The Israel Festival provides a platform for budding evacuee musicians

Art has to, by its very nature, ceaselessly and inexorably evolve. That is a given. That fundamental element is also something that has irked the Establishment of the day, looking to preserve its hard-earned hegemony, through the ages. 

It follows, therefore, that bringing young blood into the creative fold is a must and, hopefully, serves to infuse the discipline in question with an energy and spirit that keeps the creative juices flowing and breaking out into uncharted areas.

That is something that Haim Shemesh and Yuval Shafrir firmly believe in, and was partially responsible for prompting them to spring into action as the initial shock waves of October 7 crashed over us all.

Some of the results of that initiative, to work with budding musicians from areas most affected by the Palestinian terrorist attacks, will be showcased at this year’s Israel Festival, with concerts on September 12 at Kibbutz Dorot a stone’s throw west of Gaza, and at the Jerusalem Theatre, the festival’s home base, on September 18.

The project is called Music People. The name comes from the moving words of U2 rock band frontman Bono’s declaration at a concert in Las Vegas the day after the massacre. “We sing to them, the music people,” he passionately and tenderly declared.

Thus inspired by the Irish rock megastar, and seeking desperately to take a proactive line on the unfolding cataclysm as we all reeled from shock, music producers Shemesh and Shafrir – the latter is also a drummer – sought out promising talents, specifically from communities near Gaza and the North.

Not satisfied with just bringing the youngsters on, helping them hone their gifts and distilling them into consummate professional acts, Shemesh and Shafrir were intent on paving their way to strutting their newly polished stuff out there where it really matters, to audiences of paying consumers.

The rookie roster for the two shows includes 18-year-old pianist-vocalist Agam Jermi Biton from Moshav Gilat in the Western Negev, who spent October 7 holed up in the family home’s security room, 18-year-old Talya Dancyg whose grandfather Alex Dancyg was taken hostage and murdered in Gaza, and 16-year-old Yaara Cohen whose beloved longstanding music teacher, Shlomi Matias, was murdered in his home on Kibbutz Holit, together with his wife Deborah, on October 7. Clearly the project participants had a thing or two to express in their music.

That will come across in the Israel Festival shows as the teenagers bring their nascent materials to musical performative fruition, under the guidance of Shemesh and Shafrir and fired by their role models. 

Who will share the stage?

These include established pop and rock artists Alon Eder, Karolina, Alma Gov, Marina Maximilian and Berry Sakharof who will share the stage with the youngsters. 

The shows will feature numbers written by the novices and by the veterans, with Maximilian and Sakharof appearing in Dorot and Jerusalem respectively.

SHEMESH AND Shafrir are old sparring partners, dating back to the ‘90s. But, as often happens, they each went their separate professional and personal way until a joint venture, working on an album by singer-songwriter Efrat Gosh, brought them back together shortly before the war. Significant time lapse notwithstanding, the chemistry was still there and, as the enormity of the tragedy became apparent Shafrir felt an irresistible urge to get up and do something. “I didn’t want just to sit there watching the news,” he recalls. “I called Haim.”

That eventually led to the current Music People endeavor. “It was clear to me that I wanted to work with teenagers, evacuees, from the South and North,” Shafrir explains. “I had a couple of teenagers of my own at home, and I knew how much they went through in the Coronavirus years and, after October 7, their world collapsed around them again.”

Shafrir secured a “modest budget” from the Pe’imat Lev (Heartbeat) NPO which supports cultural initiatives, volunteered his own services, and got to work with young evacuees with demonstrable musical talent and, certainly in the wake of October 7, had something they wanted, and needed, to say through their music.

Shafrir says he got a lot out of the work particularly, he says, due to the fact that they hail from the fringes of Israeli society. “There is something so alluring in youth who are categorized as youth from the periphery. There is no way you could get such purity and genuineness from youth who live in Tel Aviv. That was a wake-up call for me too. These young people are, in some way, still living in the Seventies. That was a great decade of music which I connect with too,” says the 50-something producer. “The writers they like are people like Yoni Rechter and Mati Caspi. The youngsters in the Center of the country don’t listen to them but this lot look up to them.”

Having heard some of the project participants’ offerings I can testify to that purity of spirit, and earnest desire to produce something of their very own, that means something to them and which, hopefully, will be appreciated by the audiences at Dorot and the Jerusalem Theatre. “It is encouraging for me and Haim to meet young musicians like these, and the project gave them the boost and support – because of the circumstances in the country – they need to begin their adult musical life.”

After so many years in the business Shafrir is better informed than most about the great depth of musical talent this country continues to cough up. Even so, he says that does not always produce fully homegrown fruits. “What we do lack is original material. There are all the TV reality shows, like A Star Is Born and all that, and a lot of young musicians are busy with doing cover versions of hits. They do that well but that means they are busy with performance and less with creating.”

Shafrir says he is excited about the Israel Festival productions but adds he sees it more as a glittering stepping stone as gifted youngsters gain valuable performance and studio time, and training of inestimable value, as they make their way to becoming fully-fledged artists.

“We worked with them on their instrumental and vocal skills, and how to work in a studio, and to help them present their art to the world. This is the next step. The young musicians in the project have guested in all sorts of shows, and have been on the radio, but the Israel Festival is the next stage, a big stage.”

For more information and tickets: https://www.israel-festival.org/en/