Playing Through the Fracture: Israeli Diaspora Musicians Confront Culture, Politics, and Belonging

It is a crisp, cold night in mid-October, and the queue outside bar LunAtico, tucked into the now gentrified neighbourhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, is long. Dozens of revellers wait patiently for the first set to empty out, hoping to secure a good seat for the next performance of Telavana, an Israeli-led jazz band whose name alone feels charged in this moment.

It is remarkable. In the current political upheaval, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and the devastating war that followed in the Gaza Strip, where many believe war crimes have amounted to genocide, it is quite unusual to see a band bearing the name ‘Tel Aviv’ still drawing large audiences. While some Israeli artists across various art forms have been boycotted or quietly sidelined, Telavana appears as a rarity. 

What happened to the scene

For a moment in recent history, sometime in the previous decade, it seemed as if the Israeli Jazz scene in New York was thriving and bringing together people of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. While Kriss believes it is still going strong, bassist Or Bareket, a well-known jazz artist who was born in Jerusalem but raised in Buenos      Aires and Tel-Aviv, doubts that it was ever the case.

'I’m not sure the dynamic you describe ever fully existed. I can only speak from my own process, but engaging with a different culture or sound, especially one rooted in a history of oppression, comes with a responsibility to understand the people creating those cultures and that art, their lived experiences and the social context behind the sound. ‘Embracing’ the music without the people or their history can easily become simply extraction or fetishisation,' he says in a Zoom video from his New York flat.      

Bareket goes on to say that 'Studying the history and context of the Black American musical tradition known as Jazz, an artform born from the brilliance and resilience of enslaved Africans and their descendants surviving a centuries-long project designed to destroy their humanity, their culture, their very lives, opened my eyes to the state violence, dehumanisation, and systemic erasure of Palestinians culture in the place I come from. I wish more musicians from my homeland could recognise that connection.'   

Itai Kriss feels similar but slightly different about it. After growing up in Israel and its narrative, only when he left as a young man, and looked from the outside, he got a different perspective that made it 'extra difficult', as he phrases it, to celebrate the culture and the place that he originally hailed from. He is aware that the current events and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement calling for a cultural boycott of Israeli artists had some effect on people he knows, with their shows being cancelled. There was an incident in an informal Israeli club where some protesters came and assaulted the crowd, throwing red paint at them, but that did not affect him directly. He explains that different people deal with the situation in different ways, and some have been very outspoken on one side of the political fence or the other.      

'Some musicians are very hardened in their pro-Israeli stand, while others are horrified by the events and are very pro-Palestinian. Then there are people like me. I don’t want to choose a side. I don’t believe in that. If we ever want to get out of this conflict, choosing a side is not the way to resolve the conflict.'    

Is there a way to resolve it, in your view?

'The way to resolve the conflict is by realising we are all on the same side. I know it is very far from where we are now, but that’s how I see it. I think it’s also terrible that, as artists, it is expected of us to constantly address it. I mean, there’s nothing further away from my art than all this. I’m trying to bring people together, to listen to each other and create a link of listening, of compassion. The idea of Telavana is cultures meeting and celebrating beautiful things from each culture. It is the opposite of war.' 

The space between Tel Aviv and Havana 

Itai Kriss, a Grammy-nominated jazz flautist virtuoso, has lived in New York for the past 24 years. He plays a whole range of different musical genres, ranging from straight-ahead jazz, salsa, Afro-Cuban music, Cuban son and other Latin and Caribbean genres. He has played alongside world-famous musicians from the likes of the Colombian harpist Edmar Castaneda, the American trumpeter and vocalist Benny Benack III and roots reggae legend Burning Spear (Winston Rodney), to name a few. Yet it is his own project, Telavana, that brings these influences together with the Middle Eastern sounds of his homeland, Israel. 

At Bar Lunatico, Kriss starts the concert with a monologue. His band, he explains, makes music that stretches across a cultural bridge between Havana and his hometown Tel-Aviv, and even that seems like a rather brave thing to say in the current climate. 

'I didn’t even say much, ' he says in an interview to FP in his flat in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Flatbush. 'But I know what you’re talking about. I saw an Avishai Cohen show (internationally renowned Israeli jazz trumpeter) about six months ago. ‘Ashes to Gold’, his latest album, which is about the war. He gave a whole speech about and talked about the war very directly. I also talk about it sometimes a bit more, but I didn’t feel like it in the show that you saw.'     

Still, he explains, the band is called Telavana because its purpose is to connect the culture he grew up in with the culture he now inhabits. When sitting in Kriss’s concert, one cannot help but wonder that maybe the cliché about music bringing people together is true; just looking at the band’s members and their various backgrounds, with the Columbian percussionist Samuel Torres, African-American trumpeter Wayne Tucker, Cuban pianist Ahmed Alom-Vega and Iranian-American belly dancer Elena Nayiri, all performing together with Kriss alongside two other New York based Israeli musician. It seems for a short moment, music does have a healing power that can bring people of different communities together. 

'The war and all the horrific and ugly things that have surfaced give the names “Israel” and “Tel Aviv” a terrible connotation,' Kriss says. 'It is disturbing. Especially for me, as someone who tries to advance the cultural aspects of Israel to celebrate the culture that created me. I know people hear the name Israel and the first thing they would think of is genocide, war crimes and apartheid. Our music has nothing to do with any of that, but unfortunately, it does as well.

Israel is both this wonderful place where so many cultures come together, so much beautiful music and flavours, but it is also that ugly place where terrible things have been happening for many years, and it has reached a crazy crescendo of violence and hatred. For me personally, it is something very hard to grapple with.' 

Why BDS?

Even in this microcosmos of expatriate Israeli jazz musicians in New York, everything is scrutinised. While some Israeli-born artists feel marginalised, Bareket completely dissociates himself from the scene he was once a member of, and maybe from his Israeliness at large.

'Many of the collaborations you are referring to have ended around the turn of the decade, for artistic, personal or logistical reasons. Many artists my age left New York during COVID, which reshaped the scene. Since late 2023, musicians who support the war seem to have also stepped back from the larger scene or clustered into smaller circles, so I don’t have much interaction with them. Collaborations are always mutual and personal. National identity is not the point. What matters is how a musician understands their responsibility as an artist and a human being, their aesthetic, the chemistry we share and of course, can we play together? I still play with anyone that I align with on these points and will always continue to do so.'   

And what do you think of the BDS movement, which often singles out artists who have long left Israel and have very little to do with its institutions?      

'Talking about BDS without discussing why it exists is dishonest. There are no functioning Universities left in Gaza. Cultural institutions have been destroyed. Israeli academic and cultural institutions have, in many cases, been complicit or remained silent about this destruction. It is unrealistic for these institutions to expect 'business as usual'. We can’t evaluate non-violent resistance without acknowledging the extreme violence that precedes it. Whether I get personally boycotted isn’t important in the context of what Palestinians are living through. I personally avoid collaborating with any institution directly connected to the state.'

Difficult time to be an Israeli artist 

This form of ‘personal boycott’ is not foreign to Kriss as well. He says he understands why different festivals and clubs would not want to platform an Israeli bandleader presenting a mix of Israeli and Latin American music.

'When you think about the casualties of this war, the fact that I’m not getting so many festivals or gigs is a tiny price to pay when you look at all these people who lost so much, let alone their lives. The war has definitely made my life more difficult, but more on a spiritual level. It is a difficult time to be an Israeli artist in New York, but I’m still here. Performing, making music. It is much harder to see Israel now, the loss and destruction of the soul of Israel. Who are we? I don’t recognise it anymore. To see that this is who I am, where I’m from, it is very hard.

Kriss himself did not perform in Israel in the two years since the war broke out. 'That’s my personal boycott. ' He explains, and he is not sure if he will be performing there again soon, although our conversation is taking place when the ceasefire deal is brokered. 

But when listening to both Kriss’s and Bareket’s albums, the Middle Eastern sounds of their Tel-Avivian upbringing are still very present in their music. Bareket, who was much more vocal in his criticism of Israel and what he defines as the genocide in Gaza, does not distance himself from the sounds of his childhood.

'I feel a deep sense of belonging and responsibility towards the land where I was born and all life in it. My music is an attempt to reclaim a direct relationship to my experience, ancestry, and history, to narrate my identity on my own terms and to imagine a future rooted in equality, justice, and accountability between the river and the sea. I reject Israeliness because, for me, it has come to signify separation and supremacy. It’s an ideology based on the belief that safety comes through domination and erasure. That is the opposite of how I understand connection to land and community. I’ve felt that disconnect for as long as I can remember, long before I could really articulate it.'

Epilogue 

Avishai Coen’s album, inspired by the horrific events of October 2023 and the war that followed, came out on the German jazz label ECM. After the Last Sky, the latest album by Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, was released on the same label. Brahem’s album was also inspired by those terrible events, but from an Arab perspective. Maybe these artworks symbolise the idea that both narratives have a place, and even alongside each other. 

Maybe that relates to Kriss’s idea of not choosing sides. At Televana’s concert, the crowd appears to be a genuinely multicultural mix of people from every background. At a certain point, when the talented black saxophonist Irwin Hall goes on stage and starts improvising to the band’s music, his wife rises to dance in an almost mystical, primal way, as if to remind us that we are all on the same side, all human.