Lea Penn
By Lea Penn
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The Schmooze For Ravid Kahalani of Yemen Blues, ‘Music Is My Religion’
Crossposted from Haaretz Singer Ravid Kahalani’s apartment in the trendy Basel neighborhood of north Tel Aviv is furnished in Moroccan style, and he’s Skype-ing in English with the mother of his daughter back in Finland. Next to a black piano stands a three-string bass instrument called a guembri, and the suitcases lying partially open on…
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The Schmooze Putting Some Punch Into the Protest Song
Crossposted from Haaretz When Mary Ocher participated in a singing competition at 14, Idan Reichel, who was working as a music arranger in the same competition, told her she would never be a singer. At 20, after hearing the same thing from a few other Israeli teachers, Ocher packed her bags and moved with her…
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The Schmooze Out With Punk, In With ‘Ounk’
Crossposted from Haaretz Man 25 considers itself a performance band in the full sense of the word. While other local indie bands save every penny in order to produce an album and release singles to be played on the radio, Man 25 views recorded materials as a calling card only. Drummer Tomer Tzur (30), guitarist…
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The Schmooze The Long and Indie Road
Crossposted from Haaretz “Would you like to see what I have in my bag?” asks Noga Shalev at the start of our meeting in a bustling Tel Aviv bar before pulling a flute out and starting to play. Perhaps because of the noise, no one in the bar notices, but even if they did notice,…
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The Schmooze House-Trained Labrador for Sale on MySpace
Crossposted from Haaretz The story of “Labrador Labratories” (sic) should be taught in workshops for developing creativity. A year and a half ago, after the unknown Makolet band broke up, soloist Tom Gottlieb found himself suffering from a creative block. “In Makolet there was a very critical atmosphere,” he says. “We would sit a lot…
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The Schmooze Naomi Shemer’s Archive Reveals a Softer Side
Crossposted from Haaretz The 17 cartons that held Naomi Shemer’s private archive contained a small black telephone book and tucked in its pages was a note in which the popular songwriter jotted down an extra stanza to “Jerusalem of Gold” at the end of the Six Day War: Just four lines in all, plus numerous…
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The Schmooze Ran Shabtay’s Focused Folk
Crossposted from Haaretz Talking to Ran Shabtay, lead singer of The Trees and the Bees, is a frenetic experience. He jumps from subject to subject. He starts with his love of folk music (“That’s how the real thing sounds; every time I hear Elliott Smith, my jaw drops”), continues with his attraction to art (“A…
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The Schmooze Israel’s Desert Music Festival
Crossposted from Haaretz Mitzpeh Gvulot started off as a pioneering Jewish settlement in the Negev. Set up in 1943 as an experimental station to examine the prospects for agriculture in the desert, today the site is home to a different kind of experiment: indie music. The In-D-Negev festival was created as an attempt to get…
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