An Afrodiasporic narrative is bolstered by the Israeli media, which implies that skin color defines Rada’s experience, drawing indirectly from the hardship narratives of great female African American singers like Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin. Profiles like her interview in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 201311 describe her rise to fame as a victory for all Ethiopian-Israelis, sometimes portrayed in the profiles as helpless and desperate. She makes this connection implicitly, too, since her repertoire includes multiple covers of songs by Nina Simone. The articles about Rada frequently mention that she was born in Kiryat Arba, perhaps the most controversial settlement in the West Bank,12 raised by a single mother in Netanya, and that her childhood was religious; she was a member of B’nei Akiva, the religious-Zionist youth group that is especially popular among settlers, before spending her military service in a musical troupe (lehaqa). In those media profiles, music is described as a personal journey, her outlet to rebel against religious life,13 which she left in pursuit of creative freedom.
In Rada’s personal story, we find a conflicted relationship with the State of Israel, which marginalized her community, and the institutions that have cultivated an outstanding musical talent. Her musical training came by way of performing in a military troupe during her compulsory service, where she developed high-level performance skills. In our interview she talked about learning the standards of the Israeli repertoire, sung entirely in Hebrew, and about the level of professionalism she developed working in a troupe. Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi explain in their chapter on Israeli musical institutions (2004) that the military fed directly into the recording industry in the 1960s and 1970s, with members of military bands becoming some of the most beloved rock musicians of the 1970s. In that respect, Rada’s early life and her pathway into the music industry tell opposing stories of marginality and patronage.
The transition from Hebrew-language national repertoire to English-language soul music has also been enabled by a patronage network of state-supported arts education and European influence. As Regev and Seroussi go on to explain, the flocking of elite musicians to Tel Aviv, first from Germany in the 1930s and later from the Former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has offered the State of Israel a constant stream of classically trained musicians and conservatory teachers. Despite the other ways that Israel has become culturally marginalized, it has kept its status as a destination for musical (and artistic) study. Rada and the seven members of her band—Michael Guy on bass, Ben Jose on guitar, Lior Romano on keyboard, Dan Mayo on drums, Inon Peretz on trumpet, Gal Dahan on saxophone, and Maayan Mylo on trombone—all gained their music education in the military or in an excellent European-influenced conservatory system. These musicians credibly perform Ethio-jazz, a genre that relies on dissonant tones like augmented fourths and minor seconds, and that regularly flummoxes European studio musicians.14 The conservatory system in Israel that produces top-notch studio musicians is part of the infrastructural machinery that benefits any Israeli musician looking to expand into different genres.
A competent backing band is a major asset for Rada: Kevin Le Gendre argues that the affective power of soul music comes from the call-and-response between the solo singer and the band, a dynamic that he associates with the heterophony of the cotton field (2012: 26). With the accompaniment of her band, Rada constructs an Afrodiasporic connection as a musical lexicon of black alterity—what Le Gendre calls “not just a musical form but a sociological and emotional lexicon” (2012: 27)—built on the offbeats of reggae, the fuzzy guitar riffs of funk, the affective intensity of gospel, and the heterophonic movement of voice, horns, and strings that create a polyrhythmic effect in soul (Maultsby 2006: 274). In place of expounding ethnohistory or political ideologies directly, Rada invokes the painful lineage that bore black music. I will unpack the symbolic meaning of these musical vernaculars across the five songs analyzed in this chapter. In brief, though, their combination of Afrodiasporic influences is summarized in table 1.1. As it suggests, Rada and her band borrow a variety of elements from African American popular music and its Caribbean counterparts. They do so through melody and instrumentation, but also through the establishment of a style in a certain song or section of a song. As we can see, there is much brass and much modality in her music, and these elements are shared by Ethio-jazz and soul music.
Rada’s musical style is evidence of Afrodiasporic solidarity, but a critical element 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