16 METRO | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2017

• By BARRY DAVIS

Oran Etkin is one well-round-ed musician. Running an eye over his bio reveals that the thirty-something, Isra-

el-born, US-bred reedman has accrued training, as well as bandstand and stu-dio time, in numerous areas of musical and cultural creation.

He is in the lineup of the forthcoming winter version of the Red Sea Jazz Festi-val in Eilat (February 9-11), where he will play with a high-profile quartet of drum-mer Matt Wilson, vibraphonist Steve Nelson and pianist Adam Birnbaum.

IT ALL started for Etkin as a child, with one of the pioneers of modern jazz, the saxophonist and bebop founding father Charlie Parker. But the youngster was not drawn just to the compelling fire

power of the art form – he was instinc-tively grabbed by the emotions the mu-sic evoked.

“I remember when I was a small child, I danced to a record by Charlie Parker in my bedroom,” he says. “I was in a good mood and I started to dance. The next day, I cried to the same music.”

That is a lesson that informs his ap-proach to music – and life – to this day. His Kelenia album, which came out on the Motema label in 2009, exudes pos-itive energies and a sense of abiding love that carried over to his charming child-oriented Wake Up Clarinet! release, which came out the following year and forms part of his “Timbalooloo” project for the junior crowd.

“It’s not always happiness that comes out of my music,” he observes. “There are all sorts of feelings in there. I’d call it the feelings of life. At the end of the day,

life is sometimes hard and sometimes joyful, and other things too.”

That certainly comes across in Et-kin’s music.

“The music can draw something out of my soul, whatever I’m feeling at the time,” he continues. “You can feel dif-ferent emotions in Charlie Parker’s mu-sic, and also in Jewish music.”

The latter is a given, and the eclectic range of sounds that infuse Etkin’s out-put takes in Jewish textures, as well the music of western Africa, Arabic mate-rial and the music of China, Indonesia and other cultures. It all flows through him seamlessly and naturally, part of which he attributes to extensive travel-ing, which allows him to not only hear different genres of music firsthand, but also hear them in their natural habitat, which gives him insight into the social and cultural subtexts.

BESIDES REACHING out to imbibe the sounds of societies around the world, Etkin is strongly connected with the grassroots of jazz.

He started playing piano at five, fol-lowing in the footsteps of an older sib-ling. While his brother eventually lost interest, his own curiosity about music only grew. A couple of years down the road, he tried his hand at the violin – al-though that didn’t last long. But at nine, he took up the saxophone, and then guitar. He is now proficient on all three instruments, although the saxophone, as well as the clarinet, are his principal means of artistic expression.

His jazzy interest sparked when, at the age of nine, he was offered a glimpse into two very different worlds and made his choice.

“My parents bought our first CD player, and they also bought two CDs, one by Mozart and one by Louis Arm-strong,” he relates, saying he opted for the infectious rhythms and irrepressible energies of the latter.

“Louis Armstrong really grabbed me, and between the ages of nine and 14 I bought every CD of his music I could find,” he continues. “I got into his mu-sic and [that of] all the musicians from New Orleans, and the jazz of the 1930s and ’40s.”

That newfound love was enhanced by trips he made to the southern US city to-gether with his parents.

“Being there really impacted on me powerfully. There was someone in New Orleans called Tuba Fats,” he says, re-ferring to Anthony Lacen, a legendary New Orleans tuba player who died in 2004 at the age of 53. “He heard me play and he invited me to play with him. He was a mentor to me.”

Etkin’s powerful attraction to Arm-strong’s music and his fortunate conflu-ence with Tuba Fats appear to be some-thing of a recurrent theme in his life and musical growth. He has always found a way to get to grips with new sounds from different cultures at the basement level, and has a highly physical, corporeal and sensorial attitude toward upping his mu-sical ante. This unfettered philosophy soon led him to head for the source.

After studying jazz, classical music and some Jewish music as a teenager, Etkin headed for the continent that spawned jazz.

“Africa came into my life when I was 19,” he explains. “It feels that this was an important part of my education, and it happened for me at an age when an experience like that impacts powerfully on your character.”

He discovered the intoxicating magic of the music of western Africa.

“I went to Mali when I was about 20 or 21,” he says. “I did a dance class at college. The teacher was also a drummer. It goes together. Someone told him I played mu-sic and he took me into his group.”

One thing led to another.“The teacher’s uncle was a kora [African

harp] player,” he continues, “so I played with him. And he had a relative who was a famous guitarist in Mali, so I went to stay with his family in Mali for a month,

MUSIC

Spreading it around, together

The feelings of life: Musician Oran Etkin. (John Abbott)

www.jpost.com | METRO 17

so I started playing on that scene.”A couple of years or so later, while he

was doing a master’s degree at the Man-hattan School of Music, his path crossed that of acclaimed klezmer clarinetist Da-vid Krakauer, who was a teacher there. Etkin duly immersed himself in the world of Jewish music.

“That was something I had always loved, but David really introduced to the music in a deep and meaningful way,” he relates.

OVER THE years, Etkin has encountered a wide range of cultural baggage, and the sounds that go with them. He stud-ied both western classical and Arabic music at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, traveled to the Czech Republic to play with Roma mu-sicians, and spent time in Indonesia get-ting a handle on the local sounds. All of this comes out in his jazz work, offering him numerous directions to explore in his improvisatory efforts.

For his forthcoming Eilat gig, Etkin will return to an earlier phase of the jazz time line and present his “What’s New?

Re-imagining Benny Goodman” proj-ect, which is centered on the captivat-ing sounds and rhythms of the seminal American swing clarinetist who ruled the roost on dance floors in the United States and Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

“The instrumentation of my band is a homage to Goodman’s lineup of the 1930s, with Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton,” he says referring to the celebrated pianist, drummer and vibraphonist of yesteryear, with Etkin playing clarinet.

“There’s no bass in the band,” he states. “Since then, I don’t know if there have been many lineups like that.”

There’s a more far-reaching message inherent in the original band personnel.

“It was the first jazz band that had black and white musicians playing to-gether,” Etkin remarks. “That happened during the Great Depression, when peo-ple were also being pushed away from each other. This was a band that brought people together.”

Amen to that.For tickets and more information: *9066,

www.eventim.co.il/ and redseajazz.co.il

GRAPEVINE

Also appearing at the festival: Gilad Ephrat Ensemble – taut strings and a definitive sound. )Adio Harel(

Nurit Galron )pictured( and the trio, in a wintery jazz-scented rendezvous. )Ehud Romano(

Yasmin Levy, a Ladino soul singer in the land of jazz. )Ali Taskiran(

Micro, mini to maxi• By GREER FAY CASHMAN

■ WITH CASTRO as the general trendsetter for Israeli fashion, it looks as if we are in for a retro spring/summer revival of Fifties, Sixties and Seventies styles, running the gamut from micro, mini to maxi, in soft, romantic fabrics, in gentle hues and prints, in mostly loose silhouettes, which include A-line and empire-line cuts and lots of frills, flounces and tiers.

The truth is that any young woman in her mid-teens to late twenties should raid the back of her grandmother’s wardrobe before she goes shopping. She may find a treasure or two that will complement some of the offerings in the collection launched by Castro co-directors Eti and Gabi Roter at their Bat Yam International Showroom which was redesigned to look like a giant swimming pool for the showing of what they call their Night Swimming spring collection.

Yes, there were a couple of swimwear items, but these were in fact a very minor part of the collection. The retro aspect of the menswear went further back in time than the womenswear, and one of strong features of male attire this spring and summer will be the short-legged suit, which will be great for men with nice legs but may spoil the sex appeal of men with knobbly knees.

The show, featuring 80 male and female models, was led by Castro’s cur-rent chief presenters – actress and fashion model Dar Zuzovsky and actor and fashion model Omer Dror.

Spotted in the crowd among those who came to see the latest efforts of Cas-tro’s creative team were singer Josie Katz, models Yael Goldman and Rotem Sela, who is married to Ariel Roter, who represents the fourth generation of the family in the fashion business, television personality Tom Baum, former Miss Israel Ravit Asaf, Cinema City co-owner Moshe Edery and his wife, Pni-na, Ofer Shopping Malls CEO Moshe Rosenblum, Gindi Investments CEO Manor Gindi and his wife, Bat El, and Azrieli Shopping Malls CEO Arnon Toren, among many other well-known faces on Israel’s society circuit.

■ TEL AVIV Museum is the venue this Friday at 1:30 p.m for the Israeli pre-miere of Tova Ascher’s award-winning film A.K.A. Nadia, before its release to cinemas around the country. In a nutshell, the plot is about an identity crisis – not the usual kind, but one that leads to many complications.

Nadia is a 20-year-old Arab woman involved in a secret romance with Nimer, who is a PLO activist. For a variety of reasons they relocate to England, where Nimer is apprehended by law-enforcement authorities, and Nadia is left to fend for herself.

She obtains an Israeli passport from a shady character and thus acquires the identity of a young Israeli woman called Maya. She returns to Israel and begins a new life, becoming a dancer and choreographer, getting married to a Jew and giving birth to their two children.

Fast-forward 20 years into her Israeli-Jewish identity, Maya is a successful choreographer. Her husband, Yoav, is an official at the Justice Ministry. All of a sudden, without warning, Nimer reappears in her life, and her past begins to catch up with her. Fearful of being found out, her personality begins to change, and with it her behavior. Yoav realizes that she is hiding something, but cannot even begin to guess what it is.

The film stars Neta Spiegelman, Oded Leopold and Ali Suliman, with John Hurt in one of his last film performances before his death last week. Ascher and some of the film’s cast will have a Q&A with the audience after the screening.

■ ANOTHER, SOMEWHAT older prizewinning film is Sweet Mud, presented by the Tel Aviv Arts Council in its Israeli Cinema series. The film, with He-brew dialogue and English subtitles, is a satirical drama set in a progressive kibbutz in the mid-’70s. Twleve-year-old Dvir Avni navigates between matur-ing, as he prepares for his bar mitzva, the values of equality learned at home, and his relationship with his unstable mother, who has been denounced as mentally ill by members of the kibbutz.

The film received four 2006 Ophir Awards from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television (Best Film, Best Music, Best Production Design, Best Sound) and six other nominations (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screen-play, Best Costume Design, Best Editing). It also won the World Cinema Jury Prize (Dramatic) at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was Israel’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

Following the screening at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Tuesday, Febru-ary 7, at 8:45 p.m., there will be a Q&A session with the film’s director and writer, Dror Shaul, who was born in 1971 on Kibbutz Kissufim, three kilo-meters from the Gaza border, and who currently lives in Tel Aviv. Much of his youth became the setting for this film and his other award-winning film, Mivtza Savta (1999).