Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv

by Ilana Webster-Kogen

Overview

2019 Winner of Society of Ethnomusicology's Special Interest Group Award for Jewish Music

In the thirty years since their immigration from Ethiopia to the State of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis have put music at the center of communal and public life, using it alternatingly as a mechanism of protest and as appeal for integration. Ethiopian music develops in quiet corners of urban Israel as the most prominent advocate for equality, and the Israeli-born generation is creating new musical styles that negotiate the terms of blackness outside of Africa. For the first time, this book examines in detail those new genres of Ethiopian-Israeli music, including Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop, Ethio-soul performed across Europe, and eskesta dance projects at the center of national festivals. This book argues that in a climate where Ethiopian-Israelis fight for recognition of their contribution to society, musical style often takes the place of political speech, and musicians take on outsize roles as cultural critics. From their perch in Tel Aviv, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians use musical style to critique a social hierarchy that affects life for everyone in Israel/Palestine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819578341
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Series:	Music / Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

ILANA WEBSTER-KOGEN is the Joe Loss Lecturer (assistant professor) in the department of music at SOAS, University of London. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology there in 2011. Her work has appeared in African and Black Diaspora, Ethnomusicology Forum and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

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CHAPTER 1

Afrodiasporic Myths

Ester Rada and the Atlantic Connection

Levinski Street, the congested hub of migrant south Tel Aviv, came to be one of my regular haunts during fieldwork. But when I first stepped off the train from the airport in July 2008, I had the same initial impression as most Tel Aviv residents — that it was run-down and looked unsafe. It hardly resembled the "White City," the secular, leftwing, and gay-friendly Bauhaus capital on the beach that is notoriously isolated from the rest of the country. I walked the length of Levinski en route to my friend Sam's apartment, passing a number of Ethiopian businesses on the way, the bus station (see Hankins 2013), and the Nahum Records Ethiopian music emporium, plus the abandoned spots that would some years later become the Red Sea Internet Café and the Ethiopian restaurant Tenät. As I turned onto Ha'aliyah Street, the neighborhood began to change, and by the time I reached Florentin Street I was in a different world. This was the neighborhood of Florentin, the capital of hipster Tel Aviv, and its aforementioned main street is lined with renovated Bauhaus buildings, mixed with bars like the nearby Hudna ("truce" in Arabic, a mixed Jewish-Arab project, where deejays spin records outdoors until 4 a.m.). This former working-class Mizrahi neighborhood (inhabited by Jews of Muslim lands who have immigrated to Israel, known in Israel as Mizrahim, the plural term) has slanted younger in the past decade, with the soundscape of Greek folk songs on Friday afternoons replaced with psy-trance, and Bukharian pastries traded in for quinoa. Florentin is still grungy, but it's privileged, and today it's the epicenter of creative energy in the controversial capital, a gathering-point for left-leaning middle-class young people postmilitary. There aren't many Ethiopians on this side of Ha'aliyah, though, and the imaginary border between Levinski and Florentin delineates Israel's insiders (middleclass citizens) from its others (visible minorities, '48 Palestinians, African refugees). Yet thanks to the profusion of hipsters who listen to reggae and sport dreadlocks, iconographies of blackness adorn the bodies of Tel Aviv's tastemakers. These young people have a patron saint: her name is Ester Rada, she is Ethiopian-Israeli, and her music navigates marginality through the musical vernaculars of the Middle Passage.

Rada wasn't known yet to the residents of Florentin in 2008, and given the stark contrast between rich Bauhaus Tel Aviv and poor migrant Tel Aviv, perhaps separated by Ha'aliyah, I couldn't have predicted upon my arrival that an Ethiopian-Israeli soul singer would be Israel's next ambassador to Glastonbury and WOMAD. Ethiopian-Israelis are not just economically marginalized in Israel; the admittedly complicated basis of their citizenship is still sometimes called into question by the religious mainstream (Anteby-Yemini 2004, Seeman 2009). Yet in just a few years, Rada became Israel's most popular export in Europe, and she did so by negotiating a complex relationship with Israeli society. Rada's musical style connects her to Ethiopia and to the African diaspora, and in this chapter I examine the musical vernaculars that she references in her repertoire, arguing that she exemplifies a key Ethiopian-Israeli strategy of citizenship by mobilizing Harlem, Kingston, and Ethiopia — i.e., the "New Zion" of Rastafarian imagery (see Raboteau 2014 or Ratner 2015 for comparison) — as an alternative narrative of embodied otherness. This strategy is a paradox. In order to negotiate the contested citizenship of Ethiopian-Israelis, musicians connect to alternative narratives of belonging, and in the case of Ester Rada, the compelling insertion of Ethiopian-Israelis into the imagined community of the black Atlantic has earned the acceptance of Ethiopians in Israel. Making it as a performer across the African diaspora has facilitated belonging in Israel.

Rada's rise to international prominence happened quickly. In 2011 she was performing for Ethiopian-Israelis on the Tel Aviv club scene with her ex-husband Gili Yalo of reggae band Zvuloon Dub System, and by 2013 she played the Glastonbury festival in the UK. She released her first EP, Life Happens, in 2013, followed by the album Ester Rada in 2014. Her second album, Different Eyes (2017), came out to great critical success just as this book was going to press. The transitions from local popularity (among Ethiopian-Israelis) to national popularity (among Tel Aviv elites) and international attention were swift. Yet the social processes through which she rose to the vanguard of the Israeli music scene reveal the complexity of the Ethiopian-Israeli experience. Considering the socioeconomic obstacles facing Ethiopians in Israel (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 2005), and the isolation of many Beta Israel from Ethiopian society since emigration (Karadawi 1991), the reception of Rada is a surprise — not least to Rada herself; when I interviewed her in 2015, she described her rapid ascent as unexpected. Because of the aforementioned paradox of belonging, Francis Falceto, the producer of the influential Éthiopiques CD series, further remarked to me when I interviewed him that it seemed ironic that she was the first Ethiopian musician to "cross over," or achieve mainstream success in the all-important European and North American markets. However, by examining Rada's musical style in detail, this chapter will reveal a narrative that borrows from the iconographies and musical vernaculars of the African diaspora as an avenue to accruing cultural capital among Israelis and using "black music" (musiqa shehorah) as a main strategy toward integration. A close examination of songs that incorporate influences from soul music, funk, reggae, and Ethio-jazz reveals the common theme of the repertoire: a triangulated narrative of Afrodiasporic origins (see Chivallon 2011).

By exploring the musical influences on Rada's performance style — the deep, throaty vocal timbre that references Nina Simone (who, as I learned when I interviewed Rada, is her favorite singer), the funky bass lines from Parliament, the hemitonic pentatonic modes on brass from Ethio-jazz icon Mahmoud Ahmed, and the offbeat rhythm incorporated from reggae and dub, I will unpack one alternative paradigm of Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship. In the context of the wider Ethiopian-Israeli experience, it is truly unexpected (particularly to the leftistoriented Rada, but also to producers and promoters) that the biggest Israeli star abroad in 2017 is Ethiopian. Ethiopian-Israelis remain religiously suspect to many Israelis (Seeman 2009), their youth presumed to be criminals by community workers and in the press. I present Ester Rada first in this book as a counternarrative of that experience, beginning with a successful example of integration through music, and of making a success by drawing on alternative paradigms of citizenship.

It is equally bewildering that Europe's first Ethiopian crossover artist is Israeli, that she trained in Hebrew, and that she sings almost exclusively in English. Finally, it is ironic that given these factors, and the religious baggage that the Ethiopian-Israeli population carries, the first Ethiopian-Israeli solo star performs not Israeli pop music but Afrodiasporic music, acknowledging that the integration efforts of the Israeli state failed to mainstream Ethiopian citizens. Despite these ironies, the narrative that Rada promotes stylistically, a grassroots story of black otherness in a white society, has established a valuable model of citizenship for Ethiopian-Israelis, whereby they demonstrate their contribution to Israeli society through a reconfiguration of the paradigm of exile, shifting their experience from the Jewish exile to the African one. For the Ethiopian-Israelis who supported Rada's rise but who do not turn up at her concerts in increasingly elite venues, this musical style points them to a paradigm of belonging, and they increasingly look to the experiences of African Americans to relate to the prejudice in their own society (see Ratner 2015). The citizenship strategy of embodied otherness — of distancing themselves from Israeli society — transpires at the level of musical style and performance, and this chapter examines how a commercially successful Ethiopian-Israeli musician uses music to position herself as political subject in Israeli society.

ESTER RADA

Ester Rada performs a combination of original songs and soul and Ethio-jazz standards, resulting in what music critics call Ethio-soul. She was not yet a gigging musician when I lived in Tel Aviv in 2008–2009, and I first heard of her as she was about to perform at Glastonbury. Since she sings in English, it didn't occur to me that she came from Tel Aviv, nor did it occur to me to pay attention to her increasingly busy touring schedule. Between her skin and her lyrics, she doesn't resemble most international audiences' idea of an Israeli, and she can travel the festival scene in France with little drama. She tends to be quiet about her origins in concert, and her reticence can lend itself to farce, such as the anecdote she relayed to me about arriving onstage and finding herself faced with protesters waving Palestinian flags, who were temporarily rendered mute when they saw that she was black. I myself wouldn't have noticed that she was Israeli, because she has established a musical style (Afrodiasporic) and a performative self that are culturally ambiguous enough to render her nationally ambiguous. By the time she released a series of hit songs toward the end of 2013 such as "Life Happens" and "Bad Guy," I had nearly missed a permanent, almost imperceptible shift back into Israeli society because of her success. For the first time, a black solo Israeli musician was touring internationally, yet she was doing so without her audience necessarily knowing that she was Israeli. And whether these are aesthetic decisions made to astutely navigate an antioccupation cultural boycott of Israeli musicians, or subtle political statements rejecting racism, she does all of this exclusively through her musical style.

While in some ways she is placeless, Rada's music does bear a strong influence from her upbringing in Netanya. Considering the coastal stopover city halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, which claims the highest absolute number of Ethiopian citizens in Israel, allows several elements of her music to fall into place. When I interviewed her in 2015, she explained that African American culture influenced her early in life. At that time black role models at the margins of Israeli society were scarce, and the soundscape of her childhood was, in her own words, a combination of anonymous Ethiopian and popular African American songs: "A lot of music that — I don't even know the names of the performers. Music that my mother played at home ... When I was in Netanya, I listened to Afro-American music — MTV — hip-hop — total hip-hop — Tupac" (interview, Jaffa, March 5, 2015).

Given a climate of prejudice that Ethiopians encountered in the 1990s — beginning with the rabbinate's request for symbolic conversion and culminating in the "blood affair" (Seeman 2009: 163) — Rada would have been aware of racism from a young age. In a migration context, where Ethiopian culture did not yet have cultural capital, and where African American music was popular across Israel, "black music" would have been an effective outlet for catharsis and prestige. Other young Ethiopian-Israelis in Netanya, such as the future rap group Axum (see chapter 5), were, like Rada, likely to emulate African American musicians instead of Ethiopian ones. Rada's throaty, low, raspy vocal style symbolizes this debt to the music of the African diaspora (see Ratner 2015 for examples from hiphop) rather than to Ethiopian musicians like Aster Aweke, whose high-pitched voice and melismatic songs punctuated by ululation mark her as Ethiopian. I have written elsewhere about Washington, DC, Ethiopian soul singer Wayna (Webster-Kogen 2013), whose vocal style is a melismatic and ornamented R&B sound. However, her high-pitched tone still bears the traces of Ethiopian vocal style and tonality. In contrast, Rada sings nearly an octave lower than Wayna, erasing all trace of Ethiopian accent or tone color from her performance.

Her repertoire similarly draws from African American musical form. Her cover of Nina Simone's song "Four Women," for example, implores Ethiopian-Israelis to look beyond local, failed forms of integration and to find black voices that speak to them from among the cultural resources of the black Atlantic. In a splintered community that lacks political leadership or patronage in the corridors of power (Kaplan 2010, Weil 2004), musicians like Rada intervene in political discourse about the Ethiopian place in Israeli society, even when they avoid explicitly political associations. Rada's music, which is the least Israeli-influenced of the source material in this book, constitutes an understatedly powerful critique of Israeli prejudice. My analysis centers on close reading rather than ethnographic description; I interviewed Rada, have met her on several additional occasions, and have attended many of her concerts, where I have spoken with her fans. But as is the case throughout this book, I look to music for evidence of that which goes unsaid because of social taboos against explicit critique. Through her musical critique, on the other hand, Rada offers an alternative narrative for Ethiopian-Israelis that transforms the attribute of blackness into a source of cultural capital.

In this chapter I offer a close reading of five songs from Rada's concert repertoire, considering her body of work as a unified whole as I disentangle the Afrodiasporic myths that influence Ethiopian-Israeli performers today. I borrow from Dick Hebdige's explanation of cut 'n' mix from the book of the same name (1987) to define Rada's compositional and arrangement style, arguing that the iconic sounds of Ethiopia and the African diaspora insert Ethiopian-Israelis into a black Atlantic narrative. Each song described in this chapter combines African American, Caribbean, and Ethiopian sounds in different combinations to connect Rada to a lineage of black musicians in white-majority societies, linking Ethiopian-Israelis to the historical narrative of the African diaspora instead of the Israeli narrative of rejecting the Jewish diasporic state of exile (shelilat hagalut). When considering these songs and their multidirectional musical influences together as a single style — Ethio-soul — I discern a reconfiguration of an otherwise unstable narrative of marginal citizenship characterized by limited participation in national culture. First, I examine "Four Women," the Nina Simone song that features centrally in Rada's live performance; second, three original songs: "Sorries," "Life Happens," and "Bazi," all of which combine Ethiopian and Afrodiasporic styles in different ways; and third, her rendition of "Nanu Ney," an Ethio-jazz standard from the 1970s, the performance of which connects musicians directly to their African roots and cuts them off from their Israeli ones.

AFRODIASPORIC MYTHS

I previously defined myths as a set of narratives of origin, election, and ethnohistory (Smith 2008: 40–43). I arrive at a working definition of myth from the disciplines of folklore and religious studies (see Segal 1999; also Campbell 1978, Ellwood 1999), cultural or area studies (see Herskovits 1961; Mintz and Price 1992 for African diaspora; Levine 1965, 1974, for Ethiopia; Gertz 2000, Morris 1988, Sternhell 2002 for Israel), and nationalism (Smith 2008). From these disciplines' divergent approaches, I arrive at a definition of myth as a narrative that symbolically constructs or binds a group. This is not a judgment about the truth of a narrative but an analysis of the way the narrative becomes emotionally charged and powerful for a group. In the first half of this book, I spend a chapter on each of the three sets of myths, interpreting Zionist/Jewish, Ethiopianist, and Afrodiasporic myths through the lens of musical performance, and examining the social mechanism through which musicians actively create new myths of origin, election, and ethnohistory. In the Ethiopian-Israeli context, these creations and collections of myths can be read as political positionings that navigate citizenship, ultimately making space for Ethiopians in the Israeli public sphere.

Among the Zionist, Ethiopianist, and Afrodiasporic myths that mobilize musical style to construct citizenship narratives for Ethiopian-Israelis, the three sets of narratives converge around the Ethiopian-Israeli experience in their collective sense of ethnohistory. These narratives are modern reconfigurations of older tropes based initially on the paradigm of Jewish exile, the dispersal of the Jews by the Babylonians in 586 BCE (and later, and lastingly, by the Roman Empire in 70 CE). The nineteenth-century Zionist myths that propelled the founding of the State of Israel are based on medieval narratives of Jewish return to the biblical homeland — called shivat Tziyon (return to Zion) or ahavat Tziyon (love of Zion) — that were incorporated into Jewish liturgy, theology, and thought, and into the modern nation-state. But the metaphor of Jewish exile was also mobilized across the African diaspora, with African American slaves forcibly converted to Christianity in particular identifying symbolically with the people of Israel via the biblical myth of slavery in Egypt ("Let my people go"). The initial paradigm of Jewish exile has been refashioned repeatedly, and Ethiopian-Israelis draw inspiration from many of those refashionings.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Symbolic Codes of Citizenship
Afrodiasporic Myths: Ester Rada and the Atlantic Connection
Ethiopianist Myths of Dissonance and Nostalgia
Zionist Myths and the Mainstreaming of Ethiopian-Israeli Music
Embodying Blackness through Eskesta Citizenship
"What about My Money": Themes of Labor and Citizenship in Ethiopian-Israeli Hip-Hop
Levinski Street, Tel Aviv's Horn Mediascape
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Amy Horowitz

“Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words.”

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

“Webster-Kogan provides a rich discussion of Ethiopian-Israeli musical life at the intersection of national and global social histories, skillfully mining musical sound to reveal ideologies of belonging.”

From the Publisher

"Webster-Kogen provides a rich discussion of Ethiopian-Israeli musical life at the intersection of national and global social histories, skillfully mining musical sound to reveal ideologies of belonging."—Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music, Harvard University

"Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words."—Amy Horowitz, author of Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic

"Webster-Kogan provides a rich discussion of Ethiopian-Israeli musical life at the intersection of national and global social histories, skillfully mining musical sound to reveal ideologies of belonging."—Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G., Gordon Watts Professor of Music, Harvard University

"Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words."—Amy Horowitz, author of Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic

Editorial Reviews

"Webster-Kogen provides a rich discussion of Ethiopian-Israeli musical life at the intersection of national and global social histories, skillfully mining musical sound to reveal ideologies of belonging."—Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music, Harvard University

"Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words."—Amy Horowitz, author of Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic

"Webster-Kogan provides a rich discussion of Ethiopian-Israeli musical life at the intersection of national and global social histories, skillfully mining musical sound to reveal ideologies of belonging."—Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G., Gordon Watts Professor of Music, Harvard University

"Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words."—Amy Horowitz, author of Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic

From the Publisher