A prodigal son returns: Asaf Avidan continues to prove his talent with riveting one-man show

Asked what it’s like to come back to Israel eight months after October 7,  multi-talented Jerusalem-born singer-songwriter Asaf Avidan said he was struck by how the war had become part of normal life here.

“There is a strangeness coming here,” Avidan, who now lives in southwest France and is in the midst of an international tour, told The Jerusalem Post after a powerful two-hour solo performance at The Jerusalem Theater on Monday evening.

“Being an Israeli far away from Israel, I read the news like 10 times a day. I guess if I came like half a year ago, it would have been very different, but now there’s this thing that everybody has adapted to live in this reality, and somehow it seems normal. That’s the first thing that hit me – how life goes on, which is incredible but insane and horrifying at the same time.” After serving in the IDF, Avidan studied animation at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design before launching his musical career in English. Asaf Avidan & the Mojos released a series of celebrated albums, and in 2009, they signed a four-album deal with Sony International, which touted him as a male Janis Joplin for his high-range, passionate vocals.

Avidan's movement to a solo career

However, by 2012, the band had broken up, and Avidan continued an eclectic solo career, eventually leaving Israel.“Because my biography is not rooted in Israel – I was born in Jerusalem, but I grew up in Jamaica and moved around as a kid [he is the son of Israeli diplomats] – Israel is a home but just one of my homes. It’s not that France or Italy is my home either. I feel very convoluted, which has benefits, and it has a lot of downs as well... You don’t really have a social circle that defines you and helps you and is with you and so on. You also miss out on a lot of things, and that is the price I pay, but for me as my own individual self, I like being around trees and water and animals.”

Although he sings in English, Avidan spoke to the packed theater in Hebrew, telling the audience at the outset that he did not consider his music “escapism.”

In explaining that for him, music is not an escape but a means of coming to terms with reality and letting go of anger, Avidan quoted Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai at the start of his show, saying, “Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers.”

“What troubles me is that thing I say on stage...that a lot of people are looking for escapism, escapism, escapism. ‘I’m shutting off; I don’t even want to read the news.’ It’s almost like a child closing his eyes and imagining that the world disappears. I feel our job as intellectuals, artists, and people of culture is to reignite the capability of people to hold complexity again, to stop drawing imaginary lines in the sand and deciding who’s black and who’s white, and trying to figure out the real nebulus complexity of the human experience. There are fears, brokenness, impotence, and I really truly feel that we can do that as a society. If we can live within that part of ourselves and not immediately turn it into anger and hate towards other people... then we’ll be a better society, outside and inside. This is what I’m focused on in my shows.”

Avidan added that he didn’t know if he was having any impact.

 “I have no idea. I cannot speak about what I do to other people. I can only discuss the things that I try to do in myself, for myself, in this voyeuristic experience with other people. What other people get from it is out of my control and out of my responsibility, but that’s what I try to do,” he said.

However, based on the enthusiastic reception he received on Monday night, a few days after performing a similarly well-received show in Tel Aviv, Avidan has succeeded in his goals.

Avidan, 44, came to Israel for performances in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as part of  what he calls the Ichnology Solo Tour (Ichnology is a branch of paleontology that studies the traces of animals and plants.) After successful concerts in Germany and Canada, he now goes on to perform in Romania, France, Lithuania, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands.

Avidan, who once said he considers himself an artist from Israel rather than an Israeli artist, added, “If I let external forces define who I am, then they (and I’m fighting against “they”) win. There is real suffering in so many aspects and so many layers, and the idea that I’m not interested in this as an artist is insane. I am interested because that’s the reality for a lot of people, but what really interests me is the root of this insanity, the root of this evil, the root of complexity. And I think the root is this fundamental fear of impotence, of nothingness, of invisibility, of finity. And that’s universal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Chinese person or African or Gazan or Israeli. We all share that. And if we can touch that and see it in each other, we would be a better society. So what I do is very self-centered and personal, but somehow, it becomes political.”

In his Jerusalem performance, in which he energetically belted out a series of his classics, opening with “Rock of Lazarus,” and played a variety of musical instruments, from piano and guitar to drums and harmonica, he sang a song of his, titled “Not in Vain,” that had not found a home on one of his popular albums but somehow accurately represented the current mood. The lyrics of the refrain that palpably moved the audience are:

“Oh! Tonight

Oh! Tonight

Our hearts shall unite

Not in vain

Not in vain

But in pain

Amen, amen, amen!”

The only time that Avidan spoke in English during the concert was to thank his team, singling out soundman Felix Seidel. “There’s a special thank you I want to say to Felix because we booked this show when there were still missiles falling on Tel Aviv and Israel, and Felix was worried. Felix is not from here; this is not normal to him, and his girlfriend was like, ‘You’re not going, man.’ Felix needed a bit of convincing, but the fact that he’s here is so flattering and says so much about him and how much he thinks about art and its importance,” Avidan said.

Performing in Israel at this time cannot be easy. Avidan received warm applause and a standing ovation at the end of his concert, returning to the stage to serenade an appreciative audience with two more spellbinding songs.