of her appeal beyond the Ethiopian community resides in the narratives built around her musical style. Instead of appealing to the well-known Zionist myths of return from exile and attachment to the land (on full display in chapter 3), Rada (as well as some Ethiopian-Israeli reggae musicians whom I introduce later) draws from the Afrodiasporic myths of going into exile invoked in the music of the black Atlantic. She plays black music (musiqa sheḥorah) and sings in English, connecting herself to black musicians outside of Israel more than to progressive musicians inside Israel. In the process, she leapfrogs the genre of “world music,” a quasi-market for cosmopolitan Europeans that Israeli musicians usually appeal to, and connects to a network of Afrodiasporic musicians in North America and Europe.
The narrative conventions and embodied iconographies that I highlight in this chapter are:
• Journey not as return “home” to Israel but as exile, analogous to the Middle Passage;
• African American memories of suffering and poverty, and the personal narrative of redemption through music;
• Rastafari orientation toward Ethiopia, sometimes presented through dreadlocks;
• Invocation of the Kebra Negast, the medieval epic in Ge’ez that establishes Ethiopian/African civilization as a religious center;
• Triangulation of influence, or the combining of several different Afrodiasporic styles within one song, and collaboration with African musicians.
A casual listener might find Rada’s music indiscernible from popular music emanating from North America because it is a collage style comprising a variety of Afrodiasporic musical elements. Once unpacked, however, this combination makes sense as the output of an Ethiopian musician in Israel. Although she downplays any obvious elements of Israeli music, such as the minor melodic lines of Shirei Eretz Yisrael (Songs of the Land of Israel; see Regev and Seroussi 2004), sentimental biblical references, and the Hebrew language itself, as well as the specific political narratives of national vulnerability and anxiety over military service, her music is a projection of the lived experience of dislocation. Even without any Israeli source material, Rada’s music bears the imprint of the Ethiopian experience in Israel, and by assembling the African iconographies and Afrodiasporic vernaculars into a myth-narrative, she establishes Ethiopian-Israelis as Israel’s racial other.
TABLE 1.1 Funk, soul, jazz, Ethio-jazz, and gospel characteristics in Ester Rada’s songs
Arrangement Style: “Four Women”
Rada told me in our interview that Nina Simone is her favorite singer, but if she hadn’t, her preference would be apparent from the dominance of Simone’s repertoire on Rada’s 2015 EP I Wish.15 On each of the EP’s four tracks—three Simone originals (“Four Women,” “Sinnerman,” and “Feeling Good”) and one Simone cover (Bill Taylor’s “I Wish”)—Rada pays homage to Simone’s vocal style, and in concert, Rada’s non-Ethiopian audience responds the most enthusiastically to her Nina Simone covers. From a 2014 performance in New York’s Madison Square Park that I attended, to the Montreal jazz festival the same year,16 to Hulugeb (the annual Ethiopian-Israeli cultural festival in Jerusalem, where she introduced the song “Four Women” in Hebrew), her Nina Simone covers draw as much attention as her original compositions. As an audience member in New York, London, and Jerusalem, I have found that “Four Women” is the Nina Simone cover that consistently sparks the most dramatic audience reaction, performed in a style alternating between soul-jazz and Ethio-soul. She introduces the song to her audience as representing the African American female experience, and her arrangement of the song implies that Afrodiasporic narratives of violence inscribed on the body inform the way that Ethiopian-Israelis can relate to their host society.
Nina Simone first recorded “Four Women” in 1966, performing it widely in France shortly after she composed it (Audio file 1). The lyrics introduce a set of first-person African American narratives through the gendered language of sexual violence, establishing a fictive kinship with black women everywhere. In each verse Simone sings from the perspective of a different woman, describing in few words a set of obstacles for African Americans from the era of slavery to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s (for analysis of the song’s lyrics, see Feldstein 2013: 108–109). Like much of Simone’s repertoire, the song has come under scrutiny from critics, torn between interpreting it as allegory or as stereotype. African American studies scholar Ruth Feldstein interprets the song as a set of paradigms of black women’s experience in America (ibid.: 111). First, Aunt Sarah is dark-skinned and her “back is strong,” indicating that she is a slave (and, presumably, forcibly converted to Christianity). As the first of the story’s matriarchs (like the biblical Sarah), her gentle voice represents her as a mammy figure, the maternal and comforting housemaid of the plantation. Next, Saffronia is biracial or “yellow,” the result of the rape of a black woman by a “rich and white” man. Her clearly enunciated diction, along with the violence implied by her skin color, evokes the pressures on black women in a Jim Crow postemancipation America that was still explicitly racist. Then comes the “tan” Sweet Thing, available to “anyone who has money to buy.” In a lineage of black women exploited by men, her life in the sex trade was typical of many African American singers before the civil rights era (see Feldstein 2013, Maultsby 2006). Finally, the “brown” Peaches is “awfully bitter.” In both versions, Nina Simone and Ester Rada sing this part in a raspy voice punctuated by crescendo and emotion. The characters’ personal obstacles are indexed by their phenotype, skin color, and hair texture, revealing a history of violence against black female bodies, from slavery to rape to forced prostitution (see Burnim and Maultsby 2006).
Analysis of the song often focuses on the narrative structure and the biographical paradigms of the four women, but less attention is devoted to the musical structure, in which Simone articulates the tension in the lives of black women in America equally poignantly. It is worth spending a moment on Simone’s aesthetic choices, because Rada’s version is substantially different. Both communicate tension through syncopation, and examination of Simone’s musical structure—especially her blurring of duple and triple meter—illuminates Rada’s arrangement of the song (Audio file 2). By comparing the two versions, we see that Rada creates musical tension through a hemiola effect (the pitting of duple pulse against triple pulse), while Simone uses additive meter, with a tresillolike 3+3+2 pulse, but that one might prefer to follow as a syncopated 4/4. Simone’s voice and lyrics communicate the tension, too, but the song’s subtle metrical structure expresses struggle and opposition through an ongoing conflict between duple and triple meter within and across the bar lines.
The bass instrument (in some versions a double bass, in others a keyboard) enhances the syncopated feel in Simone’s version, playing on one, four, and seven in the cycle of eight. This syncopation implies triple meter, which her voice enhances: she usually begins a line on the seven, pausing halfway through the line and eventually ending at the end of the next measure. Likewise, her piano solos subvert 4/4 counting: they usually begin on an upbeat, just after the bass begins the 3+3+2 pattern. The syncopated metrical structure within each measure therefore creates a polyrhythmic effect between voice, piano, and bass. This syncopation of the supple structure creates the effect of triplets when following the bass notes on one, four, and seven; of triple meter when combined with other instruments; or of polyrhythm when the bass is subdued by a flute or cello. The effect of Simone’s syncopation of her voice, the piano, and the accompanying instruments is tension and delay, matching the lyrical themes of internal struggle, political vindication, and life narrative as national allegory (see Jackson 2013).
Bolstering the dramatic tension created in the lyrics and through the syncopated meter, Simone’s voice works with the melodic instruments to gradually thicken the song’s texture and navigate the melodic
