Rubin’s return

A veteran jazz artist makes his festival comeback in Eilat

By BARRY DAVIS
Harold Rubin (photo credit: Rinat Aldema)
Harold Rubin
(photo credit: Rinat Aldema)
Harold Rubin has been on and around the local jazz scene for quite some time, although it is unlikely that you would have caught him at the country’s larger auditoriums too often.
The 80-year-old South African-born Renaissance-man jazz clarinetist, painter, poet, and retired architect and design teacher has been spinning his free-flowing musical tales at intimate venues such as Hagada Hasmalit and Levontin 7 in Tel Aviv and Barbur in Jerusalem for three decades alongside like-minded musicians who prefer to seek their truths on the more improvisational side of the jazz tracks.
“I wanted to play original music,” says Rubin, by way of explaining his break from mainstream – largely swing – jazz to avant garde.
One of Rubin’s vehicles for his exploratory endeavors was the Zaviyot group, which he formed in 1985 along with British-born bass player Mark Smulian and Americans, drummer Reuben Hoch and, later, guitarist Tommy Belman. On August 2, the last day of Eilat’s Red Sea Jazz Festival, this country’s preeminent jazz event, Zaviyot will play with young New Zealand-based Israeli guitarist Arli Liberman replacing Belman. In a sense it is a vindication of Rubin’s unstinting efforts to forge his own path through the less orthodox musical realms.
In fact, Rubin started out as a straitlaced music student on the classical clarinet at the age of 16, taking lessons with a Russian teacher named Louis Nicholaeff. However, although Nicholaeff offered Rubin a link to a glorious Russian epoch – Nicholaeff himself had studied composition and theory at the Leningrad Conservatory with Rimsky-Korsakov – Rubin soon found classical music too constricting and opted for jazz.
“Louis was terribly disappointed,” he recalls.
“He thought I was talented and really wanted me to develop as a classical musician.”
But it was not to be, and Rubin hooked up with more experienced members of the improvisational music gang with the Jewish British pianist Dave Lee, and soon formed his own quartet and began writing his own music. The clarinet player’s original entry into the world of jazz was via the joyous dance-based rhythms of the swing genre but, true to his left-field view of music, and life, Rubin leapfrogged bebop jazz – the initial phase of the so-called “modern jazz” era – and went straight from swing into the more rarefied and ethereal domain of free jazz.
“Bebop never really interested me,” he says. “I really enjoyed listening to [bebop founder saxophonist] Charlie Parker and [trumpeter] Dizzy Gillespie and [pianist] Thelonious Monk, and I took things from them, but I never really wanted to play bebop.”
Rubin was also attracted by the work of black jazz artists in South Africa, such as saxophonist Kippy Moeketsi and trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, although he had to navigate some challenging logistics to join to them. On Sundays he would take his band and they’d sneak into the Odin Cinema in the black township of Sophiatown to play with Moeketsi, Gwangwa and others. But musical fraternizing between whites and blacks was frowned upon by the apartheid regime of the time, and Rubin and his band sometimes had to take evasive action.
“The cinema was on a corner and there were a couple of boys outside on lookout, and if the police were in the neighborhood the boys would come in whistling,” he recalls. “Then we’d hide under the stage.” But Rubin did eventually fall afoul of the authorities in 1963, when a painting of Jesus he had entered in a group exhibition was deemed to be blasphemous. A trial ensued and, although Rubin was eventually exonerated, he realized it was time to get away from the suffocating life under the South African regime.
He made aliya and soon found a job with a prestigious architecture firm in Tel Aviv, but his musical work suffered.
“Everyone here was playing bebop,” says Rubin, “so I didn’t really have anyone to play with.”
For a while, he did his best to find some common ground with the members of the local scene, but it didn’t last long.
“I played with [veteran jazz drummer] Areleh Kaminsky and he said I played swing rhythm and that it was hard to play with someone who did swing,” he says.
Frustration soon got the better of him, and Rubin left his instrument in its case for almost all of the next 12 years, sticking to his daytime job as an architect while keeping up with his painting. In the early ’80s, something of an improvisational music scene began to emerge here, and Rubin teamed up with pianistelectronic music pioneer Yossi Mar-Haim before his path crossed that of Smulian and the rest of the Zaviyot band.
The group soon found a stage – albeit a small one – for its envelope-pushing efforts.
“We got a gig at a café on Arlosoroff Street for five months,” says Rubin. While they didn’t exactly pack ‘em in in the thousands, it was certainly a lively and colorful scene.
“We got all sorts of people, of all ages, coming to listen to us,” he recalls. “I remember prostitutes used to come by later on in the night, not to work but to hear the music. We had a lot of fun there.”
The word got around that there was a band doing some unprecedented creative things in Tel Aviv, and Zaviyot landed a berth at the inaugural Red Sea Jazz Festival in 1987. It was around that time that the group put out its eponymous record, which was followed by a fruitful synergy between them and German pianist Christoph Spendel and American-Israeli drummer Jerry Garval called Tel Aviv Connection, which also spawned a recording. Rubin and company were on a roll. They performed at the next two jazz bashes in Eilat in 1988 and 1989, and toured Germany extensively for a couple of years. There was also an exciting project between Zaviyot and top New York avant-garde saxophonist Dave Liebman, which produced the Unexpected album in 1988.
They say that if you hang around long enough you eventually come back into fashion. With Rubin, it is more a matter of having arrived at an artistic epiphany way ahead of the then-developing straight-and-narrow Israeli jazz community.
However, these days he finds plenty of people to play with, such as saxophonist Asif Tsahar, who spent a decade and a half at the forefront of the New York free jazz scene before returning to Israel to help establish the Levontin 7 music venue in Tel Aviv where Rubin performs periodically. There are also bass clarinetist Yoni Silver, pianist and Levontin 7 co-owner Daniel Sarid, guitarist-banjo player Ido Bukelman and Jerusalemite bassist-record producer Jean-Claude Jones.
The latter confluence also led to a string of excellent improvisational recordings on Jones’s Kadima Collective record label, which featured such frontier benders as Silver, Jones on bass, violinist Daniel Hoffman, pianist Maya Dunietz and saxophonists Steve Horenstein and Albert Beger. Rubin is also a long-serving member of the Tel Aviv Art Ensemble.
Rubin has never been one for putting himself out there, instead allowing his art to do his talking. He says he never expected to play in Eilat again.
“I was very surprised when I was asked back with Zaviyot,” he says. So, presumably, this is an opportunity to introduce a new generation to the band’s work.
“I don’t know about that,” says Rubin. “We have been given a longer slot by the festival, I think an hour and a half, and I just hope the audience likes what it hears. The other day someone told me I’m on YouTube, and I found all sorts of bits and pieces from gigs I didn’t even remember doing. It’s nice to know there’s some stuff out there.”
Zaviyot will perform at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat on August 2 at 8 p.m. For more information: www.redseajazzeilat.com