341: Buzzin’ About, by the Apples

The Apples (Israel)
Buzzin’ About (2008)
12 tracks, 53 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The Apples are the funkiest band I’ve ever seen, and they don’t take the usual route to it, either.

They are nine, but of that number, not one of them sings or plays guitars or keys. No bass guitar, either. They have a drum kit, double bass, trumpet, trombone, tenor and soprano sax and baritone sax. Where they make it special is their two turntablists and their producer, who curate a wide-ranging set of samples, press them onto vinyl and perform them live with all the appropriate cutting and scratching for that extra spice.

As a group, the Apples’ performances are immaculate. They are all so perfectly tight. The horns are raw and soulful, able to move as one creature or split off into incredibly intricate threads of countermelodies. Shai Ran could be an acoustic Bootsy Collins, turning the double bass into a funk machine with the slightest jazz inflection. The turntablists populate the soundspace with layers of vintage and downright interesting samples, from gospel voices, spoken word, mysterious guitar noodlings, traditional Hebrew song and sounds chopped up so much to be unrecognisable, deployed with the utmost sensitivity, precision and chemistry with the rest of the group. It’s all held together by bandleader and drummer Yonadev Halevi, whose playing is snappy and expressive while remaining understated.

I think Buzzin’ About is the Apples’ album that most closely represents how they sound live. Of course, it doesn’t capture the electric atmosphere of a sweaty club of moving bodies, but it comes closer than you’d think. The music is so fun! It feels as if the band are dancing along with you as they play. The solos from the horns and the decks are great, and when they finish, they leave a trail of energy in their wake that you can feel palpably in the rest of the music. What an excellent mash-up of mostly-acoustic funk, New Orleans jazz and brass and a pinch of hip-hop in there for fun. Plus, there’s a bonus cover of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name of’ to finish up the album which is just fab.

Really, while the Apples’ music is stunning in its arrangement and groovability, words do a disservice to the feelings that it conjures. It’s just some ever-loving primordial funk-juice that bubbles from below whenever the Apples get their thing going. It’s not difficult to experience. Just stick this record on from the beginning and you’ll know what I mean within the first four notes of that bari sax. Tasty.

251: Gili Yalo, by Gili Yalo

Gili Yalo (Israel/Ethiopia)
Gili Yalo (2017)
10 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Diaspora music as a concept is something I find extremely interesting. The experiences of people who have grown up in one culture and living in a different one, or to have been born and raised by people of one culture while in the geographies of another, lend them a unique outlook on the world and a unique approach to the meanings and makings of music.

Gili Yalo’s self-titled debut album is a great reflection of that. Born to a Jewish family in Ethiopia, his family travelled by foot to the refugee camps in Sudan to escape religious persecution when Yalo was five years old. From there, he was brought to Tel Aviv as part of Israel’s Operation Moses. And so, growing up, he was immersed in Israeli life, and music: he listened to all the popular Israeli singers, and became addicted to funk, soul, rock and reggae from the Americas. He had little time for Ethiopian culture; it was, after all, the country that rejected him and his people. But then, a little older, he started to notice the systematic and structural prejudice against Ethiopian Jews in Israel. He got angry, and his anger manifested in refusing to be put down by racism, but to rise from it: he began to embrace his Ethiopian heritage like he hadn’t before. He polished up his Amharic and started listening to as much Ethiopian music as he could, mostly from the Éthiopiques series (as have we, here and here). “I discovered lively, exciting music with impressive progressions…on one hand, the beats are very, very authentic and characteristic of Ethiopia, and on the other hand, the scale is very minor – sad songs with a beat, and people dance as if there were no tomorrow. I connected with this music,” he later told Haaretz.

He was already a musician, but this dive into Ethiopian jazz and other styles from the 60s and 70s changed the way he thought about music, and when he went solo, it was obvious what direction he would take. His music reflects that cross-cultural life. Vintage Ethiogroove is at the heart of most of the tracks on Gili Yalo, but when he allows his other influences to take the fore, they come with as much skill, love and deep understanding, meaning that no matter which direction the album takes, it’s always down the grooviest avenue possible.

I’ve been following Gili Yalo for about six years now, just as he’d started to pick up steam as a solo artist. It was a little scrappy at first, but by the time this album came out, his sound was honed to perfection. When I reviewed it for Songlines at the time, I said ‘Play it loud and you’ll feel like the coolest person alive – after Gili Yalo, of course,’ and listening back to it almost two years later, I can confirm that it’s still the case. After keeping him on my radar for so long, it was great to see him live at WOMAD in July – his first ever UK date; he smashed it, of course, but that was expected. Listen to this debut album and revel in it: it was a whole life in the making.

146: Dark Nights, by Avishai Cohen's Triveni

Avishai Cohen’s Triveni (Israel/USA)
Dark Nights (2014)
10 tracks, 53 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album is by jazz musician Avishai Cohen, originally from Tel Aviv but now based in New York. Weirdly, that sentence still leaves room for ambiguity. There’s a good reason why this guy usually goes by the name ‘Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’: to distinguish himself from the other New York-based Tel Avivian jazz musician Avishai Cohen, who is a double bassist. This album is by the trumpet guy.

Like yesterday’s, this is actually another artist I first heard at WOMEX, this time in 2015 in Budapest, Hungary. I’m not quite sure why he was there, to be honest. Well, playing a gig, obviously, but WOMEX is the ‘world music expo,’ and Cohen is pretty much straight-up jazz; there’s no obvious so-called ‘world’ influences to his music, on this album at least. But that’s okay, because I love it – always nice to have something a bit different show up.

This album is presented as ‘Avishai Cohen’s Triveni.’ A triveni is a poetic form in Hindi-Urdu with three lines, each of which relies on the other two; that’s why it’s a good name for a trio, and this one consists of Cohen himself on trumpet, Omer Avital on double bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The name is an appropriate one for an ensemble like this, as the trio format – with no piano or guitar to bring the rhythms and the chords together – relies very heavily on the interplay between the individual musicians, with very little room to hide, as it were.

Not that these musicians need to. Dark Nights allows them each to show off their own prowess while remaining all of them understated. There’s no wild solos or viciously intricate head sections. It’s all rather stark and deliberate, without falling into sparseness – it feels as if there is always exactly the right amount happening at once. It’s not always just the three instruments going, though. An intriguing addition to the very classic sounding set-up is when Cohen’s trumpet is run through all sorts of effects and filters including distortion and wah-wah, and turning the trio into a quartet through the magic of overdubs. There’s quite a lot of ‘and Friends’ going on on this album too, with guest contributions from Anat Cohen (clarinet), Gerald Clayton (piano) and Keren Ann (vocals), but it doesn’t feel like a roll-call of special collaborations as they all slot into the ensemble so naturally without compromising that tightly-knit feel.

It’s always interesting to hear a style of music stripped back to its bare essentials, and Avishai Cohen’s Triveni does that with aplomb on Dark Nights, identifying the key elements that make the post-bop sound, taking away almost everything else and subtly updating what’s left to the 21st century. To quote Schoolhouse Rock, ‘no more, no less / you don't have to guess / when it's three, you can see / it's a magic number.’

081: Yemenite Songs, by Ofra Haza

Ofra Haza (Israel)
Yemenite Songs (1984)
8 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Ofra Haza was one of the first world music stars – even before world music existed. In fact, this album was indirectly one of the reasons for the creation of world music as a specific marketing term and strategy. When it was released internationally by the Globe Style record label in 1985, it was a massive success, but so were King Sunny Ade and Les Mysteres de Voix Bulgares, and record shops were having a hard time working out where to put the albums…so, after a fashion, world music became a thing. But I digress. If you want to learn more about that all stuff, it’s brilliantly chronicled on the fRoots website by the editor Ian Anderson.

As for Yemenite Songs, it is, when it all boils down, Israeli pop. And really 80s pop at that: bad synths and gated reverb abound. It wouldn’t be on this blog if that were all it was though. As the title suggests, Haza uses the album to explore her heritage as a Yemenite Jew living in a modern Israel, and the music reflects all of these identities. She sings in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic and her vocal style changes to reflect the different cultures. The instrumentation is rather orchestral without sounding it: the string, woodwind and brass sections, in conjunction with the synths and the dance beats, end up sounding quite disco-esque. Sometimes the woodwinds take a step forward and make things extra funky, and it all gets quite Bellowheadish on the medley ‘Tzur Mentati/Se'i Yona/Sapri Tama.’ The dhol-soundalike tin drum adds another flavour with its driving beats.

Basically, what I’m saying is that this is pop music inspired by Yemenite heritage and the Arabic culture that goes along with it while also retaining a Hebrew identity and mixing in classical poetry while striving towards all the modern trappings of the 1980s. Now I can see why those record shop owners had a hard time finding the right box to put this in…