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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, left-wing, 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 (middle-class 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.1 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.2 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 sheḥorah) 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.3 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.4 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 society5—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”6 (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),7 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.8 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,9 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.10 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.
First, the Jewish longing for return transformed into a set of political movements for Jewish self-determination during the nation-building nineteenth century (see Gertz 2000, Morris 1988, Sternhell 2002, and chapter 3). Second, the Solomonic narrative in Ethiopia claimed that Ethiopia supplanted Israel as Zion (Levine 1965, 1974). Third, African American appropriation of biblical metaphor (see Gilroy 1993, Mintz and Price 1992) transformed African American vernacular English. Most students of black music will be familiar with the “spirituals” song style of Southern slavery, in which “Let my people go” borrows from biblical myth and reimagines slavemasters as Pharaoh. Fourth, the Rastafari return to Ethiopianism through Marcus Garvey’s prophecy, and subsequent worship of Haile Selassie (Ewing 2014, Grant 2010, Lemelle and Kelley 1994) confirmed Ethiopia’s importance in the African diaspora. And fifth, the pan-African awakening in the era of postcolonial struggle and negritude looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as African seats of power (Fredrickson 1995, Wilder 2015).
These themes fit together heterophonically in Rada’s musical style. In the United States as in Israel, “black music” stands in for a history of violence that is expressed through and mitigated by a musical tradition. Much of the African diaspora can relate to this experience through a shared history of chattel slavery, and for many people around the African diaspora, Ethiopia symbolizes black independence. The long-established connections between Haile Selassie, Jamaica, reggae, the black Atlantic, and African American music create a network of identity resources. The links between the black Atlantic and Ethiopia are slowly developing, with Ethiopia’s best-known musician Teddy Afro placing on international charts for the first time in 2017 with his album Ethiopia. Likewise, Ester Rada creates a musical connection between Ethiopian-Israelis and the black Atlantic through Ethio-soul by adapting the lexicon of Ethio-jazz to a disparate array of Afrodiasporic popular music, linking the musical style to shared narratives of suffering and longing. However, in the absence of socially conscious lyrics, this dynamic plays out entirely at the level of musical structure, especially through Rada’s call-and-response with the band. Rada’s phrasing and flow, legato but syllabic (sharply articulated at the level of individual words), in contrast to the horn section’s staccato stabs and dull articulation, connect African American popular music to Ethio-jazz, heterophonically demonstrating the spiritual links between the United States, the Caribbean, and Ethiopia.
Afrodiasporic Myths and Style
I describe the collections and reconfigurations of recognizable myths that Ethiopian-Israelis mobilize to define the terms of citizenship as resting on their positioning as black, Jewish, and having arrived directly from Africa. I call the myth clusters mobilized in this chapter the Afrodiasporic myths, because they draw from a set of narratives originating in the African diaspora, with which Ethiopian-Israelis had little direct contact before immigration to Israel. When these narratives reference Jewish or Ethiopian experience, they draw Ethiopian-Israelis in as active participants in the cultural history of the Middle Passage. Rada’s music symbolically mobilizes the circuit (see Ratner 2015)—New York–Kingston–Addis Ababa—in her musical style, and by doing so she frames the Ethiopian-Israeli experience in the context of Afrodiasporic oppression.
In different combinations, the aforementioned five-point list of narratives works in tandem to create a circuit of black ethnohistory, in which a dignified African history coexists with a brutal present in exile. The imagery of the narratives can be mobilized to imagine an equally glorious future. This chapter focuses on the latter three points from that list (the African American, Rastafarian, and pan-African narratives), which Rada builds into the genre of Ethio-soul as a mechanism that connects Ethiopian-Israelis to the black Atlantic experience. She does so at the level of musical style exclusively, since she neither makes political statements onstage nor writes political lyrics. The song texts that Rada writes herself usually address personal growth or romantic relationships, and the absence of political material is noteworthy. Coming from a tradition of Israeli popular music (which is tremendously politicized) and adopting African American music, her tendency to skirt controversy in her songs is conspicuous. In the Ethiopian lyrical/poetic tradition of wax and gold (sem-enna-werq), or hiding deep layers of meaning or critique in material deemed light or safe, her lyrics are the wax and her musical style is the gold, a collagelike style that attaches the Ethiopian-Israeli experience to the myths of the African diaspora.
An Afrodiasporic narrative is bolstered by the Israeli media, which implies that skin color defines Rada’s experience, drawing indirectly from the hardship narratives of great female African American singers like Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin. Profiles like her interview in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 201311 describe her rise to fame as a victory for all Ethiopian-Israelis, sometimes portrayed in the profiles as helpless and desperate. She makes this connection implicitly, too, since her repertoire includes multiple covers of songs by Nina Simone. The articles about Rada frequently mention that she was born in Kiryat Arba, perhaps the most controversial settlement in the West Bank,12 raised by a single mother in Netanya, and that her childhood was religious; she was a member of B’nei Akiva, the religious-Zionist youth group that is especially popular among settlers, before spending her military service in a musical troupe (lehaqa). In those media profiles, music is described as a personal journey, her outlet to rebel against religious life,13 which she left in pursuit of creative freedom.
In Rada’s personal story, we find a conflicted relationship with the State of Israel, which marginalized her community, and the institutions that have cultivated an outstanding musical talent. Her musical training came by way of performing in a military troupe during her compulsory service, where she developed high-level performance skills. In our interview she talked about learning the standards of the Israeli repertoire, sung entirely in Hebrew, and about the level of professionalism she developed working in a troupe. Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi explain in their chapter on Israeli musical institutions (2004) that the military fed directly into the recording industry in the 1960s and 1970s, with members of military bands becoming some of the most beloved rock musicians of the 1970s. In that respect, Rada’s early life and her pathway into the music industry tell opposing stories of marginality and patronage.
The transition from Hebrew-language national repertoire to English-language soul music has also been enabled by a patronage network of state-supported arts education and European influence. As Regev and Seroussi go on to explain, the flocking of elite musicians to Tel Aviv, first from Germany in the 1930s and later from the Former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has offered the State of Israel a constant stream of classically trained musicians and conservatory teachers. Despite the other ways that Israel has become culturally marginalized, it has kept its status as a destination for musical (and artistic) study. Rada and the seven members of her band—Michael Guy on bass, Ben Jose on guitar, Lior Romano on keyboard, Dan Mayo on drums, Inon Peretz on trumpet, Gal Dahan on saxophone, and Maayan Mylo on trombone—all gained their music education in the military or in an excellent European-influenced conservatory system. These musicians credibly perform Ethio-jazz, a genre that relies on dissonant tones like augmented fourths and minor seconds, and that regularly flummoxes European studio musicians.14 The conservatory system in Israel that produces top-notch studio musicians is part of the infrastructural machinery that benefits any Israeli musician looking to expand into different genres.
A competent backing band is a major asset for Rada: Kevin Le Gendre argues that the affective power of soul music comes from the call-and-response between the solo singer and the band, a dynamic that he associates with the heterophony of the cotton field (2012: 26). With the accompaniment of her band, Rada constructs an Afrodiasporic connection as a musical lexicon of black alterity—what Le Gendre calls “not just a musical form but a sociological and emotional lexicon” (2012: 27)—built on the offbeats of reggae, the fuzzy guitar riffs of funk, the affective intensity of gospel, and the heterophonic movement of voice, horns, and strings that create a polyrhythmic effect in soul (Maultsby 2006: 274). In place of expounding ethnohistory or political ideologies directly, Rada invokes the painful lineage that bore black music. I will unpack the symbolic meaning of these musical vernaculars across the five songs analyzed in this chapter. In brief, though, their combination of Afrodiasporic influences is summarized in table 1.1. As it suggests, Rada and her band borrow a variety of elements from African American popular music and its Caribbean counterparts. They do so through melody and instrumentation, but also through the establishment of a style in a certain song or section of a song. As we can see, there is much brass and much modality in her music, and these elements are shared by Ethio-jazz and soul music.
Rada’s musical style is evidence of Afrodiasporic solidarity, but a critical element of her appeal beyond the Ethiopian community resides in the narratives built around her musical style. Instead of appealing to the well-known Zionist myths of return from exile and attachment to the land (on full display in chapter 3), Rada (as well as some Ethiopian-Israeli reggae musicians whom I introduce later) draws from the Afrodiasporic myths of going into exile invoked in the music of the black Atlantic. She plays black music (musiqa sheḥorah) and sings in English, connecting herself to black musicians outside of Israel more than to progressive musicians inside Israel. In the process, she leapfrogs the genre of “world music,” a quasi-market for cosmopolitan Europeans that Israeli musicians usually appeal to, and connects to a network of Afrodiasporic musicians in North America and Europe.
The narrative conventions and embodied iconographies that I highlight in this chapter are:
• Journey not as return “home” to Israel but as exile, analogous to the Middle Passage;
• African American memories of suffering and poverty, and the personal narrative of redemption through music;
• Rastafari orientation toward Ethiopia, sometimes presented through dreadlocks;
• Invocation of the Kebra Negast, the medieval epic in Ge’ez that establishes Ethiopian/African civilization as a religious center;
• Triangulation of influence, or the combining of several different Afrodiasporic styles within one song, and collaboration with African musicians.
A casual listener might find Rada’s music indiscernible from popular music emanating from North America because it is a collage style comprising a variety of Afrodiasporic musical elements. Once unpacked, however, this combination makes sense as the output of an Ethiopian musician in Israel. Although she downplays any obvious elements of Israeli music, such as the minor melodic lines of Shirei Eretz Yisrael (Songs of the Land of Israel; see Regev and Seroussi 2004), sentimental biblical references, and the Hebrew language itself, as well as the specific political narratives of national vulnerability and anxiety over military service, her music is a projection of the lived experience of dislocation. Even without any Israeli source material, Rada’s music bears the imprint of the Ethiopian experience in Israel, and by assembling the African iconographies and Afrodiasporic vernaculars into a myth-narrative, she establishes Ethiopian-Israelis as Israel’s racial other.
TABLE 1.1 Funk, soul, jazz, Ethio-jazz, and gospel characteristics in Ester Rada’s songs
Arrangement Style: “Four Women”
Rada told me in our interview that Nina Simone is her favorite singer, but if she hadn’t, her preference would be apparent from the dominance of Simone’s repertoire on Rada’s 2015 EP I Wish.15 On each of the EP’s four tracks—three Simone originals (“Four Women,” “Sinnerman,” and “Feeling Good”) and one Simone cover (Bill Taylor’s “I Wish”)—Rada pays homage to Simone’s vocal style, and in concert, Rada’s non-Ethiopian audience responds the most enthusiastically to her Nina Simone covers. From a 2014 performance in New York’s Madison Square Park that I attended, to the Montreal jazz festival the same year,16 to Hulugeb (the annual Ethiopian-Israeli cultural festival in Jerusalem, where she introduced the song “Four Women” in Hebrew), her Nina Simone covers draw as much attention as her original compositions. As an audience member in New York, London, and Jerusalem, I have found that “Four Women” is the Nina Simone cover that consistently sparks the most dramatic audience reaction, performed in a style alternating between soul-jazz and Ethio-soul. She introduces the song to her audience as representing the African American female experience, and her arrangement of the song implies that Afrodiasporic narratives of violence inscribed on the body inform the way that Ethiopian-Israelis can relate to their host society.
Nina Simone first recorded “Four Women” in 1966, performing it widely in France shortly after she composed it (Audio file 1). The lyrics introduce a set of first-person African American narratives through the gendered language of sexual violence, establishing a fictive kinship with black women everywhere. In each verse Simone sings from the perspective of a different woman, describing in few words a set of obstacles for African Americans from the era of slavery to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s (for analysis of the song’s lyrics, see Feldstein 2013: 108–109). Like much of Simone’s repertoire, the song has come under scrutiny from critics, torn between interpreting it as allegory or as stereotype. African American studies scholar Ruth Feldstein interprets the song as a set of paradigms of black women’s experience in America (ibid.: 111). First, Aunt Sarah is dark-skinned and her “back is strong,” indicating that she is a slave (and, presumably, forcibly converted to Christianity). As the first of the story’s matriarchs (like the biblical Sarah), her gentle voice represents her as a mammy figure, the maternal and comforting housemaid of the plantation. Next, Saffronia is biracial or “yellow,” the result of the rape of a black woman by a “rich and white” man. Her clearly enunciated diction, along with the violence implied by her skin color, evokes the pressures on black women in a Jim Crow postemancipation America that was still explicitly racist. Then comes the “tan” Sweet Thing, available to “anyone who has money to buy.” In a lineage of black women exploited by men, her life in the sex trade was typical of many African American singers before the civil rights era (see Feldstein 2013, Maultsby 2006). Finally, the “brown” Peaches is “awfully bitter.” In both versions, Nina Simone and Ester Rada sing this part in a raspy voice punctuated by crescendo and emotion. The characters’ personal obstacles are indexed by their phenotype, skin color, and hair texture, revealing a history of violence against black female bodies, from slavery to rape to forced prostitution (see Burnim and Maultsby 2006).
Analysis of the song often focuses on the narrative structure and the biographical paradigms of the four women, but less attention is devoted to the musical structure, in which Simone articulates the tension in the lives of black women in America equally poignantly. It is worth spending a moment on Simone’s aesthetic choices, because Rada’s version is substantially different. Both communicate tension through syncopation, and examination of Simone’s musical structure—especially her blurring of duple and triple meter—illuminates Rada’s arrangement of the song (Audio file 2). By comparing the two versions, we see that Rada creates musical tension through a hemiola effect (the pitting of duple pulse against triple pulse), while Simone uses additive meter, with a tresillolike 3+3+2 pulse, but that one might prefer to follow as a syncopated 4/4. Simone’s voice and lyrics communicate the tension, too, but the song’s subtle metrical structure expresses struggle and opposition through an ongoing conflict between duple and triple meter within and across the bar lines.
The bass instrument (in some versions a double bass, in others a keyboard) enhances the syncopated feel in Simone’s version, playing on one, four, and seven in the cycle of eight. This syncopation implies triple meter, which her voice enhances: she usually begins a line on the seven, pausing halfway through the line and eventually ending at the end of the next measure. Likewise, her piano solos subvert 4/4 counting: they usually begin on an upbeat, just after the bass begins the 3+3+2 pattern. The syncopated metrical structure within each measure therefore creates a polyrhythmic effect between voice, piano, and bass. This syncopation of the supple structure creates the effect of triplets when following the bass notes on one, four, and seven; of triple meter when combined with other instruments; or of polyrhythm when the bass is subdued by a flute or cello. The effect of Simone’s syncopation of her voice, the piano, and the accompanying instruments is tension and delay, matching the lyrical themes of internal struggle, political vindication, and life narrative as national allegory (see Jackson 2013).
Bolstering the dramatic tension created in the lyrics and through the syncopated meter, Simone’s voice works with the melodic instruments to gradually thicken the song’s texture and navigate the melodic contour. The first verse includes only voice, drums (playing just the second half of each measure), and a keyboard (or a double bass) playing the bass notes. Each verse adds another instrument to build counterpoint: guitar in verse 2, flute in verse 3, and a lowregister string (viola, cello) in verse 4, with Simone playing a piano solo between verses 3 and 4, and finishing the song on a dramatic staccato ascent. In concert, a hand drum often comes in during verse 3 to exoticize Sweet Thing. But most of the drama is contained in Simone’s voice, which draws from different timbres to emphasize the characteristics of each woman. In addition to increasing her ornamentation in each verse—from the minimal decoration of Aunt Sarah to a melismatic Peaches punctuated by vibrato—Simone increases her vocal range as the song progresses. Maintaining a virtually identical skeletal melody throughout, Simone sings almost in monotone for Aunt Sarah, and jumps across an octave for Peaches.
The vocal tension created by Simone’s voice is a key element of her style, and she creates that tension in “Four Women” through timbre and dynamics. From her near-whisper of Saffronia’s name in verse 2 to an abrupt transition to raspiness for Peaches in verse 4, she punctuates the song’s rhythmic structure with her own commentary on the characters. Most recognizable for Simone’s fans, though, is the song’s cadenza (see Maultsby 2006: 280), the rapid ascent at the end of verse 4 complemented by an ascending and then rapidly descending piano, an ending that she popularized with her hit song “Sinnerman.” In “Four Women” she commences this cadenza between the lines “What do they call me” and “My name is Peaches,” the piano delaying the climactic announcement of her sarcastic and decidedly anticlimactic name. The ascent with her voice, in contrast to the piano’s crescendo and cascading, descending contour, concludes the song with a contrapuntal tension that mirrors the narrative structure. Indeed, quite apart from the lyrics, the song’s melody and rhythmic structure emphasize the diversity of life stories that the lyrics express explicitly.
Ester Rada imprints her own style on “Four Women” through an Ethio-soul arrangement, reimagining the song entirely at the level of song structure and instrumental arrangement (Rada follows Simone’s melodic contour, her lyrics, and her vocal timbre). The black otherness that Rada expresses through musical vernaculars of soul and Ethio-jazz is represented in the song’s lyrics about abuse of black women, but she also plays it out in the juxtaposition of African American musical vernaculars (jazz, funk) in the verses and Ethio-jazz in the bridge. The shift from minor scales to hemitonic modes, and from syncopation to triple meter are small but significant adjustments to the instrumental accompaniment, forming the basis of Rada’s reimagining, in which Ethiopian-Israelis share the experience of blackness with African Americans.
Rada’s voice is strongly influenced by Nina Simone’s raspy timbre, low vocal register, and minimal ornamentation, but for all the similarities of vocal delivery, Rada’s version adapts the structure of “Four Women” substantially. In contrast to Simone’s syncopated 3+3+2 structure, Rada and her band delineate the verses by creating a chorus from the “My name is Aunt Sarah/ Saffronia/ Sweet Thing /Peaches” section. After an introduction with Rada singing “My skin is” on the pickup, the first measure of the verse begins on the word “black,” as it does on each subsequent verse on “yellow,” “tan,” or “brown,” the skin color of each character, with skin color explicitly forming the rhythmic and narrative delineation of the verse. Each verse lasts twelve measures, with drums and keyboard accompanying Rada’s voice, followed by a two-measure transition that brings in a swelling brass section. At the end of the two-verse transition (fourteen measures in total), the band changes meter, moving into a 12/8, including the three brass instruments (saxophone, trombone, and trumpet) plus the guitar and bass (see Le Gendre 2012 or Maultsby 2006: 297 for an explanation of the soul convention of transition from 4/4 to 12/8 to heighten syncopation). While Rada sings “My name is Aunt Sarah/ Saffronia/ Sweet Thing /Peaches,” the strings outline the skeletal melody in eighth and sixteenth notes, and the brass play ascending minor seconds. Between the triple pulse and the minor second notes, this bridge evokes the hemitonic pentatonic modes of Ethio-jazz, played in 6/8. Therefore, the melodic effect is jazz verse and Ethiopian chorus. The brass section, prominent in soul arrangements (Maultsby 2006: 274), forms a sonic barrier between the two styles.
The alternation between soul-jazz and Ethio-jazz continues for three verses, and the fourth verse (Peaches) comes in as funk. Portia Maultsby defines the transition from soul to funk as “the interlocking of the drum pattern and a two-bar bass line, counter or contrasting guitar, keyboard and horn riffs, and a vocalist singing in a gospel style” (2006: 297). The brass instrumentalists continue to play for this verse, but they switch to 4/4, with the saxophone accenting the pickup of each phrase. As Rada reaches a crescendo and incorporates rougher timbre, the combination of textural density and dynamic climax brings the song to a frenzied, affectively powerful end, similar to Simone’s version in the feeling of climax, but perhaps with her non-Ethiopian band relying too much on instrumental dynamics to bring about that climax.
Rada first recorded a Simone song in 2015, but she has been paying homage to Simone frequently in concert, the most widely circulated example online being her performance at Hulugeb in December 2013.17 In this rare instance, Rada stepped off-script briefly to explain the song to her audience in Hebrew. An audience member who has heard Rada introduce Simone’s “Feeling Good” in English, complete with demanding that the audience answer the question “How do you feel?” in English even in Israel, might be surprised to hear Rada taking such a pedagogical approach to a song. But for the audience at Hulugeb, many of whom were Ethiopian-Israelis not conversant in English, Rada’s careful explanation of the premise of “Four Women” and its multiple interpretations gave the audience a sense of the gravity of the subject matter. Whether in the dramatic case of Hulugeb or anywhere else on the festival circuit, it comes across that Rada takes this repertoire seriously and that it illuminates the Ethiopian-Israeli experience.
Rada does not offer onstage the full-throated repudiations of racism and occupation that left-wing Israelis espouse in protest songs, but her musical style itself borders on a political agenda, since the linking of soul and funk to Ethio-jazz transpires in “Four Women” through the narrative of violence against black women. She keeps her positioning subtle: she sings in English, does not usually mention Israel onstage as that might alienate her left-leaning audience,18 and connects Ethiopia to the United States via modal brass and triple meter. Yet Rada’s method works as a maneuvering through the Afrodiasporic myths of citizenship because it is understated. In “Four Women,” she forgoes a discourse of identity politics that has left the Israeli electoral system crippled. Instead she draws from Afrodiasporic influences that young Ethiopian-Israelis recognize in their own lives.
CUT ’N’ MIX COMPOSITION: “SORRIES,” “LIFE HAPPENS,” AND “BAZI”
In the video to “Sorries,” Rada walks around the Old City of Jerusalem with four members of her band.19 One immediately notices irony in the performance of reggae in the Old City, since reggae reconfigures “Zion” as none other than Ethiopia (see Raboteau 2014). Not that the song is explicitly political; the lyrics in English are about a romantic relationship, and the symbolic power of the song’s performance unfold entirely at the level of musical style. To understand Rada’s original material, and particularly three original songs from Rada’s album—“Sorries,” “Life Happens,” and “Bazi”—I describe some key musical vocabularies of blackness that, for Ethiopian-Israelis, offer alternative narratives of belonging.
Ethiopian-Israeli musicians frequently deploy reggae (and dub) references to Rastafarian imagery as a way of accruing cultural capital with Caribbean subcultures and among Israeli audiences. In Rada’s case, the negotiation of diasporic identity transpires entirely at the level of musical style, her repertoire constituting her public voice; her referencing of reggae is an effective framing device. At the same time, a number of songs from her album borrow from elements of Ethiopian traditional music and from funk to position Rada and Ethio-soul within a continuum of Afrodiasporic musical styles. Her compositional style might be best understood as a variant of the methodology of cut ’n’ mix, a style that Hebdige characterized in the 1980s as a musical dialogue between African American and Caribbean cultures. Hebdige identifies the roots, musical bloodlines, and influences in reggae as coming from a mixture of African American popular music, African “revivals” (see Herskovits 1961), and Rastafarian ritual, propelled by the sociopolitical milieu of recently independent Jamaica (1987). In this spirit, Rada’s syncretic style connects varied Afrodiasporic cultures to her own personal narrative; she draws elements from the musical cultures to which she actively connects herself, which carry a lineage of experience that parallel the Ethiopian-Israeli experience.
Looking at three of Rada’s original songs, I will demonstrate that her cut ’n’ mix compositional style is part of an exercise in what Gilroy calls “anti-antiessentialism” (1993: 99), or flexible movement between essentializing and deessentializing the features of black culture. Gilroy contends that in black music, a set of vernaculars takes the place of widespread literacy to which slaves were barred access. Those vernaculars can be mobilized to signify blackness, and they can also constitute pastiche, and Rada uses the formalizing of those vernaculars as the basis for her own Atlantic blackness. Her compositional style presents a sort of canonized vocabulary, or textuality of blackness. Reggae, Azmari, and funk all serve as building blocks, and when performed under a singular umbrella they render her conversant in black Atlantic performance.
Here I look at three songs from the album that characterize Rada’s style in unique ways. First, “Sorries,” which bears the strongest reggae influence on the album, with the verses emphasizing the offbeat rhythmically and brass playing in unison (Audio file 3). Second, “Life Happens,” which incorporates a massenqo (Ethiopian spike fiddle) and Ethiopian modality (Audio file 4). Third, “Bazi,” which has the strongest funk influence on the album, funk forming the primary structural foundation of the song (Audio file 5). This combination of funk, reggae, and Azmari music, in addition to soul and Ethio-jazz in Rada’s other work, contributes to an overall sound—Ethio-soul—that articulates an image of blackness frequently associated with otherness.
The essence of the cut ’n’ mix style, what Hebdige calls an absolute reliance on “versioning” for creativity, is on full display in “Sorries,” a song that traverses four musical genres in as many minutes. Following a brief drum solo, it begins with a pentatonic brass passage in 6/8 reminiscent of Ethio-jazz. The brass then transitions into a four-measure section in stop-time, the instruments playing in rhythmic unison. Next is a transition into 4/4 reggae rhythm, with the guitars playing on the offbeat for the duration of the verses and the brass playing in unison on the pickup between measures. Each verse lasts four measures, followed by two measures of brass, with the cycle repeating. After twelve measures, Rada sings a soul-style bridge with vocals overlaid for eight measures. The rapid transition every four measures or so from Ethio-jazz to R&B to reggae to jazz to soul defines Rada’s syncretic style.
Alongside this musical montage of styles, the “Sorries” video demonstrates the degree to which Rada’s potentially intense political statements emerge entirely at the nonverbal level (and sometimes at the visual level). The song lyrics contain no hints of subversion or protest typical of the genres she references (see Le Gendre 2012), but the video makes a statement anyway. Part of her commentary comes from choosing this song in the first place for a video staged in the Old City, the ownership of which is contested by Israelis and Palestinians. As Rada walks around the Old City—the closest analogue to the biblical Zion—playing reggae, she implies a Zion-Zion connection that reads as a multilayered commentary on exclusion and public space. This reading might only be readily apparent to someone who is aware of the problematic existence of black bodies in Israeli public life. By choosing the only song on her album that invokes the other Zion—the Zion that means Ethiopia—she inserts blackness into one of the world’s most controversial sacred spaces.
The methodology of making a statement exclusively through sonic cues and visual signifiers—making musical style her public voice—continues across Rada’s album. “Life Happens” is a polished music video, and her most viewed song on YouTube by a factor of ten.20 The musical style and visual imagery illustrate a complex set of multidirectional influences, particularly through instrumentation and harmonic modulation. The song can be broken down again into a collage style: first, a two-measure Ethio-jazz exposition that repeats (with the four-measure section opening each new verse, a massenqo featured in the second verse). Next, she sings a four-line verse in minor key. Finally, the chorus modulates to major for four measures, eventually cycling back to the Ethio-jazz section, with a brief gospel-style vocal passage at the song’s end. The collage effect repeats itself in virtually all of her original songs, and indeed lends itself to the music-video genre.
The imagery mirrors Rada’s songwriting style, displaying multidirectional Afrodiasporic sensibility. As the video opens in a warehouse, the camera pans in to Rada playing a drum kit and dressed in the style of 1970s Swinging Addis (see Falceto 2002). Next, at 0.06, she is wearing a disco-style silver dress and playing a saxophone, and at 0.10 she is wearing glasses and playing the keyboard with one hand. At 0.13 she wears purple and plays the flute, which sounds like an Ethiopian washint. We appear to be moving through decades chronologically; at 0.16 she is wearing a jumpsuit, and at 0.18 she is holding a massenqo and wearing West African prints and headdress. At 0.20 she is wearing an ’80s-style fedora, playing the bass. The images of Rada from different eras, playing different instruments, in different styles of ethnic dress, offer a collage of multidirectional influence coming from Ethiopia and the United States. The video expresses her combination of eras, regions, tone colors, and melodic structures through an easy-to-grasp visual medium.
In contrast to the collage form of the other songs, “Bazi” sticks faithfully to funk. It begins with a fuzzy guitar and a bass muted by a wah-wah effect (see Le Gendre 2012: 137 for a clear explanation of the effect of the pedal on guitar timbre), moving quickly into a brass section playing in unison, to be followed by a bass line reminiscent of funk trailblazing group Parliament. Formally, “Bazi” establishes a funk groove through the bass, via a low-pitched, rhythmic melody that responds heterophonically to the other melodic instruments throughout (see Le Gendre 2012: 106 for the role of the bass in establishing groove in funk songs). The lyrics are about love and heartbreak, but the language does not convey the double meaning that in many funk songs substitutes sexual relations for unfulfilled political desire. Rada has, in a context removed from the black Atlantic, used iconic funk vernacular—fuzzy guitar, bassline as parallel melody, brass in unison, and contrapuntal melodies—to sound African American. Table 1.2 suggests that Rada and her band employ the lexicon of African American musical style to create substantially different effects from one song to another. Individual effects may not be especially meaningful, but the composite demonstrates fluency with a variety of Afrodiasporic approaches to composition and melody, instrumentation and ornamentation, and flow and timbre.
In each song, Rada uses the main signposts of African American popular style—call-and-response, flow, articulated attack, and embellished coda—to create divergent effects or to signify a variety of styles. Not included in table 1.2 but apparent to any listener is the subject matter of song texts, namely personal relationships. Among the Afrodiasporic musical styles that contributed to the civil rights movement in the United States (jazz, soul, funk) that Rada references, lyrics constitute an explicit part of musicians’ political message (and the part that scholars focus on disproportionately). Soul and funk, and later, reggae, emphasized themes of freedom and dignity for black activists, and song titles like “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “(To Be) Young Gifted and Black” complemented songs about personal relationships that stand in for political struggle like “I Will Survive” or “What’s Become of the Brokenhearted.” The absence of explicitly political themes in her lyrics not only distinguishes Rada from the politically conscious black music that she references directly but also protects her from having to engage directly in Israeli politics. By avoiding any topics of national interest, and indeed even the language of those debates (Hebrew), she frames Ethiopian-Israelis beyond those debates.
Rada’s international prominence and rapid ascent demonstrate that diverse audiences respond to her cut ’n’ mix approach to songwriting, made up of apolitical English song texts and a collage of Afrodiasporic melodic and rhythmic styles. These compositional techniques rely on mastery of a variety of techniques—syncopation, pentatonic modes, melodic lines emphasizing the offbeat, muting for amplified strings—that amount to a musical lexicon of Afrodiasporic popular music. These techniques are part of an oral tradition that has accrued cultural capital because, in Gilroy’s (1993) estimation, that music’s affective and symbolic power exists as an alternative to textual traditions that were strictly curbed by racial slavery. Rada’s compositional approach engages and masters those musical styles as de facto texts, transforming them into a canon to be rehearsed and referenced. In her original songs, Rada inserts Tel Aviv into a circuit of blackness that includes New York, Kingston, and Ethiopia by becoming an insider through mastery of this vocabulary.
TABLE 1.2 Comparison of African American musical elements
ETHIOPIAN SOURCE MATERIAL: “NANU NEY”
“Now THAT was a good version of the song.”
“Amazing! Ester’s version is great!”
“Much closer to the original.”
It was the evening of March 6, 2015, and text messages were coming in. I was in Tel Aviv for a few days, and my friend Moshe Morad had invited me to join him on his radio show Misaviv La’olam beShmonim uShmoneh (Around the World in Eighty-Eight) on 88 FM, a Kol Yisrael national radio station. I joined the live broadcast for an hour, discussing Ethiopian music in Tel Aviv and playing songs by musicians performing around town that spring. To represent Rada’s music, Moshe chose the Amharic track from her album, “Nanu Ney” (Audio file 6), and as my acquaintances listened to the broadcast they sent me a barrage of messages, soon followed by comments on the show’s Facebook page indicating their preference for Rada’s version over the one they had heard before (see chapter 3). Some of the commenters could have been referring to the Ethio-jazz standard by Muluken Melesse, but most of them were comparing Rada’s cover to the sample of the song that most young Israelis have heard, “Mima’amakim” by the Idan Raichel Project (2005). I had myself discussed all three songs with Rada only the day before, when I interviewed her, since her engagement with source material from Ethiopia constitutes an important dimension of her positioning as an Afriodiasporic musician.
The original, “Nanu Nanu Ney” (Audio file 7), is a staple from Swinging Addis (see Shelemay 1991 for a description of the repressed music scene in the Derg years of the later 1970s). Like most of the Ethio-jazz repertoire, it is brassy, modal, and fast-paced, and fans of the important Éthiopiques CD series know it. Yet unlike the Ethio-jazz stars who tour widely like Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete, or who remain beloved at home like Tilahoun Gessesse, Melesse has retired from the music industry and does not have a presence on the touring circuit. His version has taken on a life of its own outside of Ethiopia, since it has been covered and sampled without interventions of its original performer.
In contrast to the arrangement of African American covers, and to original compositions, “Nanu Ney” is Rada’s only recorded rendition of Ethiopian source material, in this case Ethio-jazz. Ethio-jazz developed within a framework of exchange between African and African American musicians in the 1960s and 1970s (Le Gendre 2012: 242), spanning South Africa (Ballantine 1991, Muller 2006), Ghana (Collins 1987, Feld 2012), and Swahili East Africa (Sanga 2010, White 2002). As African musicians adopted rock ’n roll, blues, and jazz, African American musicians visiting Africa for the first time in the 1960s and 1970s looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia for iconographies of black power in service of a pan-African ideology. Therefore, “Nanu Ney” is part of a lineage of Afrodiasporic music returning to Africa, Rada’s cover of the song engaging a set of pan-African ideologies that connect her to African American musical vernaculars through their mutual exchange.
The Ethiopian state began to incorporate foreign musical influence from 1924, when Haile Selassie (then regent rather than emperor) brought the Arba Lijotch, a brass band of forty Armenian orphans from Jerusalem, to Addis Ababa. Once brass instruments were introduced, the musical climate of the capital changed quickly, with military bands presenting new repertoire to the public (see Falceto 2002). Within a few decades, Ethio-jazz emerged as a local example of a trend sweeping Sub-Saharan Africa: incorporation of African American musical styles framed as a “return to Africa” inspired by blue notes and political solidarity. According to Francis Falceto, the period of 1960–1974 (when Haile Selassie was overthrown) was a “golden era” for Ethiopian cosmopolitanism and cultural production, with the music scene in Addis Ababa one of the liveliest on the continent thanks to the emperor’s patronage.
The proponents of African fusion forms, like Fela Kuti in the case of Afro-beat (see Waterman 1998), crisscrossed the routes of the black Atlantic—London, New York, and Lagos, eventually transmitting across Africa. In the process they produced syncretic styles that in turn influenced music in the United States in the repertoire of jazz and funk musicians, reaching Addis Ababa in the 1960s. Ethio-jazz is distinctly local, borrowing from the modal system of Azmaris (qignit) and from folk repertoire, but its style stems from cultural processes whereby Ethiopia connected itself to the African diaspora through music. The vernacular of jazz, which incorporated the same instrumentation as the marching band, propelled hybridity based on Western instrumentation and song structure along with Ethiopian melodic lines and Amharic lyrics.
During the Derg period of military rule (1974–1991) following the overthrow of the emperor, the Ethiopian music industry virtually closed down because of (among other factors) a curfew in Addis Ababa and strict border controls (Shelemay 1991). In that period Francis Falceto, working with Buda Musique, rereleased albums by beloved Ethiopian musicians from the regional traditions of the Gurage, Amhara, and Tigray people. The result, now known as Éthiopiques, continues to produce traditional and paraliturgical musical, but the modal, brassy sound of Swinging Addis is still the main Ethiopian musical export today.
At the Madison Square Park concert in New York (June 2014) as at the Rich Mix in London (July 2015), Rada closed the show with “Nanu Ney.” The version adhered closely to her version on the album, which, at under four minutes, is shorter than both her Nina Simone covers and the original by Muluken Melesse. But rather than include it in a medley as she often does in-concert for other covers, she sang the entire song, dancing a makeshift Ethiopian shoulder dance (Eskesta) between the verses, to which the audience responded ecstatically. After presenting a repertoire in New York with a heavy American influence, she concluded by reminding the audience of her African origins.
Rada’s rendition of “Nanu Ney” hews closer to Melesse’s version than her other covers do to their sources. Rather than incorporate her band’s syncretic style, her version follows Melesse’s song structure, including nearly identical instrumentation (rock band plus brass section), meter (6/8 that can be counted or transcribed equally as 4/4), and tonality (modal, heavy on tritones and minor seconds). The band has transposed the song upward by a major second, cut the synthesizers, and reduced the ensemble size, but these modifications still leave the song close to the 1970s version. The band’s adaptations mostly incorporate Afrodiasporic techniques: the string section makes use of funk elements including the wah-wah effect, while the brass section plays slightly after the downbeat (creating subtle syncopation), and handclaps punctuate the introduction.
Meanwhile, singing Melesse’s lyrics about “unfinished business” between estranged lovers in the verses, Rada incorporates minimal ornamentation, retaining the low-pitched and smooth timbre from her other repertoire. The scale provides most of the vocal contrast: each line of verse begins with Rada ascending by a perfect fourth, and then singing the rest of the line on the fourth. In an extended verse of twelve lines, she does this eight times followed by a bridge, where she sings the guitar’s opening motive. Instead of imitating the melismatic Ethiopian vocal style, she does not add improvisation, vibrato or grace notes to her performance. Indeed, her most explicit punctuation is her pronunciation of the explosive letters ጨ (ch’ä) and ጰ (p’ä) in Amharic, the trilled ረ (rä), and the vowel እ (ë). The emphasis on Amharic pronunciation over vocal ornamentation makes sense, since one of Rada’s main achievements in this song (as she told me) is to introduce the Israeli public to an Amharic song.
The Israeli public had heard this song before, in a heavily mediated format. In 2005, the multiethnic Israeli mega-band the Idan Raichel Project—Israel’s closest analogue to Paul Simon’s Graceland—used “Nanu Ney” as the opening to the title song from the album Mima’amakim. I examine the song of the same name in detail in chapter 3, arguing that it conveys a nationalist (Israeli) agenda by drawing on the musical conventions of Israeli popular song. A Zionist interpretation of the song partly hinges on the fact that Raichel, the bandleader, samples the opening, without incorporating Ethio-jazz tonality into the full song. For Raichel’s fans, a mix of Israeli progressives and world-music fans in the United States and Europe, the Ethiopian section offers a bit of ethnic flavor to a pop song, such that in-depth treatment of tonality (modal), instrumentation (brassy), or lyrics (Amharic, dealing with heartbreak) need only be glossed schizophonically (Feld 1996).
That Rada chose this among Ethio-jazz standards to cover can perhaps be read as a commentary on “Mima’amakim” (Audio file 8) and its selective sampling of particular Ethiopian sounds. As the only Amharic song on her album, one that she renders faithfully with minimal arrangement, the song feels like a corrective to the Idan Raichel Project’s more cannibalistic approach to the classic song.
Rada’s perspective is different, though. When I interviewed her, she explained the choice in some detail:
ER: I think it happened when I heard an Amharic song for the first time on Israeli radio. To hear an Amharic song on Israeli radio … here, Idan Raichel did something really nice, because there was never anything like this in Israel. And I got quite emotional, and went to hear the original song. And I loved it. And I thought that someone had to do the original. Because it’s an amazing song. Not to do, like that to Idan Raichel [makes a stabbing motion] …
IWK: You do the whole song, and you dance, and the audience loves it.
ER: That’s what I wanted. It’s something that the audience knows, and a lot of people think that Idan Raichel wrote the song, so I wanted people to know that it’s an Ethiopian song, that it has an origin, that it’s a complete song, even that’s a good [outcome] in my opinion. And people have really liked it. It’s been on the radio a lot in Israel. It’s the first time a full Ethiopian song has been on the air in Israel. (interview, Jaffa, March 5, 2015)
Rada explains that she did indeed intend to correct misperceptions, but her concern was for Israelis to recognize and acknowledge Ethiopian culture. She notes that a listener might (as I did) interpret the song as a dig against Raichel, but she rejects that interpretation. The primary outcome in covering this song is to reconfigure its symbolic meaning for an Israeli public and, for Ethiopian-Israelis, to connect their source material to her Afrodiasporic source material.
This version of “Nanu Ney” can claim several accomplishments. Rada delivers an iconic African sound to an Israeli audience, turning a schizophonic product (“Mima’amakim”) into a part of Israel’s tapestry of ethnic origins (edot).21 The source material itself, though, carries the history of the African diaspora, of blackness, and of pan-Africanism in the postcolonial moment. Whether or not the song fits neatly into the black Atlantic discourses of musical exchange, the amount of cultural negotiation that went into producing it—from the proto-Rastafarian political speeches of Marcus Garvey to the syncretic jazz-funk of Miles Davis—has turned “Nanu Ney,” and a good deal of Ethio-jazz, into a part of the reawakening of black pride. For this song to be the choice of Israel’s first black star works in tandem with the American-influenced source material to create a lineage that connects blackness from New York to Addis Ababa, via Tel Aviv.
“How long will you be here?”
“Four days.”
“And what have you come for?”
“An interview.”
Wrong answer. I should have just said that I was here for the beach. I had done this a dozen times before, and knew better. Waiting in the immigration queue at Ben-Gurion Airport, I had a feeling that I might well experience the bureaucracy that my students and Palestinian friends knew well, but that I had always been protected from as a Hebrew speaker with an Israeli-sounding name. Every time I entered the country, I worried that this time would be difficult. I should have given my usual answer, that I was here to visit my cousins ….
“What kind of interview? Do you have an invitation?”
“No, it’s not formal. I arranged it over email.”
“Where is it?”
Deep breath. Tell the truth. Don’t look guilty. Be prepared for a long wait.
“In Jaffa. I teach music in London, and I’m here to interview Ester Rada.”
“Wow, what fun [Eizeh keif lakh!]. Enjoy [Teheni!]!” Passport handed back, visa issued. The security apparatus identified me as a desirable.
The Palestinian rappers I’ve worked with who have Israeli passports, as well as my students and colleagues (and husband), have all been in the interrogation rooms. I am fortunate to have avoided any unpleasantness from the Israeli security apparatus in my many visits, but the privilege comes at a price, and this visit clarified for me what that price is.
Ester Rada is currently Israel’s biggest star on the international music circuit, and the Israeli recording industry is excited to claim her. She overcame systemic prejudice growing up, earned professional credentials in a music troupe during her military service, and made a success of herself abroad. As a leftist who veers away from Israeli politics in her repertoire, Rada is the product of a system that she often disagrees with politically, and she navigates the international festival scene carefully. Non-Jews buy tickets to her concerts in France and the United States, and across Europe, where the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement increases in strength with every Israeli diplomatic misstep. This leaves her with some decisions to make about her career, such as whether to move abroad, or whether to collaborate with African diaspora musicians. With these complex entanglements, explicitly political lyrics would be limiting. I understand why she performs in English.
Yet the self that Rada portrays in recordings and onstage is the result of a complex set of cultural processes and multidirectional musical influences. Rada’s collation of Ethio-jazz, neo-soul, jazz, funk, and reggae represents sonically a gradual reorientation of Ethiopian-Israelis in their host society. By backing away from political or subversive lyrics, and working entirely at the level of source material, musical structure, visuals, and ornamentation, Rada works through a set of identities—Ethiopian, Israeli, black—that read differently in front of diverse audiences. As long as “black music” is the language of her performance, Rada’s political ideology can be discerned by an engaged listener. She proposes a route to belonging that circumvents the nationalist narratives that have until recently excluded Ethiopians from one paradigmatic story of exile (Jewish) by inserting them into the alternative paradigm of exile (Afrodiasporic).
For Ethiopian-Israelis, Rada’s cut ’n’ mix compositional style, her Ethio-soul arrangements of jazz standards, and her contemporary interpretations of Ethiojazz standards represent a dramatic reconfiguration of the Ethiopian position in Israeli society via Afrodiasporic narratives of citizenship. For the immigrants who struggled to integrate through the 1980s and ’90s (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 1999), and their children who are disappointed that proud military service (Shabtay 1999: 174) has not yielded upward mobility, the narrative of Jews returning to the homeland (BenEzer 2002) no longer seems an apt metaphor. Instead, young people I know like Shoshana from Haifa, who wears dreadlocks and thinks about moving to New York, are identifying with the opposite global flow, of leaving Africa and encountering blackness as a disadvantage. For these Ethiopian-Israelis, Rada’s music establishes their experience within a lineage of black otherness, blackness serving for her as a route to cultural capital. In her cover of “Four Women” as in her cover of “Nanu Ney” and her original compositions, Rada draws from Afrodiasporic narratives, connecting the United States to Jamaica, Jamaica to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian-Israeli to the African American experience. Afrodiasporic solidarity suggests a route to prestige and acceptance in Israeli society, demonstrating ironically that a performer is better accepted as a representative of Israeliness the further she moves away from Israeli musical style.
