Taken from 'Jarak Qaribak', out now: worldcircuit.lnk.to/JarakQaribak
Celebrated singer, musician and producer Dudu Tassa teams up with award-winning composer and guitarist Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead, The Smile) for new album ‘Jarak Qaribak’, bringing together vocalists and musicians from throughout the Middle East for a very special album of cross-border collaborations.
“Jarak Qaribak” translates, more or less, as “Your Neighbour Is Your Friend”. It’s an expansive, inclusive sentiment. The songs on the album, and the singers, are drawn from all over the Middle East - and, in keeping with the theme established by the album’s title, each singer takes a turn at a tune from a country other than their own. Jonny says that his somewhat incongruous benchmark when assembling the tracks on “Jarak Qaribak” was “trying to imagine what Kraftwerk would have done if they’d been in Cairo in the 1970s”.
Though Dudu says that he scrutinised every lyric as carefully as he could for even the vaguest hint of a political subtext, and insists - accurately - that “Jarak Qaribak” is an album of classic love songs, the romance and heartbreak they chronicle exclusively personal, neither Dudu nor Jonny are naïve enough to believe that nobody will project their own political prejudices onto this project, favourably or otherwise. “We didn’t want,” says Jonny, “to make out that we’re making any political point, but I do understand that as soon as you do anything in that part of the world it becomes political, even if it’s just artistic. Actually, possibly especially if it’s artistic.”
Dudu, however, believes that it would have been an act of bad faith to make “Jarak Qaribak” any other way. “Israel,” he notes, “is a small country between all those countries, so we’re very influenced by those cultures and by that music. And a lot of us in Israel - like my family - are descended from people who came here from elsewhere in the Middle East, so everything gets mixed up.” “It’s a letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean,” he decides. “Who will get it, who will hear it, I don’t know. But someone will love it.”
Featured Artist: Rashid Al Najjar
Lyrics: Meyhad Hamad
Composer: Meyhad Hamad
Produced by Dudu Tassa & Jonny Greenwood
Mixed by Nigel Godrich
Recorded by Nigel Powell, Ilan Harush, Yotam Agam, Ben Essev, Yoav Osterreicher, Shai C. Sivan
Mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering, Portland, Maine
Jonny Greenwood: Bass, Piano, Synth, Organ
Dudu Tassa: Guitars
Rashid Al Najjar: Guest Vocals
Itzhak Ventura: Flute
Yaniv Taichman: Oud
Mustafa Amal: Rebab
Niran Bassoon: Announcer
Ariel Qassis: Repertoire consulting & music notation
Idan Barir: Translations
Juan Pinto: Animation Director
#DuduTassa #JonnyGreenwood #JarakQaribak