makes sense, since one of Rada’s main achievements in this song (as she told me) is to introduce the Israeli public to an Amharic song.
The Israeli public had heard this song before, in a heavily mediated format. In 2005, the multiethnic Israeli mega-band the Idan Raichel Project—Israel’s closest analogue to Paul Simon’s Graceland—used “Nanu Ney” as the opening to the title song from the album Mima’amakim. I examine the song of the same name in detail in chapter 3, arguing that it conveys a nationalist (Israeli) agenda by drawing on the musical conventions of Israeli popular song. A Zionist interpretation of the song partly hinges on the fact that Raichel, the bandleader, samples the opening, without incorporating Ethio-jazz tonality into the full song. For Raichel’s fans, a mix of Israeli progressives and world-music fans in the United States and Europe, the Ethiopian section offers a bit of ethnic flavor to a pop song, such that in-depth treatment of tonality (modal), instrumentation (brassy), or lyrics (Amharic, dealing with heartbreak) need only be glossed schizophonically (Feld 1996).
That Rada chose this among Ethio-jazz standards to cover can perhaps be read as a commentary on “Mima’amakim” (Audio file 8) and its selective sampling of particular Ethiopian sounds. As the only Amharic song on her album, one that she renders faithfully with minimal arrangement, the song feels like a corrective to the Idan Raichel Project’s more cannibalistic approach to the classic song.
Rada’s perspective is different, though. When I interviewed her, she explained the choice in some detail:
ER: I think it happened when I heard an Amharic song for the first time on Israeli radio. To hear an Amharic song on Israeli radio … here, Idan Raichel did something really nice, because there was never anything like this in Israel. And I got quite emotional, and went to hear the original song. And I loved it. And I thought that someone had to do the original. Because it’s an amazing song. Not to do, like that to Idan Raichel [makes a stabbing motion] …
IWK: You do the whole song, and you dance, and the audience loves it.
ER: That’s what I wanted. It’s something that the audience knows, and a lot of people think that Idan Raichel wrote the song, so I wanted people to know that it’s an Ethiopian song, that it has an origin, that it’s a complete song, even that’s a good [outcome] in my opinion. And people have really liked it. It’s been on the radio a lot in Israel. It’s the first time a full Ethiopian song has been on the air in Israel. (interview, Jaffa, March 5, 2015)
Rada explains that she did indeed intend to correct misperceptions, but her concern was for Israelis to recognize and acknowledge Ethiopian culture. She notes that a listener might (as I did) interpret the song as a dig against Raichel, but she rejects that interpretation. The primary outcome in covering this song is to reconfigure its symbolic meaning for an Israeli public and, for Ethiopian-Israelis, to connect their source material to her Afrodiasporic source material.
This version of “Nanu Ney” can claim several accomplishments. Rada delivers an iconic African sound to an Israeli audience, turning a schizophonic product (“Mima’amakim”) into a part of Israel’s tapestry of ethnic origins (edot).21 The source material itself, though, carries the history of the African diaspora, of blackness, and of pan-Africanism in the postcolonial moment. Whether or not the song fits neatly into the black Atlantic discourses of musical exchange, the amount of cultural negotiation that went into producing it—from the proto-Rastafarian political speeches of Marcus Garvey to the syncretic jazz-funk of Miles Davis—has turned “Nanu Ney,” and a good deal of Ethio-jazz, into a part of the reawakening of black pride. For this song to be the choice of Israel’s first black star works in tandem with the American-influenced source material to create a lineage that connects blackness from New York to Addis Ababa, via Tel Aviv.
“How long will you be here?”
“Four days.”
“And what have you come for?”
“An interview.”
Wrong answer. I should have just said that I was here for the beach. I had done this a dozen times before, and knew better. Waiting in the immigration queue at Ben-Gurion Airport, I had a feeling that I might well experience the bureaucracy that my students and Palestinian friends knew well, but that I had always been protected from as a Hebrew speaker with an Israeli-sounding name. Every time I entered the country, I worried that this time would be difficult. I should have given my usual answer, that I was here to visit my cousins ….
“What kind of interview? Do you have an invitation?”
“No, it’s not formal. I arranged it over email.”
“Where is it?”
Deep breath. Tell the truth. Don’t look guilty. Be prepared for a long wait.
“In Jaffa. I teach music in London, and I’m here to interview Ester Rada.”
“Wow, what fun [Eizeh keif lakh!]. Enjoy [Teheni!]!” Passport handed back, visa issued. The security apparatus identified me as a desirable.
The Palestinian rappers I’ve worked with who have Israeli passports, as well as my students and colleagues (and husband), have all been in the interrogation rooms. I am fortunate to have avoided any unpleasantness from the Israeli security apparatus in my many visits, but the privilege comes at a price, and this visit clarified for me what that price is.
Ester Rada is currently Israel’s biggest star on the international music circuit, and the Israeli recording industry is excited to claim her. She overcame systemic prejudice growing up, earned professional credentials in a music troupe during her military service, and made a success of herself abroad. As a leftist who veers away from Israeli politics in her repertoire, Rada is the product of a system that she often disagrees with politically, and she navigates the international festival scene carefully. Non-Jews buy tickets to her concerts in France and the United States, and across Europe, where the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement increases in strength with every Israeli diplomatic misstep. This leaves her with some decisions to make about her career, such as whether to move abroad, or whether to collaborate with African diaspora musicians. With these complex entanglements, explicitly political lyrics would be limiting. I understand why she performs in English.
Yet the self that Rada portrays in recordings and onstage is the result of a complex set of cultural processes and multidirectional musical influences. Rada’s collation of Ethio-jazz, neo-soul, jazz, funk, and reggae represents sonically a gradual reorientation of Ethiopian-Israelis in their host society. By backing away from political or subversive lyrics, and working entirely at the level of source material, musical structure, visuals, and ornamentation, Rada works through a set of identities—Ethiopian, Israeli, black—that read differently in front of diverse audiences. As long as “black music” is the language of her performance, Rada’s political ideology can be discerned by an engaged listener. She proposes a route to belonging that circumvents the nationalist narratives that have until recently excluded Ethiopians from one paradigmatic story of exile (Jewish) by inserting them into the alternative paradigm of exile (Afrodiasporic).
For Ethiopian-Israelis, Rada’s cut ’n’ mix compositional style, her Ethio-soul arrangements of jazz standards, and her contemporary interpretations of Ethiojazz standards represent a dramatic reconfiguration of the Ethiopian position in Israeli society via Afrodiasporic narratives of citizenship. For the immigrants who struggled to integrate through the 1980s and ’90s (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 1999), and their children who
