer Nili Lotan, also Israeli, lives in New York — on January 3, and one of the flight staff, who are all generally young, out of the army, sometimes simultaneously in university, asked him for a song. And as he has before, and as he does in his often intimate concerts, such as one he recently did for
the Masorti center in Tel Aviv (he belongs to Kehillat Sinai, a Tel Aviv Conservative synagogue), he sat himself down in the galley, and sang an old favorite, Sigaliot, Violets:

Here are the lyrics, in English, for edification.

VIOLETS

She got married and she is happy
in spite her husband being wild
all the time he is in a bad mood
and even doesn’t know why
for the last three years, she receives
under the door, from an unknown man,
letters of poetry to her
they lighten up her youth.

Who is writing to you, girl, who sends you flags
a bunch of purple flowers when spring comes
who, every ninth of November,
with no name, greetings or hint,
sends you a wreath of violets tied with a bow

The whole night she can’t fall asleep
she day dreams about him
probably a man with a romantic heart,
good soul and simpatico smile
for three years she has been suffering in silence
yes sometimes she nearly screams
and what if her husband found out?
she hides her letters

When her husband comes home from work
throws a questioning glance
He doesn’t say anything,but he knows,
if she knew she would go crazy
Yes, it’s him that writes to her,
he is the lover, he is the subject of her dreams
And what if her husband found out?
She hides her letters.

Who is…

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Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeli songs

January 15, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, tv 

Last week was a busy one in the world of Israeli musical nostalgia. David Sela, a prolific online archivist and proprietor of the wonderful Nostal site, launched his latest labor of love: Radio Nostalgia an online music channel playing Israeli hits of yesteryear, 24/7.

In an interview with Israel Hayom, Sela stated that he and music editor Yoram Siman-Tov, had selected a library of about 4,500 Israeli oldies going back at least 25 years — 25 being the cut-off date (or is that the starting point?) for being considered an “oldie”. Each year, the station plans to add another year’s worth of old songs to the database.

Sela also said he was reviewing several proposals for radio broadcasts as well.

The Nostal website itself houses tens of thousands of images, some 1,000 videos, hundreds of audio clips, as well as scanned newspapers, magazines, posters, postcards, books, toys, trinkets and other ephemera. Sela stated that the site had visitors from 132 countries and estimated that 19 percent of users are Israelis living abroad.

Another great source of old Israeli songs is the YouTube channel called, not surprisingly, OldIsraeliSongs. It’s run by record company NMC United Entertaiment, which holds the rights to the old Hed Arzi music catalog.

The 90s may be less than 25 years away, though not by much, but enough time has elapsed to give music aficionados some historical perspective. Radio host and pop music historian Yoav Kutner has deemed that decade the most important in Israeli rock and produced a five-part series for Channel 8, The Albums, about five seminal works: Simanei Hulsha by Berry Sakharov, Plonter by Rami Fortis, Zman Sukar by Eifo Ha-Yeled, and the debut albums of Ziknei Tsfat and Eviatar Banai.

Following is a Ynet report on the series which features period clips as well as interviews from the launch party with Israeli rockers like Aviv Geffen (“We all lived on Sheinkin Street… there was a Sixties vibe in the air”), Gilad Segev (“I was most influenced recently by Berry Sakharov in working on my latest album”), Chemi Rudner (“Being unfashionable is the most fun”), and performances by Rudner and by a now-religious Eviatar Banai.

All agree that what happened at that time can’t be replicated — they cite commercial hype and the reality-TV-ization of the music industry, and that includes Geffen who is currently one of the judges on the Israeli version of The Voice.

But, as Rudner says, there’s still a place for artists who create for the love of it.


NOTE: If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to view.

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