New album 'Jarak Qaribak' out now: worldcircuit.lnk.to/JarakQarib...
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.”
Filmed Live at the Hamam in October 2022
Musicians:
Dudu Tassa - Vocals, Guitar, Bass
Jonny Greenwood - Bass, Guitar, Drum Machine
Ariel Qassis - Qanun
Yaniv Taichman - Oud
Ben Dagovitch - Riq
Oded Aloni - Darbuka
Sefi Zisling - Cornet
Yuval Peleg - Trumpet
Maayan Milo - Trombone
Tamar Shawki, Ariel Qassis, Dema Kablan, Jameel Faris - Backing Vocals
Jarak Qaribak Team:
Production Company: Davidson Artists Management
Batel Pipano - Production Manager
Roy Berkovich - DOP
Roi Habany, Yaniv Vaknin, Ram Tsizling, Aviv Meseznik, Rami Katzav - Videographers
Roy Biberman - Grip
Yoav Osterreicher - Stage Manager
Dana Tkatch, Elad Kalai, Dana Hazan, Yaniv Kalai - Space & Light Design and Execution
Ram Tsizling - Lighting
Ilan Harush - Recording
Roy Langley - Recording Assistant
Ben Essev - Guitar Tech
Shai C Sivan - Mixing & Mastering
Almog Maimoni - Editor
Ilan Azoulay - Colourist
Raz Danon - Stylist
Marina Eskenazi - Makeup
Idan Barir - Translation
Management: Or Davidson, Brian Message
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