Shai Tsabari performs ‘Lecha Dodi’ in Krakow in 2014
Brought up in Bat Yam, Shai Tsabari is a well-known Israeli musician of Yemenite origin who has just performed in the US. He is at the centre of an exciting Israeli musical trend to blend traditional liturgical poetry with modern rock, jazz and Middle Eastern influences. Interview in The Tablet:
Bat Yam has its miseries, but Tsabari’s childhood hardships weren’t financial. “We lived there for the community,” he said. “In synagogue, my dad would sit next to his friends from the cheder [religious school] in Sana’a. Community was very important to him, because immigrating was so difficult. I grew up feeling that there was us—the community—and outside there was big, Western Israel. ‘Be careful of them, they’re wolves, they’ll gobble you up!’”
It was a deeply musical home, though Tsabari did not realize it at the time. His father is a cantor and a mori, the honorific Yemenite Jews give to those who teach young boys how to read from the Torah (Yemenite Jews traditionally don’t celebrate Bar Mitzvahs as the children participate fully in services years before they hit 13). “He taught me a lot about Yemenite prayer, about the Yemenite reading of the Torah,” Tsabari said. “It’s a very precise sort of reading; you can’t make one mistake—of melody or pronunciation—because everyone is an expert.”
Tsabari’s paternal grandmother was a singer, but not in the typical sense: She was a mourner for the community. “She would lament the dead. It’s a freestyle art with its own internal logic,” Tsabari said. “You console the bereaved until he cries, so that he will get out of his state of shock.” She would also sing at births, Henna (engagement) parties and weddings. “It’s a very different sort of singing. In Arabic, not in Hebrew. She would take a darbuka or a platter, drum on it with her ring finger or a spoon, find her groove and make up words. She sang songs about me, how much she loved me, how happy my parents were when I was born. Or about the bravery of Moshe Dayan and how we won the Six-Day War!” he said. “She was the best singer I’ve ever heard. She was complete freedom.”
After completing his military service at 21, Tsabari began attending classes at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music north of Tel Aviv. Only then did he realize how organically musical his childhood was. But he also realized that the Israeli music scene of the mid-’90s had little room for his style. His grandmother’s singing, it turned out, was completely unrelated to Western musical scales he was learning. In class, he was given modern lyrics to compose a melody to. He sang it as he would verses from the Torah, complete with the traditional Yemenite phrasing. “That’s your safe space,” the teacher told him. “Leave it.” Tsabari felt that that space was his calling. He left the music school instead.
Tsabari spent his 20s struggling with the desire to make music. He worked as a cook and a magazine editor, always flirting with music on the side. Crucially, he worked as an assistant to Nitzan Zeira, head of the music label Nana Disc. Zeira published albums by some of Israel’s top recording artists, while Tsabari knew exactly how much milk they took with their coffee. In 2007, Berry Sakharof, the closest thing to rock royalty that Israel has, was looking for someone to do back-up vocals for a project he was working on with the musician Rea Mochiach. Called Adumey Hasefatot, or Red Lips, it was an evening of poetry by Solomon ibn Gabirol, set to music by Sakharof and Mochiach. Zeira recommended Tsabari, who showed up for a week of rehearsals.
“That week changed my life,” Tsabari told me. “It was like opening a door and stepping into paradise. I was working with world class musicians on real Jewish avant-garde.” The trend of rock musicians using piyutim – classic Jewish liturgical poetry – whether as raw material or inspiration was at its height by that point. Red Lips took the trend to the next level, fusing rock, jazz and a thousand flavors of Middle Eastern music into the mix for what was to become a landmark concert tour and album.
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