MBS with the crystallisation of a song and the Diwan of Yemenite Jews

November 13th, 2020. Shabbat is almost here 

And we’ll listen again the poem Im Nin’Alu, this time by Shalom Keisar and the Kiryat Ono voice ensemble, recorded in 1977. How does this evolved from just a poem, sang with a big part of improvisation, to a recognizable hit in the world of pop music? 


Hello, how are you? I hope well.

Today this email reaches you a bit later. Until this morning I hadn’t decide which would be the focus of this email. I woke up later than I should, because I was dreaming about this song, Im Nin’Alu. I was dreaming and I didn’t want to wake up…

I dreamt a dream that is impossible to make real in the current circumstances: I was part of the cast for a theatre play based on this song. I would have to sing it in the play. All the actors were together around a table, with food and with the scripts, to organice the rehearsals.

Anyway, these guys from the video at the bottom sing better than me. I had this piece in mind since the edition about Suliman the Great, who sang some of this in his medley of Yemenite songs. If you didn’t read that one, click in the link. That recording is enchanting and their story is very interesting.

– And, as usual, find the music piece at the bottom –
Please, if you like this, share it with your friends. Thank you in advance.
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The Diwan of the Jews From Central Yemen

What does diwan mean? In Arabic and in Persian cultures, a diwan (dīwān) is a collection of poems.

According to a text by Gregor Schoeler, the Dīwāns  redactors made the colletions “arranged by them according to theme exhibit categories which correspond to a large extent to the Western concept of genres. Suchlike Dīwāns do not arise until the emergence of Abbasid poetry with its relative wealth of genres.” The Abbasid Caliphate was an Islamic empire that existed from 750 to 1258 C.E. as it was centered in Baghdad and included much of the Middle East. You can learn more about this topic, here.

The piece at the bottom is part of an album with a compilation of recordings made by Naomi Bahat-Ratzon and her husband Avner Bahat, in the 1970s. This one is dated in January 1977.

The whole album is a wonder and you can listen to it complete here. And to learn more, you have many comments about the album and the songs, here. It was released in 2006 by the Jewish Music Research Centre, in 2 CDs and a long booklet. It is not available in Amazon but it seems to be in the website of the Centre.


The enchanting performance by Shalom Keisar and ensemble from Kiryat Ono

The piece I have chosen is sang by Shalom Keisar (voice and drum) with the male vocal ensemble Kiryat Ono.

Kiryat Ono is a city in the district of Tel Aviv, that arised with that name in 1954 (and would be considered a city in 1992). Before that, there was a ma’abara there, a temporary settlement. You may know that the Operation Magic Carpet had been done in 1949 and 1950 and it transported 49 thousand Yemenite Jews to Israel. The amount of people that arrived to Israel in short time was huge. I have tried to see if Kiryat Ono was one of the first locations for Yemenite emigrants but I haven’t found any data to prove it, apart from the existance nowadays of The return to Zion Association of Yemenite immigrants.


And the crystallisation of a song

About this recording, the website of the Jewish Music Research Centre explains some facts. I will add comments here. In italics, their original texts: 

“Im nin’alu daltei nedivim is a shira by Shalem Shabazi, signed Alshabazi. This poem is one of the most popular and widely known among the Yemenite Jews. It is sung on many different occasions, at weddings and other celebrations, to many melodies.”  

Im nin’alu daltei n’divim daltei marom lo nin’alu means Even if the gates of the rich are closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed. If you understand Hebrew, check this page of the National Library of Israel. If you don’t understand Hebrew, anyway you can listen to many other recordings of this poem.

Shalem Shabazi (you can find it written as Shalom too) was a Yemenite Jewish poet from 17th century, of whom there are around 550 poems. He was a weaver as his main profession and he is though to be quite poor. He wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. He has a reputation of a heroe and his tomb in Ta’izz, in the Southwest of Yemen, attracted pilgrims all year long and specially aroubd Shavout. After the Operation Magic Carpet there were no Jews left in the city. The exact place of the tomb has been lost. You can read more about him in this site of Diarna.

This is Ta’izz, in a picture by Rod Waddington for Wikipedia. As it may be still quite complicated to travel to Yemen in a near future, you can also check the wonderful pictures of the city that are available in google maps.

 

“Alternate stanzas are written in Hebrew and Arabic. The poem speaks of angels on high, exile and redemption, exhortation to the soul. The meter is a variant of the so’er (rajaz): -˘˘- -˘˘- – / -˘˘- -˘˘-.” 
To understand this part I had to find more about rajaz. In the book A Cultural History of the Arabic Language, by Sharron Gu, 2013, she explains that: “Most historians agree that there were distinct forms of music in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula that played an important part in the formation of Arabic poetry. Arabic poetry, unlike the literary poetry of many European languages that is written by literary writers, the Arabic poetry was invented originally by Arab soothsayers (kahins). They used incantations of a rhythmic form of rhymed prose known as saj’ and a poetic meter called rajaz. Arab soothsayers were also enchanters and prophets. It was believed that the jinn (supernatural creatures) prompted the verses of the poet and the melodies of the musician and connected music, poetry, and magic.
[…]
Pre-Islamic music derived from the rhythm of the spoken language and it was little more than unpretentious psalming, varied and embroidered by the singer, male or female, according to the taste, emotion, or effect desired. The oldest form of poetical speech was rhyme without meter, saj’, which was defined later as rhymed prose. Out of saj’ evolved the most ancient of the Arabian meters, known as rajaz meter, a measure which is believed to come from the rhythm of everyday desert life in particular, the beat of the steps of a walking camel. The rajaz meter was an irregular iambic cadence usually consisting of four or six beats.”
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“This song, as performed by Bracha Zefira, who sang a setting of one of the melodies by Paul Ben Haim, has been widely known to the Israeli public since the thirties.” 
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Do you want to listen to this mentioned version by Bracha Zefira? Click here: https://soundcloud.com/nationallibrary-of-israel/yfdolmpbdmvm And this lady on the right is Bracha in the 1940s. She will be our protagonist in a future edition.
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 “Joseph Tal and Oedoen Partos also arranged it for choir.”
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Do you want to listen to a choral version? Click here:
https://israel-music-institute.bandcamp.com/track/oedoen-partos-im-ninalu

If i didn’t tell you they are the same song, would you have noticed? I wouldn’t. This violinist is Oedoen, or Ödön, Pártos..


The album includes several versions of the poem, by different artists, and they comment:

“Each performer chooses which stanzas of the complete song suit him or his tradition, and the occasion on which it is performed. He also chooses which melodies to sing, for the sake of variety.”

I want to highlight this part, because it is something similar to what happens in many traditions, including mine, the popular music from Spain, in many of its shapes: there is the concept of styles, that means that the performer has a frame of work, composed by a corpus of melodies (that are just the base and he or she can change, can include other melismata, adapts to the tonality, adapt to the lyrics to say the words in a meaningful way…) and a corpus of stanzas (in the tradition of Spain there are many anonymous stanzas or couplets, that can be chosen according to the will of the performer (who can also create new ones).

With this piece, Im’nin alu, we see how, from the versions from the people, very different between them (you will note this specifically if you listen to the several versions in the album, don’t miss it) performed just for fun or to celebrate, in which the personal will and the circumstances of the moment made each performance different (also the different performances by the same artist), in which the song didn’t have a closed number of stanzas, in which the role of improvisation was high, goes on crystallising in the form of a song. This example is specially interesting because it has produced so many versions and with the time all are much more recognizable as the same song as in the recordings of the album we are talking about. Check more versions:

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Listen to Im Nin’Alu by Shalom Keisar and ensemble from Kiryat Ono 

The notes of the song in the website explain some interesting facts. I explain the words in bold, under the notes:

“Shalom Keisar (NSA studio, 27.1.77; YC 1181), accompanying himself on a drum, with the Kiryat Ono male voice ensemble, sing the first and last stanzas accompanied by hand clapping. The singer opens with the song’s most widely known melody, which was popularized by Bracha Zefira among the Jewish community of Palestine. It is sung in a responsorial manner: the soloist sings the opening hemistich and the choir the closing hemistich. The tawshihִ is sung to another, faster melody. It is usually sung in a responsorial manner, as follows: the soloist sings the first verse, and the choir the second, the soloist sings the second verse and the choir the third. At the end of the song the singers sing a third, slower melody, and a coda-like passage, and then repeat the last two verses at a faster tempo, followed by the blessing Vekulkhem berukhim (You all are blessed).”

The hemistich is a half-line of verse. This term applies to poetic meter with long verses. Between the hemistichs there is a caesura. Remember the schema we have also above: -˘˘- -˘˘- – / -˘˘- -˘˘- There you see the caesura between the hemistichs.

And the tawshih is a type of vocal suite, religious, in Yemeni tradition, related to the qawma (according to the The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The Middle East). And what is qawma? This looks like a gymkhana… According to Mahmud Guettat, the qawma from Yemen would be the fasil in Turkey, the wasla in Egypt, the maqam in Irak, el sawt from the countries of the Gulf. So, these are a system of melodic modes. I found Guettat’s explanation mentioned in a work by Sergi Sancho Fibla (Arrels mediterrànies de la música canareva: Reconstrucció de possibles vestigis ancestrals en les cançons populars d’Alcanar).

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Click the picture to listen to the recording:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música 

To know more about our artists, click here.

Music Before Shabbat with Suliman the Great, but the one of XX century!

October 16th, 2020. Shabbat is almost here

And the Yemenite music, the enchanting sound that is the mix of so many scents, with Suliman the Great and his family, will accompany us in the path to Shabbat. 


How are you? Today there is not a festivity (or… not yet!). I hope all this special time has been fruitful, inspiring, full of reflection and growth for you.

Today I bring you the result of my wanderings in Youtube. Our protagonist is an artist that is not characterized by humility. Well, it is not true: he was not the one who proclaimed himself as “the great”. But it wouldn’t have mattered: how would it matter when you are an amazing artist and the patriarch of a saga of artists, one of which would be the first winner of your country of the Eurovision Song Contest?

I wouldn’t have been able to make this edition without the support of Igal Gulaza Mizrahi ?, the leader of the band  Gulaza . I got this picture from his Facebook. It was done by Leat Sabbah. There is no info about this Suliman in English at the Internet and Igal gave me some relevant tips that allowed me to start the search in Hebrew websites.

Learn more below and, as usual, find the music piece at the bottom.


One last thing before we get into the flour: if you like this, share it.
That’s all I ask you.
 Thank you in advance.

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Who was Suliman the Great?

? This wonderful picture is from the page of the magazine GivatayimPlus, where you can find some more. Givatayim was the city where the family settled.
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To make this portrait I have used several sources:
– the mentioned page of GivatayimPlus,
– his profile in Geni.com
– the newspaper Mako
– the newspaper XNet
– the brief explanation that helped me to start the search, by Igal Gulaza Mizrahi, who told me:
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“Suliman the Great was the son of parents who immigrated from Yemen. He was popular in our country in the past because he sang songs of the Land of Israel, songs of shepherds, and songs of Bedouin (which the immigrants from Russia loved so much). So they called these songs : “songs around the fire.” He also sings Yemeni. All his children were singers. The most famous is Yizhar Cohen (the first Israeli to win the Eurovision Song Contest in first place, in 1978).” 

The song that won Eurovision was A-Ba-Ni-Bi. I don’t know if you know it, but in Spain it was suuuuuuper famous and everybody still knows it and there are many artists that have sang it with Spanish lyrics. This was the original performance at the contest.

Igal sent me the link to the Wikipedia in Hebrew too, where I learnt the real name of Soliman was Shlomo (that, by the way, are the same name) and the surname was Cohen.

So, Shlomo Cohen, or Suliman the Great, was born in 1921 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He married Sara Cohen. She was born in Yemen, near Sanaa, and her parents moved to Israel when she was 6 months old. The way would take months. It was done part by foot, and part in a British postal boat. After the arrival, the family faced many difficulties too. Note they entered the land when Israel as a state was not existing yet. There was a period of much uncertainty and violence. The father died when Sara was 10 years old. Her mother had to work from sunrise to night. She explains her life quite deeply in this interview. Sara and Shlomo met at very young age and they got married when she was 16 years old.

How did they become artists?

It was not premeditated. During his attendance at the army (note this was still during the Mandatory Palestina, with the land administrated by the British) the men used to gather around a fire, telling tales and singing songs. Shlomo soon stood out as a singer. He was given the nickname of Suliman the Great by one of this colleagues. The guys proposed him to request money for the performances. So it started with little expectations. And they were requested soon for many and many more places to perform.

Sara was a singer with Suliman, and a great one too! And they had four kids, who became singers and they all entered the band: the boys, Hofni, Pinchas and Izhar Cohen, and the girl, Vardina Cohen. They settled in Givatayim. Not everything was easy in their lifes. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to buy the essential furniture, but an accordion, a guitar and the personal music lessons from the father were never missing.

They recorded two albums: “30 years singing around the fire with Suliman the Great”, with 25 pieces, in 1978, and Singer of the Land with Suliman the Great” in 1994. Don’t miss to see Shlomo and Sara in this live performance at the TV. The picture above is from that performance.

Shlomo died in 2009 because of a kidney disease. It is said that he was singing even in the way to the hospital. About Sara, she was alive at least until August 2019, when the interview at XNet was done. I haven’t found any information about after. All the information about them is in Hebrew. I would thank any data. Blessed machine translators, by the way…


Who was the previous Suliman the Great?

According to Thoughtco, Suleiman the Great, or Suleiman the First:

“(November 6, 1494–September 6, 1566) became the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1520, heralding the “Golden Age” of the Empire’s long history before his death. Perhaps best known for his overhaul of the Ottoman government during his reign, Suleiman was known by many names, including “The LawGiver.”

His rich character and even richer contribution to the region and the Empire helped make it a source of great wealth in prosperity for years to come, ultimately leading to the foundation of several nations in Europe and the Middle East we know today.”

You can learn much more about his life and achievements, here. It is very interesting. Note there is a direct relation between Suliman’s reign and Yemen: in 1538 took Aden from the Portuguese and set a base to continue the attacks against the Portuguese, who were trying to control parts of India. This was the beginning of a period of conflicts between the Ottoman and the Portuguese.


Medley of Yemenite songs, by Suliman the Great and family 

Igal Gulaza explained me which are the songs in this wonderful medley and recommended me to check this website of the National Library of Israel to learn more about the pieces. So I will make a little summary about each of the pieces.
  • The singer opens with “Dror Yikra” (with Yemenite melody). This is one of the best known and most common Shabbat songs in all Israeli communities over the generations. This is probably the first song written especially as a song for Shabbat, and not as a piyyut intended to be included in prayer or in the synagogue. The song itself is about today’s Sabbath as freedom and spiritual redemption for humans and the world. The author of the piyyut is Dunash ibn Labrat, a 10th century poet and linguist from Spain (note Spain was not a estate or country yet), a student of R. Saadia Gaon who moved to Spain where he worked.
  • After that, they move on to Moroccan piyyut “Shalom Leben Dodi“. This is a piyyut written by Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, one of the greatest poets of Spain in XI century. There is a dialogue between the people of Israel and God, represented as, on many occasions in the piyyutim, by two lovers.
  • In third place, they sing a Yemenite piyyut, “Im Nin’Alu” (Yemeni melody). A central song for celebrations in the tradition of Yemeni Jews. It is composed by seven stanzas, alternating Hebrew and Arabic. It was written by seventeenth-century Rabbi Shalomon Shabazi. It is very popular specially thanks to the versions by Ofra Haza. I have found some other renditions of this song and I will come back with it in a near future.
  • And returns to finish again with “Shalom Leben Dodi“.
Click the picture to listen to the recording:

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I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música 

To know more about our artists, click here.

Zabibi, by Gulaza

7 February 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

Enjoy with Yemenite Jewish music that has been kept and transmited from mother to daughter for generations. These are Gulaza in a recording made 3 years ago at Gil Rouvio’s radio show (thank you such a delighting document).

Credits: Recorded by: Idan Katz – Camera by: Nimrod Kipi Halberthal – Video, Mix and Mastering: Ben Aylon – Recorded live at 106fm Kol HaCampus Radio with Gil Rouvio, Israel

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

Gulaza – Salam Yalbint

24 January 2020 – Shabbat is almost here


Enjoy with Yemenite music, Salam Yalbint, by Gulaza, that says:

Hello, dark maiden by the well, quench my thirst.

Walla, I swear to God If only I didn’t have seven
brothers, i would let you drink the tears from my eyes.

It is not water from the well that I desire…

In that case, please go upstairs and ask my mother for her permission.


Click to watch:
May you always find the light in your path.

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.