Bowery Presents

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Yael Naim

Yael Naim

and David Donatien with special guest Alicia Jo Rabins (of Golem)

Webster Hall

Mon 10/27
Tickets
18+

Doors 7pm

$25

Yael Naim

  • http://www.myspace.com/yaelnaim
  • http://www.yaelweb.com
  • “It’s a dream I almost gave up on along the way”, says Yael Naim about her first album released by Tôt ou Tard. Without meeting the multi-instrumentalist David Donatien, to whom she dedicated two years and who illuminated the artist with his talents as arranger and director, it’s true that this project would have been forgotten at the back of a cupboard. Blessed with an unsettlingly pure voice and an incredible agility at composition, the Israeli singer with her jet-black hair fumbled a long time before succeeding with this collection of ballads that meander through folk and pop, with an elegiac frugality and multi-coloured fantasy. If the creation of this record was long and painful, the birth of its author as an artistic personality seems even more miraculous today, in a domain where everything seems to have been already sung or played. To the point where with Yael Naim music that was once simply beautiful has now magically found a lost grace.

    Born in 1978 in Paris, Yael spent a large part of her childhood in Ramat Hacharon, a small town not far from Tel Aviv. Her Tunisian parents went to live there when she was four years old. “I remember there was a little organ which I’d tap my fingers on all the time. My interest in the instrument was so obvious, one day I got home from school and there was a real piano in my bedroom.” Ten years of conservatory and classical piano lessons followed. “After I saw the film, “Amadeus”, there was only one thing I wanted to do and that was to write symphonies.” Her idyll with classical music quickly revealed another. “At home my father would play his Beatles records and that’s how I discovered “Sgt Pepper” and “Abbey Road”, aged 12. And also when I forgot my classical ambitions.” Yael began composing songs which helped her get over her shyness… With adolescence she discovered a voice and leant towards a vocal clarity by listening to Aretha Franklin. At age 18, having come across a Joni Mitchell record, she dared to push herself even further with her own lyrics. Music never left her and her curiosity never waned. In a jazz club in Tel Aviv she met Winston Marsalis’ musicians and performed some concerts with them. Even the two years of military service (which Israeli women are obliged to do) didn’t stop her musical journey and she managed to form a group called The Anti Collision who played in clubs around the country. “After all these years everything was a bit chaotic inside. My classical education, my love of pop, the jazz, the folk... I didn’t know how to bring it all together, but I knew I wanted to write songs.”

    It was an invitation to a charity concert that brought her to Paris in 2000 and saw things really start rolling. During the show, she was noticed by producers and four days later she had signed a contract with EMI and had an album on the boil. Her name really began to circulate after she was spotted by director Elie Chouraqui who asked her to play the role of Miriam (Moses’ sister) in the Ten Commandments and then she was approached to do the original sound track for the film, Harrison’s Flowers... “I hesitated but I don’t regret having accepted because it was an amazing thing to live through for two and a half years.” Her first album, In a Man’s Womb, recorded between Paris and Los Angeles was finally released in 2001. For her it was a failure, “A huge deception because I’d given everything up for it. I suddenly lost a lot of confidence in myself which really led me to question everything.” So the young woman with the golden voice was plunged into a period of disillusion concerning her record, the end of a relationship and a career ranging from jobs to survive (another musical, Gladiator) to edgier collaborations (the album Ready Made FC).

    Then there was the meeting in 2004 with David Donatien who was accompanying a friend on stage they had in common. A West Indian drummer, David had spent the last 15 years working with an extraordinary variety of people from Bernard Lavilliers to the electro musician Junior Jack, from Wassis Diop to Malia. As changeable with instruments as he is with genres, he moves from traditional drum kits to electronic tools. David has always made a point of not stopping at just the one vocation of rhythm, but throws himself into the role of arranger too. His skill and imagination has literally made Yael’s musical universe bloom by giving a direction to her music and an aesthetic to her songs. Equally it was David who encouraged Yael to sing in Hebrew, something she had strictly denied herself up until now. Their complicity and complementary styles are such that now they prefer to present themselves as a group.

    To begin with, this album was meant to focus solely on guitar and vocals. But little by little Yael and David padded out the architecture and formed a team. Xavier Tribolet (drums), Laurent David (bass), Voed Nir (cello) and Julien Feltin (electric guitar) joined them as well as S.Husky Huskolds for the mix (Tom Waits, Fiona Apple, Me’Shell Ndegeocello). The instrumentation is pretty minimalist here yet incredibly colourful with the participation of the brass section, the Mellotron, the cello and some programming. Recorded in the young woman’s flat in Paris the 13 songs contain a part of Yael happy (Endless Song of Happiness) and a melancholic (Paris, Lonely) existence. Some of them, like Yashanti or Lachlom dive into dreams, others like Baboker bathe in the serenity found at the break of day. Shelcha looks at a love with no future. The most outrageous is of course the cover of Britney Spears’ Toxic. Listening to these little marvels could possibly remind us of old friends like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple. Yet the ensemble isn’t witness to excessive borrowing or exaggerated marking, but quite the contrary revealing a sincerity and absolute musical clarity. In fact it is quite astonishing how something that sounds so familiar could seduce our ears with such a nude and original beauty. Perhaps it is due to the dominance of Hebrew, a language so rarely sung in this context, that comes across as universal as Cesaria Evora’s Portuguese Creole? Or is it the simply the very freshness exhaled by the personality of this young woman who discovers in New Soul - sung in English with a contagious optimism – that she is “a new soul, in this foreign world, hoping to learn a little”? “It was when I was really young that I sincerely believed to be an old soul reincarnated and I could even say it gave me a sense of superiority over others. But then as I subsequently did everything the wrong way round I concluded that it was actually my first time on earth and that I should learn to be a more humble.” On Far Far, she herself delivers this other perspective, that of a little girl who chases her dreams but who can only achieve them by accepting the “beautiful mess inside”. In short both her own personal history and that of this simply magical record.

Peter Von Poehl

  • http://www.myspace.com/petervonpoehl
  • http://www.petervonpoehl.com/
  • Going to Where the Tea Trees Are is the outstanding debut album by Peter von Poehl.

    Recorded partially in the Swedish countryside and in Peter’s Berlin apartment, Going to where The Tee Trees Are shows no signs of the shiny shell or overblown workings of many pop productions. Instead, the music takes advantage of the basic surroundings it was recorded in, to emerge as a lively, vibrant recording, loaded with inspiration.

    Peter von Poehl is Bella Union’s fantastic new signing for Autumn 2007, a extremely talented young Swedish gentleman and one of the most captivating artists to emerge this year. This is perfectly demonstrated with Going to Where the Tea Trees Are, which has ability to build music that possess the ample proportions and richness of detail to fill an entire universe.

Alicia Jo Rabins (of Golem)

  • http://www.myspace.com/brooklynfiddler
  • http://www.aliciajo.com/
  • Raw, beautiful and irreverent, Alicia Jo Rabins' fiddle playing transports her audience through numerous traditional styles, all unified in the prism of her unique musicality. Seth Rogovoy, author of The Essential Klezmer, calls Alicia "a walking encyclopedia of fiddling traditions." She is one of a growing number of young musicians who, searching for an alternative to the overcommercialization of today's popular music, have returned to acoustic, handmade music. Equally at home performing in rock clubs, bluegrass festivals, bars, concert halls and living rooms, Alicia has been onstage since early childhood and continues to follow her fiddle around the world.

    Alicia's first violin lesson at age 3 was followed by years of classical study, and then a few stints in punk-rock bands. Her first old-time fiddle tunes were learned from a shipmate on board a schooner at sea, and after returning to New York City she apprenticed herself to a Virginian fiddler whom she met busking in the subways. Before long, Alicia was playing on the streets herself. One such day in Baltimore, an old man handed her a stack of sheet music, saying, "You have the soul of a klezmer fiddler." Thus began her initiation into klezmer music, a hybrid of Jewish and gypsy musical traditions from Eastern Europe, which she continued by studying with legendary klezmer fiddler Alicia Svigals.

    Another felicitous busking encounter led to the founding of cutting-edge folk group The Mammals, with Ruth Ungar, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, and Mike Merenda. After a year with the Mammals, including appearances with Pete Seeger and Jay Ungar, Alicia joined forces with Michael Daves and Peter Siegel to form "new old-time" trio Underbelly, which the Berkshire Eagle called "a supergroup of New England talent." In winter 2004, Alicia moved back to New York to join the groundbreaking folk-punk group Golem, which reinterprets traditional Gypsy and klezmer tunes with a rock edge. Of Golem, the Washington Post wrote: "Golem produces the kind of music you'd expect if the shtetl were filled with punks instead of peasants"; the Forward calls Golem "one of the hottest young groups on the vibrant Yiddish/Klezmer scene."

    Alicia's 2003 solo release, "Sugar Shack," garnered critical praise as "a sheer delight...one of the most delicious, wonderful to listen to recordings of southern and old-timey American fiddle traditions I have heard in many years" (klezmershack.com). In April 2006, Golem signed a record deal with JDub (Matisyahu, Balkan Beat Box) and recorded an album with producer Emery Dobyns (Patti Smith, Antony and the Johnsons), which will be in stores in August 2006. Meanwhile, Alicia continues to play and sing her way around the world.

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