Autumn Nights in the Old City

October 2, 2009 - 1:32 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Israeliness, Music 

There’s nothing like a Jerusalem night. After a hot day, it cools down but not so much that you’re shivering. That’s one reason the city is sponsoring its free “Fall Nights in the Old City” festival now until October 26 – it’s a way to get out and have some shirtsleeve fun while exploring the city’s historic Jewish Quarter.

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Last night’s show was the Marsh Dondurma band – a motley crew of 15 brass musicians playing traditional ethnic music from around the world with a heavy emphasis on jazz, klezmer, funk and a smattering of pop too (I’m pretty sure I heard snippets of “Rock Around the Clock”).

The band includes trumpets, trombones, clarinets, saxophone, and assorted percussion instruments.

There’s no way to leave a Marsh Dondurma concert without a huge grin on your face. The music is infectious and the band members seem to be having such a good time on stage. And when do you ever get to see a dancing tuba player rocking out at close range.

The setting was spectacular – the Gan Hatekuma amphitheater set along an ancient wall not from the Western Wall itself. The audience was as eclectic as the performers – religious, secular, Jerusalemites and Tel Avivi’s with their shaved heads and small round glasses.

We were sitting right up front when some of the band’s fanboys started dancing right in front of us. Such chutzpah, we thought, to block everyone’s view like that. But when the bandleader exhorted the crowd to get up and boogie, we figured if you can’t beat them, join them.

Before long, a good portion of the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds, was grooving up front.

Marsh Dondurma has played all over Israel as well as at the Guca Trumpet Festival in Serbia (2006), The Montreal Jazz Festival (2007), and at venues in New York and Croatia. The clip above is from their Montreal performance.

You can catch more music from the band on their MySpace page.

The next show at Gan HaTekuma will be klezmer kings Oy Division on October 12. The full schedule is here.


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Returning to Israel and jazz again

April 3, 2009 - 10:11 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles 

Jaroslav JakubovicJaroslav Jakubovic, or JJ, as he’s known in some jazz circles, can’t stay away from Israel. And he can’t seem to stay in Israel either.

Jakubovic grew up in Prague and has fond memories of cutting Czech military orchestra rehearsal short to play an impromptu, defiant jazz “welcome” to the Soviet tanks as they rolled in to the city in 1968. At the age of 20, Jakubovic defected two weeks later and moved to Israel.

But soon he was abroad again, studying jazz at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and jamming with the likes of Lionel Hampton, Bobby Rosengarden and Buddy Rich in New York. By the end of the Seventies, he was maintaining a successful career as a saxophonist, doing time in jazz orchestras, releasing solo albums and serving as a session man and accompanist for Carly Simon, Bette Midler, Paul Simon and others.

But in 1980, he moved back to Israel. As he recently told Ha’aretz,

“When I got married, I promised my mother that my children would grow up in Israel and there was no way in the world I wouldn’t keep my promise.”

Jakubovic worked as a producer for CBS records in Israel over the Eighties and Nineties, overseeing landmark rock-pop albums including Shalom Chanoch’s Chatuna Levana (White Wedding), but he also worked on a lot of cheese and crap, if he does say so himself:

“I ran after nothing. To make money I got into all sorts of productions of bullshit that made me want to vomit. Terrible things. And in the end I also didn’t make money.”

He claims that his move back abroad in 2001 is unrelated to these more embarrassing projects, and he regrets the move. The Ha’aretz profile/interview was published on the occasion of a visit to Israel to celebrate the local release of Coincidence, a new project that brought him back to jazz performance, thanks to the cajoling of old Prague friend George Mraz, so JJ still comes to visit regularly.

And he’s trying to find new ways to get back involved with the Israeli industry, including through his own label, VMM, but there are no plans to officially move back here:

“I’m not planning to return and I really don’t miss the industry and the cliques. But I can’t disconnect from this place. The roots have sunk in deep. I miss Israel without realizing. It’s totally missing.”

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Tel Aviv, Shmel Aviv

July 22, 2008 - 8:05 AM by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Travel 

Tel Aviv Sure, I’m just as happy as the next guy that Tel Aviv got a fantastic write up in the New York Times. My problem with the piece is that it recycles the same information available in every other article written about Tel Aviv. Yes, I know, Madonna ate at Manta Ray (maybe because it was directly across the street from her hotel?), yes, Brasserie and Coffee Bar are indeed hip (but is it about the food or being seen?), the Bauhaus architecture, the fancy shmancy luxury apartments, Neve Tzedek, etc, etc…..all the rich stuff. The piece made me sad. It made Tel Aviv (often referred to as “Hell Aviv” by my Jerusalem loyalist friends) seem like the most pretentious place on earth. Hell yeah it’s got pretension, but it is not lurking in every corner. Especially not at Levontine 7…

…This impermanence can be an intensifier. I think of the hour I spent at a club called Levontine 7. Started by three musicians (including Ilan Volkov, the Israeli-born conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), the dark and underdecorated two-level club is in Gan Ha Hashmal, Tel Aviv’s former unofficial red-light district, which is sprouting those kinds of hyper-groovy stores — one was selling a lamp made out of forks and spoons — that fascinate but baffle. For the recent national basketball finals, Levontine 7 hired two groups of six musicians who each improvised music to go with one team’s movements, in the manner of a silent movie.

Agreed, improvising Jazz to a live basketball game is a bit much, but that is not at all what Levontine 7 is all about. It is one of the only venues in the city that fosters indie musicians of all disciplines.

I’m also a bit miffed that the journalist spent a full week in Tel Aviv, but just eight hours in Jerusalem.

And while the memories I developed during the course of my weeklong, first-ever trip to Tel Aviv are pleasant and strong, the ones I concurrently made during my eight-hour-long, first-ever trip to Jerusalem are permanently scarred into my brain.

You don’t have to be devout, or even a believer, to be moved to tears by a visit to Jesus’ Stations of the Cross or to the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem. At the latter, the Children’s Memorial is a single room in which five candles are reflected in 500 mirrors, creating the impression of an infinity of candles; meanwhile a voice slowly intones the individual names and nationalities of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by Nazis. The effect is bone-chilling.

I am not going to fault the writer for his heavy experience in Jerusalem. It can be quite a heady city, but to completely ignore the myriad of cultural offerings in Jerusalem is nothing less than a crime. But hey, why experience the awesomeness of Jerusalem when you can eat where Madonna ate?

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