Israeli music

[cellio]

It's fairly rare that Dani wants to do something that could be categorized as "Jewish", so when he does I almost always go along with it. That's how I ended up seeing a concert tonight by Chava Alberstein, who is apparently a big-name Israeli singer.

She's very talented, and the show was fun overall. All of the songs save one were in either Hebrew (mostly) or Yiddish (a little), and there were several where she didn't tell us what it was about, so my comprehension was limited. I was getting a word or two here and there, but not entire phrases.

I knew that some words migrated from English into Hebrew, mostly technical terms. It was still a little disconcerting to hear the word "video" several times in one Hebrew song. (The song was about an immigrant who was working in Israel to feed his family back home, and the recordings he made to send back with the money.) I wonder if speakers of languages from which English has borrowed have the same reaction when they hear English speakers.

She did a group of love songs near the beginning that she sketched out loosely in English. I asked Dani later if they were as sappy in Hebrew as they sounded in English, and he said yes. You can do a lot with sappy lyrics by performing them in a language not native to your audience, though, a trick that opera companies have known for centuries.

She had two backup musicians, a guitarist (she also played guitar) and a percussionist. The latter, Avi Agababa, was really good, and fun to watch. His bag of percussive tricks was quite sizable, though he spent a lot of time on doumbek (or something very like a doumbek -- metal, not ceraminc, and large) and tambourine. When using other items, like cymbals, bells, and something that looked like a bunch of large wooden beads clumped on a cord, he really understood the concept of "less is more".

Now here's the surprising part: we bought our tickets two days ago, asked for "best available", and got third row center. The theatre was about half full (maybe more). Did most of those people really just pay at the door? How did we get such good seats on Tuesday?

Comments

Chava...

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Isn't she the one who sang as Moses' mother in Prince of Egypt?

[sethg]

In written modern Hebrew, English loanwords are actually harder to recognize. You come across some word you haven't seen before, and your first instinct is to try to break it down into a three-consonant root with prefixes and suffixes, and you rack your brains trying to figure out what that root might be and what it might mean ... and then when someone pronounces the word out loud, you say "D'oh!"

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

I can't count the number of times I've sat there trying to figure out a "hebrew" word only to figure out that it says "cornflakes" or some such.

Musical instruments

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

If it's made out of metal, it's still a doumbek. I'm blanking on the name of the wooden beads on a cord. I have tapes of Ruyna Pacha, a group that plays South American Indian music (They play at local county fairs which is how I found them.) They said the instrument was originally made out of condor claws, but since the bird is now protected, they use sheep's hooves and wooden beads to get the same effect! :D
-- Dagonell

Re: Chava...

[cellio]

She's not listed in the IMDB writeup.

[cellio]

Yeah, I encountered that confusion in a conversational-Hebrew class, where the sample dialogues involved the usual basic tell-me-about-yourself chit-chat. Seeing "New York" transliterated into written Hebrew broke my brain.

[cecerose.livejournal.com]

She did an album with the Klezmzatics, called "The Well." It was really good -- a set of Yiddish poems set to music. I highly recommend it...