Keeping any cultural vehicle on the budget-balancing road for nigh on a quarter of a century in this country is a pretty demanding task. 

For starters, there is the distressing security situation, which tends to rear its ugly violent head with rising frequency over here. That, subsequently, damages the chances of bringing over A-listers from the global arts scene and pulling in the crowds. And then, there is the continuing miserly state support for cultural derring-do. In fact, it is a wonder we have any cultural life here at all.

But thank goodness we do, in abundance. The aforementioned milestone has now been reached by the Jerusalem International Oud Festival, founded by Confederation House CEO and artistic director Effie Benaya back at the dawn of the third millennium. 

This year’s rollout – the 25th to date – supported by the Jerusalem Municipality, takes place November 21-30 at various spots around town, such as the base venue, Jerusalem Theatre, and at the Yellow Submarine, National Library of Israel (NLI), and the downtown Mazkeka music club.

A festival grows up

To say that the festival has grown over the years would be a gross understatement. I recall the debut event which stretched to all of two days, with all the concerts taking place at Confederation House (center for ethnic music and poetry). If memory serves, there was a senior citizen oud player from Morocco on the bill, a delightful gent who was an ace storyteller and could crack a slide-spitting joke or two while he was at it.

Benaya has steadfastly followed through on his vision, keeping a steady hand on the programmatic tiller as he steered the festival through choppy waters, bringing in headlining acts from Turkey, Greece, India, the United States, and farther afield, and flexing the genre and sonic spread just about as far as he possibly could without straying too far from the Arabic musical core. 

But he has always taken care to keep his ambitions within reasonable and practicable bounds. “I have tried to develop the festival gradually over time,” he says when we meet up for a rendezvous in his charming office that commands a spectacular view of the Old City walls.

TWO AND a half decades on, the unassuming Benaya can rightly allow himself a gentle pat on the back, and to cast a sagacious eye back on the birth and growth of what has become a robust and very popular fixture on our national cultural calendar. 

“I started out on a journey,” he smiles, with more than a modicum of nostalgia. “When I began providing a stage for ethnic music here for the music of different communities, I thought to myself, ‘Arabic music has to be part of Confederation House.’”

 That notion came naturally to him. “I grew up in surroundings where Arabic music was always present,” he recalls. “Our neighbors played the music, and my father came from Egypt and my mother from Turkey. My grandmother listened to Arabic music the whole time. And it was always on the radio at home.”

THAT CHILDHOOD-GENETIC backdrop filtered through into Benaya’s consciousness when he took up his post in 1996 and started forming a new philosophy and cultural identity for the arts facility. 

“I suddenly found myself at Confederation House, which was looking for a new path and what work it should take on in this diminutive building. I saw there were stages for all kinds of music; but where was Arabic music?”

Indeed. This was a decade or so after world music became a prominent force in the global entertainment arena which, on the one hand, brought the sonic cultural heritage of all sorts of ethnic communities to the awareness of Western domains. Then again, world music tended to spice up – some might say “dilute” – the source roots material with, often, extraneous colors and textures such as electronica. Hence, that did not serve to expose folk with no knowledge of Arabic fare to the work of such titans of Arabic music as Egyptian diva Oum Kulthoum; Syrian-Egyptian singer, oud player, composer, and actor Farid Al-Atrash; and now-89-year-old Lebanese songstress Fairuz.

Benaya does not lack for drive or determination, but he was wily enough to know that, as is frequently the case, especially in the local entertainment sphere, the higher you leap the farther you are liable to fall from transient grace. 

“I TURNED to Taiseer and asked him to produce an evening dedicated to three great Arab female singers – Layla Morad, Oum Kulthoum, and Fairuz.” Benaya could hardly have turned to a better-informed authority in the field. 

The artistic director in question was celebrated oud player-violinist Prof. Taiseer Elias, then a doctoral student of musicology and already a seasoned performer with the likes of internationally acclaimed seminal crossover troupe Bustan Avraham. Elias now heads the Department of Music at the University of Haifa. The water tester foray was highly encouraging and augured well for a promising continuum. 

“Taiseer submitted a program, we invited a singer – it might have been Lubna Salameh – and we were sold out three weeks in advance. I thought, ‘What a wonderful surprise.’ Our other events didn’t sell so well. For this [show], we got a curious, interested audience [coming] for Arabic music!” Benaya was clearly on to something.

The possibility of bigger and better things hove into view. “I thought we should have a festival, headlined by the oud. The oud is known as ‘the king of the instruments’ of Arabic music. I had no idea where it would all lead.”

Diverse, homegrown talent

That may be so, but even the measured Benaya allowed himself to entertain thoughts of spreading out into uncharted waters. “I called the festival ‘International’ from the start because I thought we should at least cater for the possibility that we would bring in stars from overseas. That is in addition to Jewish and Arab musicians from here.” 

That suggests a coexistence-related remedial subtext was in the offing. “We all know that music brings people together. That it is a language we can all share and enjoy,” Benaya notes.

Again, as per his softly, softly ethos, Benaya based the early installments of the festival on homegrown talent. 

“We had all our great musicians, like [percussionist] Zohar Fresco, Taiseer, [Elias’s pal in Bustan Avraham, violinist-oud player] Nassim Dakwar and, of course, [global star violinist-oud player] Yair Dallal. They are the founder artists of the festival,” says Benaya, taking an imaginary hat off to the respected quartet. “That’s how we began.” All four are due to perform in this year’s edition.

And the perennial festival tribute to some of the giants of the history of Arabic music backdrop will take place at the Jerusalem Theatre on November 27 (9 p.m.) with The Four Masters concert with numbers written and/or popularized by Oum Kulthoum, Farid Al-Atrash, Muhammad Abd al-Wahab – aka “king of the oud” – and Egyptian singer-actor Abd al-Halim Hafez. Elias will be front and center for that one as will preeminent vocalist Violet Salameh and singer Faysel Benhaddou, who will make the trip over from Morocco for the occasion.

Once up and running, there was no stopping Benaya and the Jerusalem International Oud Festival. Three or four years into its continuing successful timeline, the annual program curtain raiser moved to the far grander and larger stage of the Jerusalem Theatre. 

“We always filled the Sherover Hall [with a seating capacity of close to 1,000] with homages to the greats of the Arabic music world, not just Egyptians, but also Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, from all over the Arab world.”

Initially, the patrons were in and around the senior citizen age group, people who were born in Arab countries and had imbibed the music with their mother’s milk. But gradually, the festival began to draw younger folk, including young Ashkenazim who were starting to get turned on to the vibes of a discipline which, in many ways, was anathema to the Western classical pop and rock sounds they’d heard in their early formative years. 

Before your Westernized ear gets tuned in, Arabic music can sound monotonous and same-y. Growing up myself on a heady mix of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, jazz, blues, folk, and cantorial songs, it took me a while to get anything approaching a handle on musical fare that was entirely devoid of harmony and featured such sonic subtleties as quarter tones, which I simply did not consciously discern.

But practice makes perfect, and Benaya began to see more and more blond and blue-eyed folk turn up to the festival concerts. There was a practical impact too, as music schools such as the Eastern Music Center in Jerusalem and Maqamat School of Eastern Music in Safed took in youngsters who had not inherited the “requisite” cultural genes.

Benaya kept on stretching the parameters of the source material, thereby allowing himself greater room for programmatic maneuvering. “We were looking at Arabic music which also influenced our Hebrew language poets, such as during the Golden Era of Spain. We introduced music from the Middle Ages, too.”

Highlights

That, naturally, leads in the direction of piyutim, Jewish liturgical music which, apparently, can wend every which way, crossing genre boundaries with gay abandon.  

This year’s lineup, for example, includes veteran rock outfit Nikmat Hatractor (The Tractor’s Revenge), whose The Right to Cry Out show (National Library of Israel, November 25 at 8:30 p.m.) is described as offering “timeless trance music.” That feeds off the writing of Jewish luminaries such as 11th-12th century poet-physician Yehuda Halevi and 11th-century poet-philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

As the festival continued to draw the crowds, and the disciplinary purview opened up to ever more expansive cultural tracts, Benaya began to entrust an ever-widening circle of artists with putting their stuff out there, even if it went some distance beyond the strict confines of Arabic music. 

“I then said, ‘Let’s have oud with jazz, oud with blues, oud with percussion.’ I said the oud would offer another stratum to different genres. We had, for example, Alon Olearchik with Yair Dallal, and we had Mickey Shaviv and Wissam Joubran and Mika Karni.” 

Olearchik, of seminal Israeli pop-rock band Kaveret, has taken on several jazz ventures over the years, while Shaviv, who lived in Canada for some time, is one of our foremost blues artists. Karni, who is best known as a pop singer-violinist, is on this year’s festival roster, where she joins up with vocal artist Victoria Hanna for the Song of Mothers show (NLI, November 24 at 8:30 p.m.), with Aviva Avidan guesting. The repertoire is based on ancient Jewish texts that relate to maternal and feminine power.

Liat Cohen cites for the paternal side of the parental union in her slot at the festival (Confederation House, November 23 at 8:30 p.m.). Her show goes by the name of Abraham’s Children, where she is joined by French oud player and flutist Pierre Baillot; longtime colleague-in-musical-arms Brazilian percussionist Edmundo Carneiro; and Israeli opera singer Efrat Rotem.

Hefty cultural baggage

There is some pretty hefty cultural baggage in there and, it must be said, the concert moniker gives much of the conceptual game away. The patriarchal reference immediately gave me the impression that Cohen – principally known for her prowess in the classical guitar field – and her cohorts are striving to find common ground between Jews and Arabs. 

“I very much like to break down walls,” Cohen smiles, with a nod to both the brotherhood sentiment and the instrumental lay of the land. I wondered how, for example, her Western string instrument blends texturally and sonically with the oud. 

“Wonderfully well!” she exclaims. That was something of a surprise for me. While the oud is often used to play flamenco, or flamenco-oriented material, as of course is the guitar, the said king of Arab instruments can be used to produce quarter tones that are a core element of Arabic music. Even the ability to bend the strings is not something that comes naturally to guitar players. 

“In fact, together we sound a bit like a harp,” Cohen adds.

Cohen clearly goes with Benaya’s eclectic flow with respect to sticking to the Arabic music, straight and narrow. “We are definitely not purists,” she explains. “Even when I play ancient [Western] classical music, I don’t play lute, I play guitar. I recognize the uniqueness of ancient music, but I perform it on a modern instrument.” 

There are precedents from other musical realms. “It is the same when you play jazz with an oud or play Eastern music on guitar – there are compromises to be made. We try to make these connections, in good taste and with much caution.”

Integral cultural crossovers

Those interfaces also take in cultural crossovers that are an integral element of the Abraham’s Children project that weaves traditional melodies from across the Mediterranean region – from Italy, Spain, and North Africa – which met and seamlessly fused when they landed here. As the festival background information posits: “This is a sensual journey in time and space that evokes possibilities of hope and peace.” 

With plenty of Ladino fare in her portfolio to date, music that was transplanted and disseminated across the whole region in the wake of the Inquisition, Cohen seems like the ideal artist to promulgate that wholesome healing intent.

Cohen modestly demurs when I suggest that. “Music has the ability to soothe our souls. It has the power to provide us with comfort and strength. And we need that strength, especially now. I must admit I had some pangs of conscience about playing music after Oct. 7. I questioned our right to play music. But music gives us the strength we need to continue to battle.” 

Cohen, who lived in France for many years before returning here, says she has the facts-on-the-ground collateral for that viewpoint. “A few days ago, I gave a concert in Paris, and there were relatives of hostages in Gaza in the audience, and they came to me with tears in their eyes. I could see the emotion the music evoked in them.” Sounds consoling, indeed.

Elsewhere across the festival itinerary, Benaya has clearly cast his artistic director’s net here, there, and practically everywhere. Arabic music-meets-jazz-meets-infectious groove when the young Komradin trio plays at Confederation House on November 26 (8:30 p.m.); and sparks are sure to fly when the Asbestonim hit the stage at Mazkeka on November 23 (9 p.m.) in a tribute to late punk rocker and unremitting rabble-rouser Maurice Sarfati. 

Jewish Tunisian singer, dancer, and actress Habiba Msika, who was murdered by a jealous fan in 1930 at the age of 26, also gets a rare salute (Confederation House, November 22 at 12 p.m.) by a quintet of vocalist-percussionist Ayelet Uri Benita; oud player, vocalist, and arranger Imad Dalal; saz player-vocalist Yuval Tobi; percussionist Omri Zichron; and flutist-violinist Basil Hleihel. 

The Iraqi Jewish community was blessed with abundant musical talent, and the Saharat all-female nonet duly presents a contemporary women’s project in the spirit of Iraqi music at the Yellow Submarine (November 28 at 9 p.m.). 

The festival will go out with a bang, with feted veteran rocker Shalom Hanoch fronting a sextet at the Jerusalem Theatre on November 30 (9 p.m.). Popular singer-songwriter Shlomi Shaban and Yair Dallal will guest. No doubt, the Sherover Hall will be packed to the rafters.

Love, openness, and music

Benaya says he is understandably thrilled to be rolling out the oud festival for the 25th time of asking. 

“I never dreamed I, we, would still be here doing this all these years later,” he smiles. “The festival brings people from all over the country to Jerusalem. I want to offer the public musical riches from as many fields and places as possible. This festival can grow and grow. But that depends on the budgets we get.”

The CEO wants to get those good vibes out there, across the board. “Let’s live our life with love and openness, and music.” Amen to that.■

For tickets and more information: www.confederationhouse.org