From the flames

Israel Portnoy recovers from last year’s devastating fire in Mevo Modi’im with the help of his music.

MAY 26, 2020 08:41

ISRAEL PORTNOY: If you don’t have some major tragedy then things won’t really be real. (photo credit: BASTI HANSEN) — ISRAEL PORTNOY: If you don’t have some major tragedy then things won’t really be real.

(photo credit: BASTI HANSEN)

To be able to create, to delve into your innermost thoughts and feelings and to come out with some worthwhile expression of your unique self, you need to be driven or patently fired up. Israel Portnoy certainly has the latter element to his personal, corporeal and artistic makeup.

The 29-year-old-British-born singer-guitarist has been enjoying a decent musical career, alongside younger brother keyboardist-vocalist Mendy, as the Portnoy Brothers for some time now. The sibling-led act has become one of the mainstays of the English-language indie folk-rock leaning and Jewish music scene here, and have put out a couple of albums in the last four years, with Portnoy getting his fair share of solo “moonlighting” in too.

Since he made aliyah, at the age of 16, Portnoy has furthered his craft and made a name for himself as a more than capable blues-oriented musician, and for his soulful delivery of a wide range of colors and textures.

Around a year ago he achieved substantial media coverage, but for the wrong reasons. The house he was renting at the time, in Mevo Modi’im, was completely decimated, along with around 80% of the village, when a fire broke out in the nearby forest.

It was a shock to the physical and emotional system, and Portnoy lost practically everything he had on terra firma – his lovingly amassed collection of guitars, personal memorabilia and songs he had penned over the years, not to mention his clothes, ID, wallet, you name it. However, besides the clothes on his back, he was left with one single material possession and a highly prized one at that: his beloved 12-string Guild guitar. It was the only instrumental survivor of the blaze but it helped keep Portnoy emotionally afloat in the aftermath of the inferno, and also underpins his latest album, Facing Flames. Last week, he released the title track as a single, with the rest of the record to follow within the next few weeks.

“The record is a concept album based on this vintage 1963 Guild guitar which I literally left the house holding just because – at the time when they evacuated us – that was before we realized we could lose all our houses,” Portnoy recalls. “We thought it was just a fire in the nearby forest and we needed to get to the entrance of the village quickly – I was playing the guitar, and I instinctively took it with me.”

He thought he was well-equipped to see out the interruption to his back porch music making, and was set to enjoy an impromptu jam session with some of his musically-minded neighbors, while the firefighters went about their work.

Sadly, it soon turned out to be a matter of getting away as far as possible and as damned quickly as possible, rather than hanging around and sharing some musical vibes on his precious Guilda with his like-minded neighbors while the flames died down.

The fire could have knocked Portnoy and his musical career for a loop – it did take him a while to get his hands back on the Guilda’s strings – but he appears to have come out of the flames that engulfed his material life. He seems more emotionally robust and determined to maintain his creative continuum. In fact, he feels the daunting experience has provided him with more personal collateral to fuel his music making as well as enabling him to communicate with the world around him on a more subliminal and all-embracing level. He surmised, there must be others who have been through similar challenges, some very close to home.

“I was renting, but there were people in the village who lost the homes they built with their own hands.”

PORTNOY SAYS the experience has also left him with more to relate and to sing about. That stands to reason. Ultimately, artists can only feed off their own life episodes which subsequently inform their creative output. “I’m a white Jewish boy and I love the blues. A friend of mine actually said to me, soon after it happened, you’re whole life you’ve been a writer, and you wanted to be prolific and change the world. But, at the end of the day, you’re a privileged white Ashkenazi boy from England, who had loving parents and food on the table. If you don’t have some major tragedy then things won’t really be real. He said it sort of jokingly but it was such a beautiful thing to hear.” Many a true word is spoken in jest.

The fire and loss of his worldly possessions are woven onto the fabric of Facing Flames, as a sensorial subtext but also on the actual upfront lyrical and musical content. As many an aesthete will tell you, regardless of religious, ethnic or sociocultural stripe, offloading the tangible can free up space for the spiritual. “There was so much truth in what my friend said jokingly,” Portnoy notes.

He spells that out in “Backporch Blues” which he performs in a video clip shot among the ashes of his former home, which features on the new release. “I know that I’m not alone,” he intones. “Someone else is blue, it’s not just me or you, and it’s comforting to know. It’s the plain and simple truth. I’m just human too.” There’s a simple, undeniable ethos to be had there which, perhaps in this coronavirus time of ours, is felt even more keenly across the globe.

Portnoy hit his musical road, on piano, at the age of five. The son of a rabbi-cantor, who was considered a cantorial wunderkind at the age of 18, Portnoy was, perhaps, destined to become a musician. He also does an annual turn as a cantor, in Los Angeles on the High Holidays, and says he sees a natural bond between cantorial artfulness and the blues. “In a good hazan (cantor), like Naftali Hershtik, you hear lots of modal interchanges going on, switching very fluidly between major and minor. Blues, essentially, is that massive space of tension between the minor third and major third [intervals]. That is blues.”

He transitioned from keys to strings when he realized that Mendy, two years his junior – Portnoy has 8 siblings all told – was already a dab hand on the guitar. “Yeah, it was a little bit competitive,” he laughs. He says he first “pilfered” lyrics from biblical verses but eventually got around to putting his own words to his own charts.

Coming from an orthodox family – he spent time in yeshiva after making aliyah, he says, though playing his guitar rather than studying the Talmud – it is, perhaps, not surprising that Portnoy equates music and especially the vocal side of his craft with spiritual rather than cerebral endeavor. “I’ve studied voice over the years with teachers, particularly in my cantorial days. The one common denominator is that you’ve basically got to get out of your head. If you are out of your head intellectually and you’re breathing, you are connected to life, which is breath. Then you will inevitably be singing correctly.” Divine demeanor is close to mellifluous musicianship. “The most beautiful sound comes when the artist just completely lets go, and lets that godliness flow through him into the surroundings, whether that is on a concert stage or in front of a computer.”

Portnoy had originally intended to release the new album on the first anniversary of the fire, May 23, but for now, at least, all corona-related circumstances being equal, he is making do with putting out the first single. The hope, naturally, is to get back to performing his music live before too long. ”Otherwise I’ll probably do some online gigs,” he says. “It is no way comparable, but it’s better than nothing.

Considering what Portnoy has been through, that’s definitely something.

To watch the brand new single: https://youtu.be/6cWGv0-jpjs