Music: Dese’s ID

The 28-year-old singer’s parents made aliya from Ethiopia in the early 1980s, as part of Operation Moses.

By BARRY DAVIS
Singer Aveva Dese (photo credit: HAREL DAHARI)
Singer Aveva Dese
(photo credit: HAREL DAHARI)
Some of us move to this country looking for a new life, and are keen to learn the language and segue into the Israeli mind-set.
Others may initially try, albeit half-heartedly, find it doesn’t really work and revert to type, sticking with “our own kind” forevermore.
Then you get the second generation, who may be born here or move here as little ones, who grow up speaking Hebrew as their mother tongue, and who manage to balance their natural- born Israeliness with their parents’ imported cultural baggage.
But there are those who are so keen to be accepted as “real Israelis” that they thoroughly repudiate anything they consider to be foreign to these parts , which can sometimes even cause familial rifts. And there are still others who feel a little estranged whichever way they turn, and find purpose and direction in a third culture.
You might say that Aveva Dese pertains to the latter category.
The 28-year-old singer’s parents made aliya from Ethiopia in the early 1980s, as part of Operation Moses, which brought around 8,000 Jews to Israel. She grew up with something of a mixed cultural identity.
“My parents spoke Amharic between them, and to us. But I’d answer in Hebrew,” she recalls of her childhood in Upper Nazareth.
But it wasn’t the sounds of her parents’ country of birth that first fired young Dese’s musical imagination.
“At home I listened to soul music,” she says. That comes over loud and clear in the vocalist’s debut album Who Am I, as it will in her forthcoming show at Confederation House on Monday (7 p.m.). The concert is part of the lineup of the seventh annual Hullegeb Festival, devoted to Ethiopian-Israeli culture, which was founded by the aforementioned Jerusalem institution and its long-serving director Effi Bnaya.
“I am drawn to soul music in my own work,” Dese continues. “I loved people like Aretha Franklin, Etta James and I really like Whitney Houston. It was hard for me when she died [in 2012 at the age of 48]. I also liked [American singer-songwriter and rapper] Lauryn Hill and all sorts of newer artists.”
The original soul acts of the 1950s and 1960s, like the stars out of the Motown Records stable, such as Diana Ross, the Four Tops and Stevie Wonder, also appear on the Dese radar screen occasionally, but she says she’s always on the lookout for something to pique her creative interest. “I want to keep my musical compass constantly refreshed and sharp.”
“I Wanna Go,” which opens Dese’s six-track album, sounds like it comes straight out New York or, maybe, Detroit. All of Dese’s lyrics are English, and her diction and delivery are faultless. She feels, breathes and imbibes black American pop music, and reading the lyrics, you’d never guess the writer is not a born English speaker.
Dese’s interest in the sounds she heard over the airwaves a decade and a half or so ago as a teenager was, in fact, the result of a sibling spark.
“I got to know about soul music because of my big sister, who is about 11 years older than me,” Dese explains. “She was at boarding school at the time. She’d record video tapes for me and we’d sing the stuff together at home. She also made audio cassettes for me. We’d have a great time with the music.”
The Dese family’s initial cultural origins were also there, somewhere in the youngster’s burgeoning musical consciousness, but had more of a peripheral position.
“My parents listened to Ethiopian music at home, so it was there in the house,” says Dese, “but it wasn’t really important to me. I wouldn’t, say, take a cassette of music in Amharic and put it in the tape recorder. It didn’t really interest me.”
Fast forward to 2016, and Dese says she is beginning to dig into her familial cultural roots.
“Today I am very interested in Ethiopian music,” she states. That comes across on Who Am I, the musician guest list of which includes Solomon Kahati, who plays masenko, a single-stringed Ethiopian spike violin played with a bow that also has only one string, on the title track. Kahati will also be on duty at the Dese gig and will star in the Adyabo Ensemble show, which follows Dese at Confederation House on Monday, alongside the other members of the trio, krar player Yaakov Lilai, who also plays on Who Am I, and Ilan Maharat, who plays washint, a wooden flute native to Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Interestingly, Dese also got into English through her love of soul music, so much so that it soon became second nature to her and she was quickly able to put together lyrics in her eagerly adopted new language. That is pretty impressive, considering you really have to get a handle on a learned tongue in order work your creative magic with it. There’s also the matter of a language’s inherent rhythm and textures. Dese says her segue into English was seamless.
“Because I listened to soul music I really bonded strongly with English, and with its musicality.” It actually felt more natural to her than producing texts in her mother tongue. “Hebrew is very rigid and so difficult for writing lyrics. At least, that’s how I feel, although I have written and performed material in Hebrew. I find it less comfortable for me. I don’t completely rule out doing stuff in Hebrew sometime in the future, but right now, I am really keen to do my stuff in English, and also in Amharic on things that suit me.”
Dese first got the notion that she might actually take singing seriously when she worked as a kindergarten teacher on a kibbutz in the Galilee. She had come through a tough period, when she was in a traffic accident and her father died, and finally found herself in an island of tranquility and with time on her hands, time to consider her future.
“I realized that music was what I really wanted to do with my life,” she says. She found an efficient way of getting herself out there too.
“I had a friend who worked on [TV reality music show] The Voice. She knew I sang and kept on pestering me about applying for the show.” The pressure eventually did the trick and Dese did all right, getting through the preliminary round and enjoying a coaching stint with megastar Mizrahi-style singer Sarit Haddad.
“I didn’t get too far on the show but I got a lot out of it,” Dese says. “I’d performed on a really big stage. I got a lot of confidence from that.”
Naturally, singing in English can also help to pave an artist’s way into the great offshore global beyond, and to aim for audiences around the world.
“That is also a wonderful thing, because my aim is touch people, to convey some message, to tell my story. It doesn’t matter to me who the person listening to me is. If I can make someone feel happy, and shift something inside them, whether that is in Germany, Ethiopia or Israel, that’s even better for me.”
Dese has “previous” experience abroad, albeit as a member of a youth choir, when she was in 11th grade, when the choir spent three months touring the US. She is now older, wiser and more experienced, and a few days after her Hullegeb spot, she and her group will head to France for several shows. The title of Dese’s debut recording may imply an identity quandary, but she appears to have a pretty good idea of where she’s heading.
For tickets and more information about this year’s Hullegeb Festival: (02) 623-7000, (02) 624-5206 ext. 4 and tickets.bimot.co.il


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