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Israel

Tel Aviv, 1971

Arik Einstein

Arik Einstein belonged to Lul, a loose Tel Aviv artist collective that wanted to remake Israeli culture from the inside, in the spirit of the Beatles and Dylan records of the day. On albums like 1971's BaDeshe Etzel Avigdor, often with composer Miki Gavrielov, he recorded songs that became standards of Israeli communal singing. Decades later they still get sung at youth-movement gatherings and at public rallies.

Jerusalem, 1983

HaClick

HaClick formed in Jerusalem in the late 1970s, when childhood friends Dani Dothan and Eli Abramov got back together and brought in Belgian-born drummer Jean-Jacques Goldberg. Bassist Oved Efrat joined later. Abramov wrote and arranged the music, putting Dothan's restless lyrics over melodies borrowed from new wave and punk. Their 1983 album Olam Tzafuf (Crowded World) dealt with sex, madness and death, and was one of the first Israeli pop records to take on homosexuality and bisexuality directly. The band split soon after, reunited in 2005, made a third album in 2012, and lost Abramov, its composer, in 2015.

Hebrew poetry, Eastern melody

HaBrera HaTiv'it

Shlomo Bar founded HaBrera HaTiv'it in the late 1970s and has led it ever since. He is the main creative force behind its sound, which sets biblical and modern Hebrew poetry against Andalusian, Indian and Persian melody. It was meant as an alternative to an Israeli mainstream still modeled on Europe and America. Their album Eli Shorashim reaches back further than the band itself, arranging medieval Hebrew poetry and Yemenite folk melody in the band's own style.

Tel Aviv → Amsterdam, 1981

Minimal Compact

Malka Spigel, Samy Birnbach and Berry Sakharof started Minimal Compact in Tel Aviv in 1980, and within a year they had left for Amsterdam looking for a bigger scene. They were one of the first acts signed to the Belgian label Crammed Discs, and their post-punk, colored by Middle Eastern rhythm, caught on across the European underground. Guitarist Rami Fortis joined in 1984, four years before the band split in 1988. Sakharof and Fortis both went on to become major solo names in Israeli rock, and eventually reunited as the duo Fortisakharof.

Kibbutz Ginegar, 1975

Ktzat Acheret

Shlomo Gronich, Shem Tov Levy and Shlomo Yidov met on a 1973 television program about the poet Leah Goldberg. Within months they had recorded a single progressive-rock album together as Ktzat Acheret (Somewhat Different), cut in just seventy hours at a Tel Aviv studio. They debuted it live on March 15, 1975, at Kibbutz Ginegar, playing the album's songs in the first half and a full set of newly arranged Beatles covers in the second. The concert was never broadcast or released. The only recording, a private reel-to-reel tape, turned up decades later in a kibbutz member's personal archive, and music researcher Dudi Patimer made it public on the album's fiftieth anniversary.

A rare Israeli bulbul tarang player

Ahuva Ozeri

Ahuva Ozeri grew up in Tel Aviv's Kerem HaTeimanim quarter and became one of the only Israeli musicians to play the bulbul tarang, an Indian stringed instrument she learned in 1968 and kept on her recordings for the rest of her career. Her 1975 debut album was shaped by grief for a soldier killed in the Yom Kippur War, and it made her an early voice of mourning in Mizrahi music. She wrote songs as well as sang them, and kept recording through albums like 1999's Tzeltzulei Pa'amonim (Ringing Bells). In 2016 her music got an unexpected second life on Shadow of Truth, the Israeli true-crime documentary series that was later streamed internationally on Netflix.

The Collection