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| Written by Michelle Kay | |||||
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An Interview with Yoel Ben-Simhon, Harmonizing his Arab-Jewish Self If one could build a corporate empire of soul-searching, Yoel Ben-Simhon, the head of the New York-based band, The Sultana Ensemble, would be the CEO. An accomplished and versatile musician, Ben-Simhon’s career path ran the gamut from painting to piano before he stumbled across his most useful muse—his own musical heritage. An Israeli Jew whose family made aliyah from Morocco, he tapped into nearly every form of musical expression possible before exploring his culture’s musical heritage. While his parents were too absorbed in their shiny new Israeli identities to guide him in connecting to their pasts, Ben-Simhon took the initiative and began studying with Arab musicians on his own. He learned to play the oud, an eleven-string instrument with fourth-century Iraqi origins, traveled to his parents’ hometowns in Morocco, and ultimately formed the Sultana Ensemble, a group comprised of musicians with various religions and Middle Eastern nationalities. Named for Ben-Simhon’s beloved grandmother, the internationally touring band has played at Carnegie Hall and with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Ben-Simhon leads workshops on Mizrachi (Jewish Arab) history and Middle Eastern music, and is the musical director of Storahtelling, a Jewish ritual theatre troupe. Ben-Simhon and I sat down to talk about his Israeli childhood, his reluctant fighting in Lebanon, and the grandmother who inspired a musical phenomenon. Michelle Kay: During your childhood, how did your family relate to its Middle Eastern roots? Yoel Ben-Simhon: When you grow up in a pretty right-wing home with the notion from your father that a good Arab is a dead Arab, you deny that part of your identity. Now I know it is part of me. Back then I did not. I was born in 1964 in Kiryat Gat, which was a mix of cultures: a lot of Mizrachi Jews, from Arab lands, some Sephardi, some Ashkenazi. But the Mizrachi kids never felt like equals. In school, we never studied Jewish Arab poets or learned about Jewish Arab music, or Arab music in general. It was almost forbidden to play Arabic music on the radio or on TV. MK: Have you and your parents ever discussed your parent’s denial of their heritage? YBS: Two years ago, at the age of 38, I had the courage to sit with my father in Kiryat Gat for Shabbat dinner and I told him, smack in his face, “You are an Arab Jew.” He wanted to slap me. He said, “I am a Jewish Moroccan, not an Arab Jew.” I said, “Morocco is an Arab country.” But what do you call Arab? Jew? Christian? Is it the culture or is it the religion? We always get back to that question and we don’t know the answer. MK: But you haven’t always felt this way. YBS: No, no, I was an Israeli! Ben-Gurion [the first Prime Minister of Israel] said we should forget about our culture and build a new country, a new culture. That was a big mistake. You can’t tell a human being to forget where they are coming from. MK: How did that play into your childhood? YBS: My parents and I tried to assimilate into a society where every kid dresses like a solider for Purim. One of the ways I had to prove myself was to be macho and go into combat. I became a second lieutenant paratrooper and was in the Lebanon war for ten months in 1983. I lost two of my best friends. Being there really opened my eyes. For the first time I realized what is the power of media. of newspaper, of TV, of administration. It was an unjustified war and we didn’t know what we were doing there. Eventually I quit along with the other lieutenant. MK: Is this when you began to learn music? YBS: Well, I had been painting and playing piano and organ since I was very young. So after the army I decided to go back to the child in me, and I went to painting and music, and also studied ballet for a year before joining a dance company. And though I felt good spiritually, dance wasn’t the language I felt comfortable expressing myself in. I wanted the warmth of people. So I went to music school in Los Angeles and supported my schooling, my true dream, by doing textile design. I continued with graphic design and moved to New York, where I began my Masters at Hunter. I studied jazz piano, classical, Broadway. Eventually I met a guy and we established a rock band. MK: So you hadn’t begun to play Middle Eastern music yet? YBS: Tarbuca was always in the background at my grandmother Sultana’s because, like all my grandparents, she spoke only Arabic, except for a bit of Hebrew from the synagogue. Even the radio was tuned to shortwave radio from Egypt and Lebanon. So I grew up listening to this music, but I had never expressed or made use of it. Not yet. When it came time for my Masters thesis, I didn’t know what to compose. It felt like a search for identity. I started to fool around with some opera and jazz and a little bit of “ethnic.” I realized that I felt the jazz and classical from here and up [motioning from his neck to the top of his head]. It didn’t hit me here [he touches his chest]. It didn’t hit home. So I started to explore. I realized that my identity is not one thing. I started to understand that the world is really not just Jews, Arabs, Christians, blah blah blah. And I started to fuse these elements in the music. In 1998, one of the Masters classes invited a musician named Simon Shaheen. First he played Mozart on the violin. Then he played something by Abdel Wahad on the oud and explained quartertones, which can only be achieved with certain instruments like the oud. It evoked in me something I had never felt before as a Westerner used to an eight-note scale. I approached him afterward and found out he is a Palestinian from the Galilee, and all of a sudden the sentence from my father, “A good Arab is a dead Arab,” rang in my head. Arabic music was always just cheap music for hafla, for parties, but this guy proved that it is one of the oldest artistic traditions. I started taking lessons from him. MK: So how did you arrive at the Sultana Ensemble from this dissertation composition? YBS: I hired a few Arab musicians to perform my dissertation and started going to clubs to interview musicians for my paper. Through the interviews I met specialists on kanoon, oud, and clarinet. I learned how to play the nuances, how to really feel it without playing with an accent. I named the group for my grandmother, who embedded in me, without knowing, the love for Moroccan culture. Not Jewish Moroccan, just Moroccan. The music opened to me a huge array of vocabulary that Western music didn’t let me express. I have a Middle Eastern and Arabic upbringing in my ears, in the back of my mind. And it was not only that my music and my identity are becoming one, but it also went back to the time I was serving in the occupied territories and in Lebanon. I could easily hate Arabs. “They” killed two of my best friends. But I don’t hate Arabs. I understand where their frustration is coming from. MK: I imagine that your identity and music might not always be received well by the mainstream Jewish community. YBS: Sometimes they tell me I sound too Arabic, and I say, “What do you mean, too Arabic?” There is no voice for Mizrachi Jews. There’s an idea that Arabic music doesn’t belong to Jews. This is one area I can make a difference. With the Sultana project, I am leaving the world in a little bit better shape than I found it. In my communities—in Arab communities. And I’m not trying to be the next Michael Jackson or David Broza or Chava Alberstein. If it happens, it happens. The way is more important. I am enjoying the moment.
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