India Abroad - September 17, 2010

Serendipity of music

ON THE RIGHT NOTE
am not a Hebrew
qawaal,” says Shye
Ben-Tzur. “I’ve never
been one and never
will be.” But because
the Israeli singer
loves the music of
Ajmer’s Sufi qawa-
als, and because he sings in
Hebrew, the media has anointed
him the Hebrew qawaal.
“In Hebrew there is no tradi-
tion of qawaali,” protests Ben-Tzur. “I just work
with Sufi qawaals.” That work has resulted in his
new album, Shoshan.
Ben-Tzur’s journey from Israel to Ajmer’s dar-
gahs is a story about the serendipity of music. Born
in the United States, Ben-Tzur grew up in Israel,
listening to the standards — rock, progressive
rock, the classics. He was the singer in a high
school band, Sword of Damocles.
“We did rock, heavy metal, progressive, you
know different things,” he says. “It was just a high
school band. But the good thing is it led me to dif-
ferent kinds of music.”
That included world music, the amorphous
genre that has become a catch-phrase for all kinds
of music from samba to tribal chants. Ben-Tzur
came across Indian music when he was about 17.
Hearing tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and flautist
Hariprasad Chaurasia at a concert changed his life.
“It was fascinating; it still is,” he says. “Just two
people and a tanpura player on stage playing one
scale for one hour without any harmony change,
and it really touched the heart. It was like a solo
recital, but it was so complete — minimum people
and maximum music.”
That was when he decided he wanted to go to
India. “I wanted to go to the place where the music
came from,” he says, adding that he was quite naïve
at that time. He just landed in India with “a
romantic attitude. I didn’t know there was such a
rich tradition within Indian music. So many differ-
ent kinds of music,” he says.
Ben-Tzur is just one of thousands of Israelis vis-
iting India these days, many of them fresh off an
army stint. India offers a cheap place to unwind in,
maybe even get a dose of spirituality. Ben-Tzur says
he thinks Israelis at some level feel a connection
with “a civilization that has ancient roots, where
they see people worshipping in the same temple
perhaps for hundreds of years.”
He thought he would find the “traditional guru
and follow the traditional path.” Reality was more
complex. Contemporary India was very different
from the India of gurukuls and gharanas. At one
level it allowed a complete outsider like him access
into the world of music, which might have been
tougher half a century ago. But it was also difficult
often being the only foreigner around. He remem-
bers those early days going from one place to
another, learning, meeting teachers.
One of his first gurus was the great Indian classi-
cal vocalist Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar. “I don’t
play dhrupad now,” says Ben-Tzur. “But he is an
ocean with never-ending depth. I still regard him
as my biggest inspiration.”
Ben-Tzur lived with Dagar for a year in Bhopal.
He was the only foreigner, and at that time he did-
n’t speak any Indian language. They got up at four
in the morning and started riyaaz, practicing one
note till six. “Then a few more notes till seven,” he
says. “So it went on till you went to sleep at 11 at
night. It was intense.”
For a musician from the Western tradition, Ben-
Tzur said he had to re-orient himself in many ways.
“Western music is written. Indian music is more of
an oral tradition,” says Ben-Tzur. “It is hard to get a
deep understanding of something that is very pre-
“I
cise and a big mystery at the
same time.”
He had to unlearn old habits.
“Music is a language, a refined
and subtle language,” he says.
“But it’s not just vocabulary. It’s
also about accent.”
He says unlike a spoken lan-
guage where the accent doesn’t
matter as long as the words
make sense, “in music accent
matters. So, a rock musician
playing jazz might be spotted as not being the real
thing. To play it right you have to unlearn your old
accent.”
Ben-Tzur says that’s still something he is working
on. At the same time he has realized he is an Israeli
musician working in an Indian tradition. “I know
that though I love Indian music there is no reason
to give up the culture I come from,” he says. “My
music needs to be honest. So, I went back to writ-
ing in my own language.”
He has written and composed most of the songs
on Shoshan. He says the vision was a “collection of
love songs to the divine.” Structurally the songs fol-
low “a raga in a basic way” says Ben-Tzur, the
“asthai leading into the antara,” but it reaches into
his Western training when it comes to arrange-
ment and production — “for example, putting in
chords.”
“Ten years ago, I would not have been able to do
it,” he says. “It was a challenge to create music that
speaks both languages without harming either tra-
dition.”
For help, Ben-Tzur reached out to friends and
artistes in both traditions. Flamenco guitarist
Fernando Perez and Grammy-nominated bassist
and producer Yossi Fine from Israel lent their tal-
ents as did Indian vocalist Shubha Mudgal.
“I wanted to have the nylon-stringed guitar as a
basic element throughout the album,” says Ben-
Tzur. “You hear the guitar in Indian rock, but not
much elsewhere. I was fascinated to hear how it
would sound. And I fell in love with Perez’s spirit.”
As for Fine, he says he needed his touch to make
music “groovy and funky.”
Ben-Tzur had performed with Mudgal at a Sufi
music festival and fallen in love with her voice —
“the classical background, but a voice that carries
weight.” He thought she would be perfect for a
song like Daras Bin, which he had composed with
“a deep sense of yearning in it.”
Much of the album, rooted in the Sufi musical
tradition, is scored with a sense of yearning. Ben-
Tzur says he’s keenly aware that in the dargahs of
Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti the music he hears is
“not entertainment, but part of ritual — a path to
devotion.” He feels privileged that as “an outsider”
he was welcomed by the Sufi singers.
“Shoshan is my way of expressing my love back,
but in Hebrew,” he says. As an Israeli, he grew up
“being exposed to only one side of Middle East’s
political struggles. I am touched to see a whole dif-
ferent side of Islam — there is love. To sit with this
love and be able to create music is amazing.”
It has also meant that some call him and his
music a bridge between these two desert tradi-
tions. Ben-Tzur says that embarrasses him. “I am
touched to be thought of as promoting peace and
religious co-existence, but I don’t perceive myself
as someone on a mission,” he says. “I’m just a musi-
cian. People give me crowns too big for my head.”
But deliberate or not, the bridge building is hap-
pening. Ben-Tzur now lives in Jaipur with his fam-
ily. His wife is Indian, the daughter of a Sufi schol-
ar. He says his 5-year-old daughter was just play-
ing Radha at her school. “And that is completely
different from my background and my wife’s, but it
was beautiful. Life surprises you.” ;
Sandip Roy tells
the story of
Shye Ben-Tzur, a
Israeli musician who
found his
calling in Sufi music

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