Sweating the small stuff too
Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival
While it’s the big news that gets all the headlines, sometimes it’s the small stuff that’s the hardest to sweat. Last week, terrorists attacked along the Israel-Egypt border just north of Eilat. The ensuing days have been filled with IDF strikes and Gazan counterattacks. More people have died.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the seminal rap-rock band HaDag Nahash was playing a concert at Sultan’s Pool as part of the annual Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival. Our 17-year-old daughter Merav had a plan to dance up a storm with her friends at the show. She got all dolled up, then received a phone call.
“There’s a terror alert in Mamila (the mall that is adjacent to Sultan’s Pool). Everyone’s been ordered to get off the street and hide in the stores. There are police everywhere. It’s really serious,” her friend on the phone said.
“What should I do?” Merav asked us. “I want to go…”
“…but you don’t want to die,” I finished her sentence.
“Right,” she responded.
We checked the news. There was indeed a “high alert” going on in Jerusalem, but it was mostly along the highways entering the city from the north and west – Highway 443 was reported to have back-ups for up to 10 km coming towards the checkpost from Modi’in. But nothing written about trouble in town.
“If they’re locking down the mall, they must have some good lead,” I speculated.
“Maybe I could get to the concert from the other side,” Merav offered.
“No, they’ll have closed everything,” I said.
“And the other way is kind of dark,” Merav remembered. “Oof, this sucks! I really like HaDag Nahash.”
“And I really like you…alive,” I replied. I wish I were trying to be ironic.
Merav sat in the kitchen, now with two of her friends. While we’d tried to leave the decision up to Merav (with some strongly worded parental advice), one of her friends had much stricter marching orders.
“My mom says I can’t even leave your house,” she said gloomily.
The truth is, this kind of terror lock down has been pretty rare in recent years. During the early 2000s, it was a nearly daily occurrence, but nowadays we take for granted that we can sit at a Café Aroma and sip an iced limon-nana on a warm Jerusalem night with carefree abandon.
But an arts and crafts festival with tens of thousands of nightly attendees makes a pretty good spot for an attack. It’s a reminder that, despite our protestations and blogs to the contrary, Israel is not quite yet that “normal” nation we proffer it to be.
And yet the contrary is just as true: we say (and we mean it) that we won’t let the bad guys stop us from living our lives. If Merav had received a call just then saying the threat had passed, she would have been on the next bus to town, with our blessing.
The girls wound up reluctantly taking a pass on the show. We watched a family movie instead: “The Invention of Lying.” It was an amusing distraction.
Later, Merav talked to a friend of hers who had made it to the show. It was amazing, Merav quoted. “But he said everyone was terrified. They spent the whole concert looking around, trying to spot if there was a terrorist in the crowd.” She added, almost parenthetically, that she was, in fact, glad she hadn’t gone in the end.
There was no terror attack and the threat level was lifted by morning. My wife and I are scheduled to attend the festival and show on Tuesday (Ehud Banai is playing live). And unless the roads are closed, we’ll be there, defiant, proud and enjoying a warm Jerusalem evening.
Funky Israel gets in the groove
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture
The Apples - the Afro is real
Until a few years ago, the funkiest Israel music got was the hip hop hybrids offered by Shabak Samech and Hadag Nahash.
Today, however, the music scene is bursting with horn charts, sinewy grooves, Afros and matching outfits, as a whole slew of artists ranging from Boom Pam, Digital Me, and The Ramirez Brothers to The Apples, Markey Funk, Soulico, Kuti, Karolina and Uzi Navon have discovered their inner Kool and the Gang.
They’re all coming together this week in Tel Aviv for the first-ever Groove Festival, taking place at the cavernous Hangar 11 at the Tel Aviv port. The show is in celebration of the release of Mediterranean Grooves and Raw Sounds, a compilation of 20 songs featuring the artists who will be performing. It’s the brainchild of Audio Montage, a boutique Tel Aviv record label that has released albums by The Apples, Radio Trip and Boom Pam.
According to The Apples’ Erez Todors, the whole movement can be traced back to an old song from the early 1970s called “I Paint the Leaves Green,” performed by Yoram Arbel who went on to truncate his music career and become one of the country’s top sportscasters and TV personalities.
Yoram Arbel
“To this day, that’s the funkiest song that Israel has ever produced,” said Toders, DJ for The Apples, who are no slouches themselves when it comes to rhythmic, horn-driven groove music. Even Hadag Nahash have covered it, embellishing it with modern hip hop mixes.
And almost 40 years since recording the classic Israeli pop song, Arbel is going to perform the song and others from his sole album onstage at the festival together with The Apples.
“It’s very exciting,” Arbel said after rehearsing with The Apples three times. “Before I said yes, I told them my condition was that we meet for one rehearsal, we record it, and if I find that I’m in tune and my vocal chords are still functioning, then I’ll continue.”
Lucky concert-goers can witness the results for themselves on Thursday night in Tel Aviv, as the funk flag is flown high and proud.
Hear what Hadag Nahash did with Arbel’s funky song here.
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Ramirez Brothers invade Tel Aviv
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Life, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles
You can hear a lot of different types of music bouncing around the vibrant Tel Aviv nightclub scene – from tons of dance/electro pop to ‘beautiful Israel’ public sing-alongs to grungy alternative rock, all within walking distance from each other.
But not even experienced Tel Aviv scenesters weren’t prepared for a group that combines a piercing trumpet, Jack White-distorted guitar histrionics, ’70-styled funk and soul rhythms and a mess of facial hair. Never mind that all three members are brothers hailing from Mexico!
Forget that last part – The Ramirez Brothers are indeed the name of the band, but they’re not from Mexico and they’re not brothers. They’re just three talented Tel Aviv musicians with a penchant for shedding their shirts during their sweat-inducing performances. With songs sung in English that evolve into groove-based, howling jams, the band has gained a word-of-mouth following around the Tel Aviv area and are poised to break out beyond Israel’s borders soon.
“We thought it would be really cool to have stage names. And even though we’re not biological brothers, we are very close friends,” explained Sefi Ramirez (Zisling), the band’s trumpet player, who along with Uzi Ramirez (Feinerman) on guitar and vocals, and Eitan Ramirez (Efrat) on drums form the rather unorthodox trio, who effortlessly tackle an Americana mix of blues, funk, r&b and some Hendrix hysteria.
They’re no strangers to the Israeli music scene with Uzi handling guitar chores for Hadag Nahash and Sefi taking the solos for Funk’N'Stein and Yehudit Ravitz’s band. But The Ramirez Brothers is their passion and their baby, and their music offers a most exciting and seamless Israeli-American synthesis
So, the next time you unkowingly walk into a Tel Aviv club and suddenly think you’ve been transported to the American Deep South circa 1974, you’ll know that you’ve just stumbled upon The Ramirez Brothers. Don’t forget to say hi.
Here’s Johnny
Filed under: Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles
The cover of The Johnny Show
Johnny has that musical gift, and unlike many of us who never develop their seed of talent over the course of a lifetime, he lives and breathes music. This kid has a home studio, he’s produced albums for hip hop artists like Sagol 59, and he’s got his own dazzling versatile album out now called The Johnny Show, which features guests like Hadag Nahash, Shlomi Shaban and Useless ID. And he’s still going to high school, for pete’s sake.
And to top all that, he’s the sweetest kid you’d ever want to meet – soft-spoken, shy and earnest, but with a constant smile on his face. I guess this could be a story about a teen anywhere, but what struck me as being a uniquely Israeli version of the gifted kid makes good, is the fact that next year Johnny’s going to put aside his fast-track career and devote three years to serving his country in the army.
He told me that he hopes to serve in the entertainment troupes and continue playing music, but if it turns out that he ends up in a combat unit, he’s ready and willing. I guess there’s nothing special there either, as most of the 18-year-olds here don’t have much of a choice in what branch of the service they end up in.
But I’m hoping that Johnny is given the chance to play his keyboards or drums, or produce IDF band albums, or in some way, be allowed to continue exploring his muse. And that his smile continues to stay on his face and brighten everyone else’s.
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