Stepping out

Singer Maya Menachem wistfully admits that she’ll ‘never be Dylan or [Leonard] Cohen or Joni Mitchell’, but she believes in perseverance and is now boldly striking out on her own

By BARRY DAVIS
MAYA MENACHEM521 (photo credit: Courtesy: Yanai Menachem)
MAYA MENACHEM521
(photo credit: Courtesy: Yanai Menachem)
Maya Johanna Menachem may not have been around when the folk revival movement was in full swing back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but she has sure grabbed the spirit with both hands, and all of her silky vocal chords.
The 28-year-old Menachem has become something of a regular on the Anglo music scene in recent years. She has performed several times at the Jacob’s Ladder Festival – winter and spring editions alike – and usually sings in tandem with the veteran folkie guitarist- harmonica player and Jacob’s Ladder perennial, Shay Tochner.
While Tochner has been a mainstay of Menachem’s early musical development, she has begun to strike out on her own too, and last Saturday evening she performed at the Levontin 7 club in Tel Aviv, alongside guitarist-vocalist Arnon Naor (aka Sun Tailor) with a program based on Menachem’s original material. The show was titled “Shallow Waters,” which also happens to be the name of the new single off Menachem’s impending debut album.
Tochner has been instrumental in guiding Menachem through the intricacies of folk endeavor, but the bond between them goes much deeper than just the music. “Shay’s ex-wife and my mother grew up together in Cleveland, and they both came to Israel to learn Hebrew and work, and they both met handsome Israelis and got married. But my mom passed away when I was sixyears- old, and Shay got divorced and we lost touch.”
But the global village eventually came to the rescue. “Shay’s ex-wife found me a few years ago on Facebook,” Menachem recalls. “We got chatting and she told me about Shay and that he was looking for a singer, and that’s how the connection was made. I believe it’s all from above.”
IN FACT, Menachem was born in Israel, on Kibbutz Givat Oz in the Jezreel Valley, but eagerly fed off her mother’s musical background. She spoke English at home and after her mother died, Menachem maintained her links with Anglo-American culture through her mother’s sister and parents – but folk music was not part of her upbringing.
“I listened to the pop music of the ’80s and ’90s, but Shay got me into the stuff from the ’60s and ’70s,” explains Menachem.
“He’d say, go listen to this or that, and eventually I started researching it myself and getting into the music of that era. It was fantastic to discover all those songs. Nobody writes that way anymore.”
Menachem also formally honed her musical skills at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon for several years, and extended her genre spread across the jazz, rock and pop music domains. In recent years, the Jacob’s Ladder Festival faithful have become used to hearing Menachem perform “their” music, and do so in pretty convincing style.
For Menachem, the fact that she grew up on a small kibbutz in the north of Israel, rather than, say, hanging out in Greenwich Village in the late ’50s, when the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were doing their thing, is not a problem. “I try to take what those guys did into my own original music,” she says. “I try to take all these things I have been doing with Shay, and all the things from the folk genre, and use them in my songs. Obviously, I’ll never be Dylan or [Leonard] Cohen or Joni Mitchell, which is many times very frustrating, but I dabble with it and I think that’s a big part of why I do music.”
With several years of “apprenticeship” with Tochner behind her, in addition to all that delving into the folk treasure chest, Menachem felt it was time to do her own thing. A virtual confluence with someone who shares her love of the folk icons’ offerings led to her current project.
“I saw Arnon Naor doing a Dylan song – You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome – on You Tube, and I really loved it and the arrangement,” she says. “So I started looking at the other things he’s done and I discovered he is an amazing singer-songwriter. He actually started working and writing in London, when he was there a few years ago, and he moved back to Israel and he recorded his first album, and he has been performing all over since then.”
Suitably impressed with that Dylan reading, Menachem met up with Naor and asked if he’d be interested in working on her music with her, and the two set off on their merry musical path.
“We have been working together for a year now,” continues Menachem. “We have gathered a small group of musicians to work on this material, and it is very exciting and frightening, too.”
This is a giant step for Menachem, out of Tochner’s sizable and protective shadow. “Yes, this is me putting myself out there for everyone to hear and see.
I have been writing music since I was a teenager, and every once in a while, I’d do something at school or with my friends – maybe a song I wrote – but this is the first time I am really saying, this is what I am going to do, to do my own thing.”
To borrow from the name of a Dylan record from the ’70s, Menachem’s debut solo venture has been “a slow train coming” and, as she puts it, it is still very much a work in progress. “I found that, for so many years, I was just waiting for the right people and the right time, and you end up just waiting forever. But whatever it is that I am doing now, I know this is not the final thing, and is not perfect in any way. But deciding to go for it, and to see how it all works out, is all part of looking for success and part of growing up.”
Menachem is evidently made of sterner stuff and is not afraid of getting bruised along the way. “Getting to success, I think, also involves moving from one failure to the next. I want to grow from every little thing I do and, hopefully, years from now I’ll look back and say, hey I started from somewhere and look where I am now.”
Even though, as she says, she has taken on a plethora of American folk music material, Menachem says she is not sold on limiting herself to any particular musical approach. She is even contemplating writing lyrics in her native Hebrew.
“I don’t think I am committed to anything. That’s what’s nice about being an artist and having a job in which you can basically decided that you can do whatever you want. There’s a lot of freedom if you just allow yourself to be free.”
Sounds like a good approach to life in general. ■