another instrument to build counterpoint: guitar in verse 2, flute in verse 3, and a lowregister string (viola, cello) in verse 4, with Simone playing a piano solo between verses 3 and 4, and finishing the song on a dramatic staccato ascent. In concert, a hand drum often comes in during verse 3 to exoticize Sweet Thing. But most of the drama is contained in Simone’s voice, which draws from different timbres to emphasize the characteristics of each woman. In addition to increasing her ornamentation in each verse—from the minimal decoration of Aunt Sarah to a melismatic Peaches punctuated by vibrato—Simone increases her vocal range as the song progresses. Maintaining a virtually identical skeletal melody throughout, Simone sings almost in monotone for Aunt Sarah, and jumps across an octave for Peaches.
The vocal tension created by Simone’s voice is a key element of her style, and she creates that tension in “Four Women” through timbre and dynamics. From her near-whisper of Saffronia’s name in verse 2 to an abrupt transition to raspiness for Peaches in verse 4, she punctuates the song’s rhythmic structure with her own commentary on the characters. Most recognizable for Simone’s fans, though, is the song’s cadenza (see Maultsby 2006: 280), the rapid ascent at the end of verse 4 complemented by an ascending and then rapidly descending piano, an ending that she popularized with her hit song “Sinnerman.” In “Four Women” she commences this cadenza between the lines “What do they call me” and “My name is Peaches,” the piano delaying the climactic announcement of her sarcastic and decidedly anticlimactic name. The ascent with her voice, in contrast to the piano’s crescendo and cascading, descending contour, concludes the song with a contrapuntal tension that mirrors the narrative structure. Indeed, quite apart from the lyrics, the song’s melody and rhythmic structure emphasize the diversity of life stories that the lyrics express explicitly.
Ester Rada imprints her own style on “Four Women” through an Ethio-soul arrangement, reimagining the song entirely at the level of song structure and instrumental arrangement (Rada follows Simone’s melodic contour, her lyrics, and her vocal timbre). The black otherness that Rada expresses through musical vernaculars of soul and Ethio-jazz is represented in the song’s lyrics about abuse of black women, but she also plays it out in the juxtaposition of African American musical vernaculars (jazz, funk) in the verses and Ethio-jazz in the bridge. The shift from minor scales to hemitonic modes, and from syncopation to triple meter are small but significant adjustments to the instrumental accompaniment, forming the basis of Rada’s reimagining, in which Ethiopian-Israelis share the experience of blackness with African Americans.
Rada’s voice is strongly influenced by Nina Simone’s raspy timbre, low vocal register, and minimal ornamentation, but for all the similarities of vocal delivery, Rada’s version adapts the structure of “Four Women” substantially. In contrast to Simone’s syncopated 3+3+2 structure, Rada and her band delineate the verses by creating a chorus from the “My name is Aunt Sarah/ Saffronia/ Sweet Thing /Peaches” section. After an introduction with Rada singing “My skin is” on the pickup, the first measure of the verse begins on the word “black,” as it does on each subsequent verse on “yellow,” “tan,” or “brown,” the skin color of each character, with skin color explicitly forming the rhythmic and narrative delineation of the verse. Each verse lasts twelve measures, with drums and keyboard accompanying Rada’s voice, followed by a two-measure transition that brings in a swelling brass section. At the end of the two-verse transition (fourteen measures in total), the band changes meter, moving into a 12/8, including the three brass instruments (saxophone, trombone, and trumpet) plus the guitar and bass (see Le Gendre 2012 or Maultsby 2006: 297 for an explanation of the soul convention of transition from 4/4 to 12/8 to heighten syncopation). While Rada sings “My name is Aunt Sarah/ Saffronia/ Sweet Thing /Peaches,” the strings outline the skeletal melody in eighth and sixteenth notes, and the brass play ascending minor seconds. Between the triple pulse and the minor second notes, this bridge evokes the hemitonic pentatonic modes of Ethio-jazz, played in 6/8. Therefore, the melodic effect is jazz verse and Ethiopian chorus. The brass section, prominent in soul arrangements (Maultsby 2006: 274), forms a sonic barrier between the two styles.
The alternation between soul-jazz and Ethio-jazz continues for three verses, and the fourth verse (Peaches) comes in as funk. Portia Maultsby defines the transition from soul to funk as “the interlocking of the drum pattern and a two-bar bass line, counter or contrasting guitar, keyboard and horn riffs, and a vocalist singing in a gospel style” (2006: 297). The brass instrumentalists continue to play for this verse, but they switch to 4/4, with the saxophone accenting the pickup of each phrase. As Rada reaches a crescendo and incorporates rougher timbre, the combination of textural density and dynamic climax brings the song to a frenzied, affectively powerful end, similar to Simone’s version in the feeling of climax, but perhaps with her non-Ethiopian band relying too much on instrumental dynamics to bring about that climax.
Rada first recorded a Simone song in 2015, but she has been paying homage to Simone frequently in concert, the most widely circulated example online being her performance at Hulugeb in December 2013.17 In this rare instance, Rada stepped off-script briefly to explain the song to her audience in Hebrew. An audience member who has heard Rada introduce Simone’s “Feeling Good” in English, complete with demanding that the audience answer the question “How do you feel?” in English even in Israel, might be surprised to hear Rada taking such a pedagogical approach to a song. But for the audience at Hulugeb, many of whom were Ethiopian-Israelis not conversant in English, Rada’s careful explanation of the premise of “Four Women” and its multiple interpretations gave the audience a sense of the gravity of the subject matter. Whether in the dramatic case of Hulugeb or anywhere else on the festival circuit, it comes across that Rada takes this repertoire seriously and that it illuminates the Ethiopian-Israeli experience.
Rada does not offer onstage the full-throated repudiations of racism and occupation that left-wing Israelis espouse in protest songs, but her musical style itself borders on a political agenda, since the linking of soul and funk to Ethio-jazz transpires in “Four Women” through the narrative of violence against black women. She keeps her positioning subtle: she sings in English, does not usually mention Israel onstage as that might alienate her left-leaning audience,18 and connects Ethiopia to the United States via modal brass and triple meter. Yet Rada’s method works as a maneuvering through the Afrodiasporic myths of citizenship because it is understated. In “Four Women,” she forgoes a discourse of identity politics that has left the Israeli electoral system crippled. Instead she draws from Afrodiasporic influences that young Ethiopian-Israelis recognize in their own lives.
CUT ’N’ MIX COMPOSITION: “SORRIES,” “LIFE HAPPENS,” AND “BAZI”
In the video to “Sorries,” Rada walks around the Old City of Jerusalem with four members of her band.19 One immediately notices irony in the performance of reggae in the Old City, since reggae reconfigures “Zion” as none other than Ethiopia (see Raboteau 2014). Not that the song is explicitly political; the lyrics in English are about a romantic relationship, and the symbolic power of the song’s performance unfold entirely at the level of musical style. To understand Rada’s original material, and particularly three original songs from Rada’s album—“Sorries,” “Life Happens,” and “Bazi”—I describe some key musical vocabularies of blackness that, for Ethiopian-Israelis, offer alternative narratives of belonging.
Ethiopian-Israeli musicians frequently deploy reggae (and dub) references to Rastafarian imagery as a way of accruing cultural capital with Caribbean subcultures and among Israeli audiences. In Rada’s case, the negotiation of diasporic identity transpires entirely at the level of musical style, her repertoire constituting her public voice; her referencing of reggae is an effective framing device. At the same time, a number of songs from her album borrow from elements of Ethiopian traditional music and from funk to position Rada and Ethio-soul within a continuum of Afrodiasporic musical styles. Her compositional style might be best understood as a variant of the methodology of cut ’n’ mix, a style that Hebdige characterized in the 1980s as a musical dialogue between African American and Caribbean cultures. Hebdige identifies the roots, musical bloodlines, and influences in reggae
