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Music man By Neri Livneh Tags: Israel News The big question that's always followed Yoni Rechter is how such a pleasant, attractive and talented guy managed to avoid star status for all these years. No celebrity aura has stuck to Rechter, who not only is the son of (the late Israel Prize laureate in architecture, Yaakov Rechter), but by age 21 was one of the best-known musicians in the country as a member of the phenomenon known as Kaveret. "I think it's not at all coincidental," he says. "I have a problem with this whole concept of celebrity. I'm not interested in being like that, or in relating to celebrities just because they're celebrities. I just want to relate to people for who they really are. During the period of Kaveret, when for a year and a half we were doing 28 shows a month and no one else came close to us, I think that everyone else in the band felt like rock stars, but I definitely didn't. I didn't want that. I never had girls coming to me with gifts and notebooks to sign, and I was very comfortable with that. On the other hand, I liked the fact that the rest had so many fans. I think Gidi [Gov] was the most popular." Rechter was 16 when he composed the music for "Tears of Angels," one of the most beautiful Israeli melodies, to lyrics written by his high-school classmate Danny Minster. Sixteen years old! Forty-one years later, in the presence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he received the 2008 EMET Prize-awarded for extraordinary achievement in art, science and culture. His fellow recipient of the $100,000 prize was Yizhak Sadai, his former composition teacher at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem. Advertisement Rechter?s golden touch has left its mark on nearly every aspect of Israeli music, from pop-rock (Kaveret, 14 Octaves) to children's songs ("The Sixteenth Sheep") to music for the theater. His compositions have been performed by symphony orchestras including the Israeli Philharmonic. He is a superb pianist, a precise musical arranger and master orchestrator-and a pretty good singer to boot, at least for those who enjoy his restrained style and droll humor. In this writer's mind, his contribution to Hebrew song is comparable to the late Yaakov Shabtai?s contribution to the new literature: Rechter has brought a new, whole and perfect sound, which, while influencing everything around it, also remained unique. It certainly bears mentioning that as one-third of the "royal" triumvirate that also featured Arik Einstein and Avraham Halfi, Rechter composed what is considered to be the most beautiful Hebrew song of all time: "Atur mitzhekh" ("Your Head is Crowned in Black Gold"). "I remember one time I was driving in the car and I heard the song, and the second it was over the disc jockey played it again from the beginning," the composer says, recalling the song's path to the pantheon. After Rechter came up with a new arrangement for Sasha Argov's music to King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler," Argov's widow acknowledged that Rechter "had even improved on Sasha's work." At present, Rechter is composing music for a play at the Khan Theater, studying German, performing at various venues around the country, and touring with singer Esther Ofarim in Germany. Another thing that Shabtai and Rechter have in common is Tel Aviv. "In German, there's this concept of heimat-a city that is your home. Tel Aviv has always been my heimat," he says. Rechter wasn't a part of the bohemian scene and didn't flit among the tables of actors and poets at the cafes-"I was into basketball." He owes his introduction to music to his father, who played the piano, had an extensive record collection and took his son to concerts by the Philharmonic. His earliest childhood memories are of musically related experiences. "For example, I remember the duo of Ran & Na'ama; I remember listening to their record at age six. I remember a Portuguese fado [folk song], and afterward the Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould, which my mother, Sara Shafir, bought for me. At age eight, I started taking piano lessons from a teacher in the neighborhood named Rina Levontin, and at age 10 I started studying with Eliahu Rudiakov, who was also my father's teacher. No one was thinking: Here's a pianist who's going to conquer the world, and that's not what I had in mind either." "I've been writing music since about age 14, and actually, as a teenager, I used to think about how my father had a big office and a very interesting life, and he traveled all over the world and maybe I ought to become an architect. You know, there is a similarity between architecture and music. Both deal with structures and forms and lines and counterpoint, but I don't know how it's done in architecture. Luckily for me, apparently, I wasn't accepted into the program where you defer army service for university, so I ended up going into a military entertainment troupe together with the three who later became the group Hakol Over Habibi. Our big hit was "Flowers in the Gun Barrel." At the same time, I began studying at the academy, and when I finished the army, I was at the end of my third year and then Kaveret burst on the scene." Rechter's parents separated when he was three; he has an older sister from their marriage, artist Michal Levit. His mother, a teacher who founded the drama track at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College, subsequently married Yeshayahu Shafir, who had two children from a previous marriage. Rechter also has three half-siblings from his late father?s marriage to the actress Hanna Meron: Amnon, an architect; Dafna, an actress; and Ofra, a philosophy professor. Yoni Rechter has been married for over 20 years to Dafna, a former art teacher, and they have two grown sons who are not involved in music. He is very close to his mother, who lives nearby. "She is a dominant figure in my life and we've always been close. We have an open dialogue that derives from her process of inner growth." His relationship with his father was, under the circumstances, more distant, "but he had a big influence on me. We're similar physically. I think that, all in all, with all the complexity of things, I still got to a good place with him, to a good, if not very close, relationship, and I think that in the end he was also very proud of me." At this point in the conversation, Rechter consents to briefly answer some questions and, together, to create a kind of glossary, describing some of the major components of his life. Rechter's glossary of terms Arik Einstein: "I've worked with a lot of singers and I?ve occasionally had the opportunity to guide and direct them, but my work with Arik Einstein, which began when I was 24, was almost like a miracle to me. I think that Arik's singing ability is a heavenly gift. His voice, his phrasing, his diction. A lot of songs were written together with him because I'd come to his house and we worked together. He brought Avraham Halfi's songs to me and spurred me to do things that I wouldn't have been able to do without him. The same thing goes for some other artists, like Nurit Galron, Gidi Gov, Esther Ofarim, Yossi Banai." Tichon Hadash High School: "Some of the people I'm in closest touch with to this day are people I met at Tichon Hadash, people like Danny Minster. I also met Eli Mohar there, but he was in 12th grade when I was in ninth and we weren?t friends. But I remember him. There was something about his look that intrigued me-something simultaneously dreamy and down to earth-and also a kind of wisdom." Divorce: "To grow up as the child of divorced parents in the 1950s and ?60s was something out of the ordinary. There weren't the kind of arrangements you find today. I was at my father's once a week, every Friday, but I grew up with my mother. My childhood wasn't simple. People think I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. That's not how it was. My father's house, the one I didn't grow up in, had an abundance of pictures, records, beautiful things, but it wasn't like that at all at my mother's. It wasn't easy to navigate between those two homes. I remember myself as a child seeing a bottle of Tempo and knowing that I couldn?t buy it. But we didn't lack for anything; it just taught us to put the emphasis on things that come from the inside. It happened to me with music and literature and movies and theater. I vividly remember film experiences from age 15. The movie "The Graduate" had a major impact on me." Danny Sanderson: "Danny Sanderson and Gidi Gov, who are two years older than me, wanted to put together a band along with Efraim Shamir and Meir Fenigstein and "Churchill" (Yitzhak Klepter), and they were looking for a piano player, and then Gil Dor told them about me. They had me audition in Sanderson's house. He lived in Savyon at the time, and before the audition he gave me a cassette of his music and I was blown away. He?d written a rock opera called "Poogy Tales" and the freshness of it just stunned me. At the time, Israeli music mostly meant military singing troupes, aside from a few things by Arik Einstein and Shalom Hanoch, and Sasha Argov, of course. But for people like me who grew up on the Beatles, there was nothing to listen to. And suddenly I heard this totally original music, rock'n roll with fantastic, funny and deep lyrics, and [Alon] Oleartchick's playing was fantastic, too." Old age: "Once a week I visit a relative in a nursing home, and it's a tough thing to take in. It's hard for everyone. The thing that's hard for me about old age is the way young people are repulsed by it. I think a person doesn't really believe he's going to get old. I didn't believe I'd ever be 40 and now I'm already 57, and I'll apparently become an old man, too. My war on old age is through my daily activity. Both with exercise- either I swim or I do a lot of walking-and with music. Creativity helps to keep old age at bay a little." Friends: "We used to be a group of friends who would meet regularly at Haim?s restaurant on Basel Street. There was Eli Mohar and Eitan Green and Miki Gurevich. I work with Eli and Miki a lot, and when Eli was alive, the bunch of us did a lot of stuff together." Texts: "I have a gut feeling about a text. I see a text and immediately know if I connect to it and if I can compose something for it. Texts often have an internal meter, and something in the tone of the words that speaks to me. A lot of people send me texts, and I read poetry, too. I?m in touch right now with Yankele Rotblit, who has sent me four poems that I?m setting to music. Every good song has something magical about it. Every good work of art seems to have somehow come into being organically, without any need for explanation. It's a miracle." Work of art: "There's a vast difference between working on a poem and working on a symphonic piece or on music for the theater. It's kind of like the difference between writing a poem and writing a novel. I've written several longer works, for both the theater and movies, and I've also written some symphonic pieces. I once worked for eight months, eight hours a day, on a symphonic piece and I felt like I?d reached much deeper into myself. It's an intoxicating experience and sometimes there?s a feeling of a letdown when you write just a song afterward." Kaveret: "We don't do reunion concerts all the time and we're not in daily contact. The last reunion concerts we did were done to raise money. The band contained some of the musicians that I most admire to this day. It was a revolution. I think that all the best things start from a feeling of revolution and rebellion. "The Sixteenth Sheep" was also a revolution." Studies: "If there's anything I owe my father, it's that he was the model for me of continually educating yourself; he really pushed me to go study at the academy and he was always learning new things. I believe in that. For two years, I've been taking piano lessons with Amir Fedorovich and learning different pieces. We take a piece and break it down, I practice at home and come to a lesson once a week. I no longer feel that I need to practice the songs that I play in performances. I have to work on myself, I?m the vessel. So before the show I practice Schubert and Chopin etudes, and it gives me a very pleasing and meaningful framework for the fields of jazz and rock. In 1977, Chick Corea came here and I went to all his shows and workshops, and he said that a jazz pianist has to learn drums, so I spent a year learning to play the drums to improve my sense of rhythm, and to develop the separation between the two hands. I also play a little guitar." Mizrahi music: "I remember that in the early 1970s, there were interviews with Avihu Medina and others who complained about discrimination, and I felt like my friends and I were being attacked personally. Today Medina is chairman of the board of ACUM [Israel's Music and Literary Rights Society], and this is a positive thing because it?s part of the process of correcting mistakes. As a musician, it's not my concern whether Mizrahi music is played. I?m not a sociologist. But a lot of the Mizrahi music you hear on the radio is basically pop with Mizrahi scales." Ninet: "I don't want to talk about her personally, but about the ratings culture and the phenomenon of "A Star is Born" [the Israeli version of "American Idol"] which in my opinion is having an adverse effect on the artistic aspect of creativity in Israel. There's a problem when a program like "A Star is Born" is the only serious production that has anything to do with music. It fosters a reality in which this is what music looks like afterward. I take no issue with the participants, the contestants, the producers and the audience: They're all doing their uncreative work faithfully. But this is a program whose purpose is to sell the show and not to make music. It fits in with all the shallowness of the ratings culture." Movies and books: "I get asked to write music for movies and it almost always doesn't go well because I always have conflicts with the directors. When a director brings me a movie, he doesn't have time to wait, he wants it fast. I've had experiences with four directors who didn't give me enough time. But the last film I worked on, which hasn't been released yet, "Bruria" by Avraham Kushnir, turned out wonderfully." "I read a lot. When Eli Mohar died, he left instructions for his friends to come and choose books to take from his collection. For many years, I wanted to read Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brothers," because Eli and Esther Ofarim told me about it, and this past Yom Kippur I finally started it. For me, "Buddenbrooks" was also a formative book, as was Yehoshua Kenaz's "Infiltration" and the books of Philip Roth." Eli Mohar: "Even though I remembered him from high school, our first meeting was when he brought the song "Homeland Lesson" to Kaveret in 1973. The next time we met was in the Golan Heights. We went to perform there, and he was a combat soldier on an armored personnel carrier, but our personal connection began when he approached me to write a musical together with him and with Uri Klein. Eli gave me the texts for three songs that he had written, one of which was "That's All There Is," and within an hour I'd set them to music and he really loved it. We took the musical to Nola Chelton at the Haifa Theater, but nothing came of it. But our relationship continued from there. Our friendship gradually developed into different areas and we performed our show "My Only Love" for 10 years. For 25 years, we swam every day at the Gordon pool. We met at Haim's restaurant every day. I think he was a very significant poet. I always felt that his poems contained the truth, and extra depth. We always had arguments about what mattered most: the words or the music. Over the years, I also came to see how important the words are." Livelihood: "The money I'll receive with the prize, $100,000, will be very helpful to me. I'e never had a lot of money, but I'valso never really worried about money. I almost always get by." Young people: "I see lots of different generations in popular music. There?s the generation of the 1970s with great composers like Matti Caspi and Shlomo Yidov and Sanderson and Shem-Tov Levy. Then there was the generation that produced Arcadi Duchin and others, and the generation that produced Shlomi Shaban. I really like Shaban, and Hadag Nahash, too. And there are the two Avishai Cohens, too-two excellent jazz musicians, a trumpeter and a bassist. I really like Rona Keinan, too, as a writer of both words and music, and I think that Evyatar Banai is a musician with a lot of depth." Jealousy: "I'm not at all jealous of other performers who perform my songs. Just the opposite: Sometimes I feel a sense of regret that I don't have the ability that they have to sing so well. To me, perfect happiness is being able to express yourself in song. Don't get me wrong: I like how I sing, but I don't think of myself as the best performer of my songs." Gossip: "I don't read gossip, I don't like to gossip, I don?t like to hear gossip and I?m very happy that I never appear in the gossip columns." Low points: "I guess I've had down periods, but I relate to this a little differently. My musical output isn't measured in ratings anyway, and I can?t say that I suddenly sold fewer records because I don't sell that many to begin with. A lot of the music I make doesn't really reach the public anyway, so it's impossible to use that kind of external measurent in relation to me. On the personal level, in my early thirties, I had a difficult period when I began to become aware of a lot of different kinds of childhood pain that suddenly came to the surface. I went to therapy then. That would seem to be a low point, but really that down was preparation for an up." Theater: "I don't see that much theater. When I was a kid, I saw more, because my father married Hanna Meron and she took me to see a lot of plays. But I like to write for the theater. On average, I write music for two plays a year. For me, it's an exciting experience. I feel like I' also learning about theater. I think I?d like to write a musical one day, maybe also an opera. Why not? Bookmark to del.icio.us   Who's missing? Haredi parties absent from Jerusalem coalition for first time in decades. 'Kavosh 2' Amid nuclear tensions, Iran says it successfully launched rocket.   1.   Yoni Rechter 14:37  |  Jayme 21/11/08

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