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Lullabies and lamentations
13.4.2008
By Ben Shalev |
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April 13, 2008
About a month ago, the Iraqi government approved the
execution of Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali"),
Saddam Hussein's right-hand man and the one
responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi Kurds by means of chemical weapons in the
late 1980s. A few days later, singer Ilana Elia met
with a senior music editor at Army Radio. "Now you
have an opportunity to play the song 'Fermana' on
one of the current events programs," she told the
editor.
"Fermana" ("Destruction") is a song that laments
Saddam Hussein's slaughter of the Kurds. Elia
learned it from Kurdish-Turkish workers who came to
work in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s, and she included
a stunningly powerful version of the song on her
second album,www.ekurd.net
released in 1997. Since
then, she says, she has learned of other versions of
the song, from different parts of Kurdistan, each
one relating to the specific trauma of that region
and telling its unique story of destruction.
They may not play "Fermana" on Army Radio, but
several contemporary composers have recently
expressed an interest in it. Composer Mark Kopytman
contacted Elia with a request to write an adaptation
of the song. "He really felt it," Elia says
appreciatively when speaking of the adaptation he
composed. And just recently, composer Betty Olivero
contacted Elia, asking to include a part of the song
in one of her compositions.
Elia performed "Fermana" last Thursday at a show at
Jerusalem's Confederation House, to mark the release
of "Aram," the album that marks her return to the
stage after a long absence.
Elia's retreat from performing was due to a number
of reasons. The singer devoted most of her time to
caring for her sick mother (who passed away two
years ago), the band that accompanied her for about
10 years broke up, and there was one more thing: The
invitations to appear at world music festivals in
Europe, which used to pour in, had slowed to a
trickle. "In recent years, Palestinian musicians
have received most of the invitations," says Elia.
"Now the situation is starting to improve."
The red line
In an article published in Haaretz about 10 years
ago, critic Ariel Hirschfeld wrote that Elia has
"one of the biggest voices ever heard in Israeli
song." He went on to say: "If one can restore the
real meaning of the term 'sincerity,' then her voice
is 'pure sincerity.'" But the story of Elia, who was
born in Jerusalem to parents who came to Israel from
Kurdistan, actually begins with years of silence.
"I always sang and always wanted to be a singer, but
no one encouraged me to fulfill this desire," she
says. "After the army, I got stuck working in a
bank, to support myself. Like what I saw at home.
It's what they did. They worked. As if everything
that has to do with yourself and your self-fulfillment
has to completely move aside."
"The red line," as she calls the moment when she
decided to make singing her calling and profession,
"was my father's death." Elia's father was a singer
and a cantor, an amazing virtuoso in her words, "but
he didn't do anything with it in the professional
sense. He sang at the synagogue and at family
events, and that's it. After he died I told myself,
'I'm an adult already and I don't want to waste my
life. I'm going to do it differently than he did.'"
She was in her 30s at the time.
After her father's death, Elia took out the tapes he
used to record from Radio Kurdistan ("from the
short-wave radio, with a lot of static") and began
listening to them. She was thrilled by the treasure
she had discovered. "It's the most primal kind of
song I know,www.ekurd.net
song that really comes
from the gut, and its power shook me out of my
coma," she says. She spent a year listening to
Kurdish singers and learning their special
techniques, which emphasize elements like
throatiness and reverberation and sometimes create
the impression that the singer is singing from a
mountaintop and her voice is echoing back to her
from the surrounding mountains.
Elia selected from the vast repertoire on her
father's tapes the songs she wanted to sing
("political protest songs, women's protest songs,
love songs and lullabies") and once she felt sure of
herself, she went into the recording studio and made
her first record, which was released independently
in 1992. At first, it was hard for her to find
anyone willing to listen to it, but then music
editor Shimon Parnas heard it, was wowed by her
singing and began playing it on his radio show, and
after that, "people started looking for me and
inviting me to festivals," says Elia. The
recognition she received led to the recording of a
second album, which was released by a record company
and distributed internationally.
Improvisation doesn't come easily
If she was hoping that this momentum would continue
for a long time, that hope was disappointed. Her
potential audience in Israel is small, she says, and
some in the Kurdish community are not receptive to
her style of singing, which is also influenced by
the classical Western singing in which she was
trained before she discovered Kurdish folk songs.
The new collection is the first album she has
released since 1997 and, at this stage, it will be
sold only at her performances and not in stores.
Other projects of hers, such as the idea of
releasing an album of songs set to Hebrew poems,
have not been that successful. "Once it would have
depressed me and really got me down," she says. "Now
I can deal with it. At least I'm doing something,
little by little."
At the show on Thursday she played with her new
backup band (Eliahu Degami: saz, Tibi Golan: ney,
Eran Horvitz: bass, Oren Fried: percussion). Apart
from her regular material, with the addition of some
new songs and a slightly different sound, there were
also pieces she calls "mixes" - i.e., a rhythmic
song over which Elia sings an improvised solo based
on another, slower song.
Playing freely with the music in this way is typical
of Kurdish song culture, says Elia. "These aren't
fixed songs. It's as though there were stories in
the melody that can change in accordance with the
situation. My first record includes a lullaby in
which the mother is telling the baby about a love
story in her life, about a love that went
unfulfilled, and in the middle of the story she
suddenly says to him, 'Okay, quiet down already, you
never stop crying, I'll give you to your
grandmother.' Everything that is happening during
the time the singer is singing enters into his
story. Someone comes into the auditorium late? The
singer will include that in the song. Sort of like
what rappers do. I admit that this improvisation
doesn't always come easily to me, but I'm trying. No
one does it as naturally as Margol [singer Margalit
Tzan'ani]."
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
haaretz com
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