song style of Southern slavery, in which “Let my people go” borrows from biblical myth and reimagines slavemasters as Pharaoh. Fourth, the Rastafari return to Ethiopianism through Marcus Garvey’s prophecy, and subsequent worship of Haile Selassie (Ewing 2014, Grant 2010, Lemelle and Kelley 1994) confirmed Ethiopia’s importance in the African diaspora. And fifth, the pan-African awakening in the era of postcolonial struggle and negritude looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as African seats of power (Fredrickson 1995, Wilder 2015).
These themes fit together heterophonically in Rada’s musical style. In the United States as in Israel, “black music” stands in for a history of violence that is expressed through and mitigated by a musical tradition. Much of the African diaspora can relate to this experience through a shared history of chattel slavery, and for many people around the African diaspora, Ethiopia symbolizes black independence. The long-established connections between Haile Selassie, Jamaica, reggae, the black Atlantic, and African American music create a network of identity resources. The links between the black Atlantic and Ethiopia are slowly developing, with Ethiopia’s best-known musician Teddy Afro placing on international charts for the first time in 2017 with his album Ethiopia. Likewise, Ester Rada creates a musical connection between Ethiopian-Israelis and the black Atlantic through Ethio-soul by adapting the lexicon of Ethio-jazz to a disparate array of Afrodiasporic popular music, linking the musical style to shared narratives of suffering and longing. However, in the absence of socially conscious lyrics, this dynamic plays out entirely at the level of musical structure, especially through Rada’s call-and-response with the band. Rada’s phrasing and flow, legato but syllabic (sharply articulated at the level of individual words), in contrast to the horn section’s staccato stabs and dull articulation, connect African American popular music to Ethio-jazz, heterophonically demonstrating the spiritual links between the United States, the Caribbean, and Ethiopia.
Afrodiasporic Myths and Style
I describe the collections and reconfigurations of recognizable myths that Ethiopian-Israelis mobilize to define the terms of citizenship as resting on their positioning as black, Jewish, and having arrived directly from Africa. I call the myth clusters mobilized in this chapter the Afrodiasporic myths, because they draw from a set of narratives originating in the African diaspora, with which Ethiopian-Israelis had little direct contact before immigration to Israel. When these narratives reference Jewish or Ethiopian experience, they draw Ethiopian-Israelis in as active participants in the cultural history of the Middle Passage. Rada’s music symbolically mobilizes the circuit (see Ratner 2015)—New York–Kingston–Addis Ababa—in her musical style, and by doing so she frames the Ethiopian-Israeli experience in the context of Afrodiasporic oppression.
In different combinations, the aforementioned five-point list of narratives works in tandem to create a circuit of black ethnohistory, in which a dignified African history coexists with a brutal present in exile. The imagery of the narratives can be mobilized to imagine an equally glorious future. This chapter focuses on the latter three points from that list (the African American, Rastafarian, and pan-African narratives), which Rada builds into the genre of Ethio-soul as a mechanism that connects Ethiopian-Israelis to the black Atlantic experience. She does so at the level of musical style exclusively, since she neither makes political statements onstage nor writes political lyrics. The song texts that Rada writes herself usually address personal growth or romantic relationships, and the absence of political material is noteworthy. Coming from a tradition of Israeli popular music (which is tremendously politicized) and adopting African American music, her tendency to skirt controversy in her songs is conspicuous. In the Ethiopian lyrical/poetic tradition of wax and gold (sem-enna-werq), or hiding deep layers of meaning or critique in material deemed light or safe, her lyrics are the wax and her musical style is the gold, a collagelike style that attaches the Ethiopian-Israeli experience to the myths of the African diaspora.
An Afrodiasporic narrative is bolstered by the Israeli media, which implies that skin color defines Rada’s experience, drawing indirectly from the hardship narratives of great female African American singers like Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin. Profiles like her interview in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 201311 describe her rise to fame as a victory for all Ethiopian-Israelis, sometimes portrayed in the profiles as helpless and desperate. She makes this connection implicitly, too, since her repertoire includes multiple covers of songs by Nina Simone. The articles about Rada frequently mention that she was born in Kiryat Arba, perhaps the most controversial settlement in the West Bank,12 raised by a single mother in Netanya, and that her childhood was religious; she was a member of B’nei Akiva, the religious-Zionist youth group that is especially popular among settlers, before spending her military service in a musical troupe (lehaqa). In those media profiles, music is described as a personal journey, her outlet to rebel against religious life,13 which she left in pursuit of creative freedom.
In Rada’s personal story, we find a conflicted relationship with the State of Israel, which marginalized her community, and the institutions that have cultivated an outstanding musical talent. Her musical training came by way of performing in a military troupe during her compulsory service, where she developed high-level performance skills. In our interview she talked about learning the standards of the Israeli repertoire, sung entirely in Hebrew, and about the level of professionalism she developed working in a troupe. Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi explain in their chapter on Israeli musical institutions (2004) that the military fed directly into the recording industry in the 1960s and 1970s, with members of military bands becoming some of the most beloved rock musicians of the 1970s. In that respect, Rada’s early life and her pathway into the music industry tell opposing stories of marginality and patronage.
The transition from Hebrew-language national repertoire to English-language soul music has also been enabled by a patronage network of state-supported arts education and European influence. As Regev and Seroussi go on to explain, the flocking of elite musicians to Tel Aviv, first from Germany in the 1930s and later from the Former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has offered the State of Israel a constant stream of classically trained musicians and conservatory teachers. Despite the other ways that Israel has become culturally marginalized, it has kept its status as a destination for musical (and artistic) study. Rada and the seven members of her band—Michael Guy on bass, Ben Jose on guitar, Lior Romano on keyboard, Dan Mayo on drums, Inon Peretz on trumpet, Gal Dahan on saxophone, and Maayan Mylo on trombone—all gained their music education in the military or in an excellent European-influenced conservatory system. These musicians credibly perform Ethio-jazz, a genre that relies on dissonant tones like augmented fourths and minor seconds, and that regularly flummoxes European studio musicians.14 The conservatory system in Israel that produces top-notch studio musicians is part of the infrastructural machinery that benefits any Israeli musician looking to expand into different genres.
A competent backing band is a major asset for Rada: Kevin Le Gendre argues that the affective power of soul music comes from the call-and-response between the solo singer and the band, a dynamic that he associates with the heterophony of the cotton field (2012: 26). With the accompaniment of her band, Rada constructs an Afrodiasporic connection as a musical lexicon of black alterity—what Le Gendre calls “not just a musical form but a sociological and emotional lexicon” (2012: 27)—built on the offbeats of reggae, the fuzzy guitar riffs of funk, the affective intensity of gospel, and the heterophonic movement of voice, horns, and strings that create a polyrhythmic effect in soul (Maultsby 2006: 274). In place of expounding ethnohistory or political ideologies directly, Rada invokes the painful lineage that bore black music. I will unpack the symbolic meaning of these musical vernaculars across the five songs analyzed in this chapter. In brief, though, their combination of Afrodiasporic influences is summarized in table 1.1. As it suggests, Rada and her band borrow a variety of elements from African American popular music and its Caribbean counterparts. They do so through melody and instrumentation, but also through the establishment of a style in a certain song or section of a song. As we can see, there is much brass and much modality in her music, and these elements are shared by Ethio-jazz and soul music.
