Woman 2024 festival hosts tribute to Alona Turel, one of Israel's most important musicians

Those of us with a working knowledge of the popular Israeli music scene will probably know the A-listers.

For the older crowd, the likes of Arik Einstein, Shalom Hanoch, and Yehoram Gaon will surely be familiar if not downright beloved, while some younger pop and rock music fans may be better acquainted with the work of vocalists Hillel Yuval, Dana Adini and Ola Schur Selektar.

All the above, and plenty more, including the string section of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, contribute to a fittingly grand salute to late songwriter-keyboardist Alona Turel, who died five years ago at the age of 75.

The Turel nod forms part of the Woman 2024 program, which runs at the Holon Theater March 5-9. The subtitle of the predominantly musical event reads “Female Art at the Holon Theater.”

Somewhat unfamiliar moniker notwithstanding, this is the 27th edition of the Woman Festival which takes place at the Holon cultural center on and around March 8, International Women’s Day, which is marked around the globe and which focuses on women’s rights and a host of related burning issues.

This time round, with the violence still raging in Gaza, and over 130 Israelis still held hostage there, the organizers opted to omit the word “festival” from the banner.

Israeli music would sound different if it weren't for Turel

SO, WHO was Turel? And what role did she play in the growth of the Israeli music industry, across a range of genre and stylistic domains?

Eitan Itzkowitz is as good a person as any to ask about her. The veteran drummer, who mainly works at the jazzier end of the musical spectrum, is one of the brains and hearts behind the Holon project, along with guitarist, songwriter and producer Amos Ever Hadani and bassist Alon Nadel. Both are long-serving members of the Israeli pop and rock music community, as is musical all-rounder Ilan Mochiach, the music director of the Turel show, with the other three in charge of production.

The Holon concert is tagged as the launch event of a tribute album to Turel which, Itzkowitz says, is due for release “later on in the year.”

I try my hand at a grandiose supposition. So, would it be safe to say that Israeli music would sound different, were it not for Turel?

“Absolutely,” comes the unequivocal reply from Itzkowitz, who says she got off to a roaring start. “She wrote most of her best-known songs between the ages of 16 and 25. The songs she wrote, for example, for [celebrated vocalist-guitarist] Chava Alberstein, like “Adaber Itcha” [I Will Talk to You] and “Bashvil El Habreichot” [On the Path to the Pools] and quite a few others were written during this time.”Both numbers, naturally, are in the Holon repertoire, and on the impending album.

The opening productive spurt petered out, after which Turel was content to engage solely in hands-on sonic endeavors. “From the age of 25 – I have no idea why – she made do with being a sideman, in piano. She played in loads of gigs with, for instance, [seminal jazz combo] Platina. She stopped writing music.”

But, as they say, you can’t keep a good woman down, and Turel’s creative bent came shining through yet again, with a little help from a fellow female artist. “It is only in later years that she returned to writing music, to texts written by [prominent poet] Agi Mishol. Alona really liked Agi’s work, and her compositional gifts just poured out of her again.”

That synergy also fits the festival thematic gender bill. When Turel started out, there were no other female artists and performers on the scene, other than vocalists.

Itzkowitz caught the Turel bug early on. “I first saw Alona on stage when she played with [iconic rocker] Shalom Hanoch and his Adam Betoch Atzmo [A Man Within Himself] show,” he recalls. That refers to Hanoch’s first solo album, which came out in 1977. The drummer was well and truly hooked.

“The show ran for three or four years. I saw it seven times,” he chuckles. “I really wanted to play on a stage myself, and that was the first time I’d seen people playing on such a high level, live.”

Turel hove into Itzkowitz’s burgeoning creative view. “Alona was the only woman on the stage, and in the industry in general at the time. She was fantastic. She played amazingly. She had this groove to her playing, on a Fender Rhodes, the sound of the mythological electric piano which [legendary American jazzman] Chick Corea used on so many records.”

The young Itzkowitz may not have known it at the time, but he and the rest of the audience were witness to an undercurrent of vibes and sounds from New York, the epicenter of the global jazz scene, where Turel had studied and worked for five years in the 1960s.

“Alona was one of the first to bring the flavor of American jazz over here,” he notes. “Before her there was [now 86-year-old evergreen reedman] Albert Piamenta and [pioneering jazz pianist, now 85-year-old] Danny Gottfried and the people around him. Alona brought the playing style over here. She had funk and black groove in her music. That was something new for Israel, and certainly within pop and rock music. Alona was at the center of Israeli music in the 1970s. She was a mover and shaker at the birth of Israeli [commercial] music.”

Turel was generous with her gifts and invaluable accrued experience.

“She played with everyone, and she was a wonderful person,” Itzkowitz coos. “I fell in love with her musicianship, and later, when we worked together, I fell in love with her as a person.”

The drummer basked in Turel’s artistic and personal presence on a couple of productions, including a successful run-out with one of the country’s preeminent chansonniers. “We performed with Yossi Banai for three years, and we recorded a live CD of his songs. Ilan Mochiach was the producer and arranger on that.”

That brings us neatly back to next week’s Holon date, which takes place on March 7 at 8 p.m.

“Alona was a good friend, and I missed her a lot,” says Itzkowitz. It was time to do something about that personal and musical baggage.

“I asked Amos and Alon if they wanted to make a tribute album to Alona. I just threw up an idea without too much forethought. I thought it would happen at some unspecified stage of the future.”

The notion fell on fertile and well-primed ground. “They said they’d love to go for it, and a week later we started selecting songs.”

It turned out that Itzkowitz, Ever Hadani, and Nadel had plenty of willing souls keen to express their appreciation of Turel’s expansive oeuvre and endearing personality.

“All the musicians on the album worked for free,” Itzkowitz notes. “I think that is a mark of how people feel about Alona.”

For tickets and more information: (03) 502-3001 and http://woman-festival.co.il