Izabo's Summer Shade

This is my summer for Israeli music. Israeli bands are pushing hard to get traction in the American market. I've skyped with Israel's Oleh! Records, found out that Israeli bands took SXSW by storm, and exchanged email and tweets with Israeli bands and promoters asking me to blog about them. That's new for me but I'm game. There's a lot of great music coming out of Israel and I'm happy pass it along.

Today's find is the Israeli band Izabo. Here's their official blurb....

"Best described as a “brilliant, action packed combination of Psychedelic Rock, Disco, Punk and Arabic spices,” these psychedelic rockers secured a spot as one of Israel’s most successful alternative pop bands with the 2003 release of their debut album “The Fun Makers.”

To me they fit in the same 'Israeli beach party' orbit with my fav's Boom Pam and Electra and their new video, Summer Shade, is a perfect summer track..buzzy and languid at the same time. Like Electra Izabo sings in only lightly accented English, making it an easy listen for an American audience. In fact, the light accent and the lightly Mizrachi flavored tunes lends Izabo a perfect sense of friendly exotica.

C'mon. Even the ice cream cones have bushy mustachio's. How much more friendly does it get?

Summer Shade

Right now, Izabo is running a giveaway on their facebook site. "Like" them and get Summer Shade and two other tracks for free download.

For salvation, Kaddish. For redemption, Kaddish. For revolution, Kaddish? Ofra Haza, Twitter, and the Yemeni Revolution

It's rare that Jewish music has international prominence and when it does it's usually because of some dustup over Israel. For a current example, check yesterday's Israeli National News article "Jewish Music Group Rejects Israeli Money After Threat." While an interesting and frustrating article, Jewish music itself plays a small role. The article could just as easily been about a Jewish literary group or student group. Not so this morning.

Today I woke up to a twitter discussion between National Public radio strategist and digital technology community organizer Andy Carvin and Maria Al-Masani, a Canadian public relations agent, model, and former Miss Universe Canada. Al-Masani was telling Carvin, and others, about how Ofra Haza's song Kaddish was becoming the anthem of the current Yemeni revolution. Haza was a popular Israeli singer of a Yemeni-Jewish family who sang pop-Israeli, Yemeni-Jewish, and Yemeni-Arabic music.

Here's the exchange:

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:09: @acarvin @TomOdell Andy you are jewish? That's wonderful! Have you heard the music of Yemeni-Jewish singer Ofra Haza? http://bit.ly/Ja6MB

Acarvin Saturday 3/26, 23:11: @al_masani was a big fan of hers before she passed away, RIP.

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:13: @acarvin same here. :-) Her music in general but especially her song kaddish is played by so many in Yemen as sound track to uprising

Acarvin Saturday 3/26, 23:14: Yemeni Jewish singer Ofra Haza and the revolt. Wow. RT @al_masani: her song Kaddish is played by so many in Yemen as soundtrack to uprising

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:14: Awesome! @jilliancyork Loving how @acarvin is standing up for Muslims against Twitter hate tonight.

zweever212 Saturday 3/26, 23:22: http://youtu.be/GG0ic19pL2o Israeli singer Ofra Haza's song Kaddish played by many in Yemen as an inspiration for uprising. / @al_masani

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:26: @zweerver212 to us she is Yemeni. She also sings many songs in traditional Yemeni dialect.

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:27: @gfry @emilylhauser Ofra Haza is a source of national pride for Yemenis. We have a Yemeni-Jewish population, many are Israeli citizens

zweever212 Saturday 3/26, 23:28: @al_masani well yes, she's a yemeni jew, i've heard her songs in the dialect since im an arabic student. we're all one people.

Al-Masani Saturday 3/26, 23:27: @zweerver212 exactly, Jews, Christians Muslims united against brutal regimes #MENA #Egypt #Yemen #Libya

Ofra Haza - Kaddish

Ofra Haza singing Kaddish at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1990*

Haza's Kaddish isn't the liturgical prayer of the same name. But, similarly to Alan Ginsberg's poem Kaddish, picks up on themes from the prayer to create her own secular prayer for peace and redemption. It's a deeply moving song and it's wonderful to think of it being adopted by a people striving for redemption and peace.

The discussion is also fascinating as it shows how labels like Yemeni, Israeli, and Jew are negotiated. Haza fits all those categories, but the commentators, for their purposes, preferred more restricted descriptions. Yemeni. Yemeni-Jew. Israeli. When confronted both were able to step back to the larger label set. The result... the restricted categories turned out to be ways of describing the commentator, not Haza.

Just as a note, I don't have any independent confirmation that what Al-Masani said is true and that Haza's Kaddish is really being played in Yemen right now. If anyone has any additional information, please let me know.

* The video I posted is not the video linked in the twitter discussion, which is more pop and more English language. It's not clear from Al-Masani's tweets what recording is being played right now and the Montreaux recording has always been a favorite of mine.

hat tip to OfraFan for uploading the video.

Styles of Saturn...Israeli Music hits Miami

Styles of Saturn is a Miami area band that, according to guitar player Danny Edell, is "trying to make Israeli type of songs popular over here. With original songs like "Party's at Tel Aviv" and others we are trying to build up a jewish fanbase as much as we can." Check 'em out..I dig "Party's at Tel Aviv".



They're looking for gigs...if if you're booking, drop 'em a line.

Notes on my "Silver Age of Jewish Music" talk

I normally don't post on Shabbat, but I'm up at 3 in the morning and my brain is buzzing about my upcoming Ignite Ann Arbor talk "The Silver Age of American Jewish Music is Happening Now! And Why We're Missing It." I posted earlier this week about the talk, so I won't repeat the details here. Other than to say giving a 5 minute talk is not easy and I'm more than a little bit stressed. I can't convey a real nuanced story in 5 minutes. Anything I say will be fundamentally wrong or misleading in some major way. I just have to deal with it.

I've spent the last 2 hours working out a rough storyboard of my 20 slides. I get 15 seconds for each one. Whew. Here's a pretty close approximation of what I sketched out. Sorry the formatting's crummy, but it's 3 am. Comments anyone?

#	Design	Notes
1	?	Fast intro: I write a blog on Jewish Music. Not a musican or expert. Just a rookie fan.
2	Words/album covers 'klezmer/Dave Tarras', Cantorial/Jan Peerce', 'theater/fiddler', 'folk/hava nagila'	I knew a few random bits that had come through what passed for a national Jewish musical culture in the 1970's.
3	Avant-garde / Kelka Red & Frum-Pop / Lipa	I found this. (play 7 second music clips)
4	Jazz / David Chevan & Reggae / Matisyahu	(play 7 second music clips)
5	House / Ghettoplotz & Misrachi Chamber / Davka	(play 7 second music clips
6	Sephardic Indie / DeLeon & Pop Liturgical / Sam Glaser	(play 7 second music clips)
7	Hip Hop / Y-Love & Yiddish Blues / Wolf Karakowski	(play 7 second music clips)
8	fill screen with album covers	And lots more. Art music. Bible-gum. Yiddish Gothic. Boy Choirs. Niggunim. All happening now. But how come I didn't know about this?
9	Pictures of 1930's Jewish NYC	Because I don't live here. I'm not living in a predominately Jewish are w/ defining a Jewish culture & media
10	Picture of 1940's Catskill resort	The Golden Age of Jewish Music was in the 20's through 40's, right along with the big wave of Jewish immigrants from Europe
11	Picture of Jewish big band / swing albums?	Who like most immigrant groups clung to culture & community while at the same time radically assimilating and reinventing themselves
12	pics of a yiddish radio station, theater, newspaper and the Eldridge Street Synagogue.	Their media, and cultural lives, were tied up the local Yiddish radio station, theater, and newspapers and shuls with a superstar cantors.
13	?	I, and most Jews in the US, are products of that assimilation. We don't have that community & media because it's largely vanished.
14	pics of Orthodox & Chassidic media (e.g. JM in the AM, a Big Event type poster, the Jewish Jukebox logo, a current frum-pop album cover.	Though it still exists in pockets, predominately in the small but vibrant Orthodox and Chassidic communities
15	pics of 1950's through 1980's JM albums. Bagles & Bongos. 'Hear O Israel: Service in Jazz.' 'Brothers Zim' 'Jan Peerce' 'Israeli Kibbutz Singers'	Jewish music didn't die but it lost relevance and focus. It became marginalized, attenuated, and self-referential.
16	kapelye album cover, Sholomo Carlebach cover, Jeff Klepper or Debbie Friedman cover. Flory Jagoda album cover	Now it's exploding again. Kicked off in the 1970's by the klezmer revival and by Reform camp music & Chassidic folk-niggunim entering the liturgy, and in the 1980's by a world music scene that pushed local ethnic diversity as a marketing gimick.
17	map of Jewish population centers in the US with a television in the middle of it.	But I live here. We American Jews get our media awareness through mainstream American channels. Unless you're visible to the mainstream media (eg. Matisyahu) most American Jews don't know to look. We're in a silver age of Jewish Music, but most American Jews don't know it.
18	images of YouTube, MySpace, CD Baby, Teruah blog, Jewish Music Report	The Internet is making a difference. It makes everything more accessible, but you still need to know to look and now what to look for.
19	image of a social media graph. maybe with facebook or twitter logos.	Without a central media, we are only exposed to it through word of mouth. This is a classic social network problem. And the new social media tools might be part of the answer. There is a rich community of transnational & transdemonational Jews self-organizing on facebook & twitter .
20	overlay faces taken from twitter & facebook feeds I follow.	So if Jewish music is interesting, go to synagogue, go to concerts, buy mp3s and CDs, watch videos & read blogs. But talk about it, tweet or status update about it, and let people know. Culture only happens in a vibrant community. It's time to rebuild one.

I think I need to shrink the Golden Age section by one slide and expand the social media section by one slide at least and give a really concrete example maybe use Patrick A from Can Can / Punk Torah as my poster boy of musician use. (you cool with that Patrick?) Also should think about a good example of non-musician/publisher/blogger usage. Maybe a page of interesting recent twitter comments.

* note, I'm thinking about using a light gold background on slides relating to the Golden Age and a light silver background on current slides. I'm not sure if that will work or not.