For Piris Eliyahu, the music is blowing in the wind

“The wind inspires creativity as it blows across the desert.”

By BARRY DAVIS
Piris Eliyahu (photo credit: ZOHAR RON)
Piris Eliyahu
(photo credit: ZOHAR RON)
It is said that Mother Nature is probably the greatest composer of them all. Ever taken the time to listen to the rustling of the leaves, the waves incessantly ebbing and flowing, the birds chirping at sunrise, or sunset?
No one, not even the Beethovens or Stravinskys, the Duke Ellingtons or Ravi Shankars, can possibly compete with the unbridled natural scores that come straight from the elements; although it is a given, of course, that the aforementioned titans and their ilk all feed off nature’s sonic bounty.
Piris (Peretz) Eliyahu would probably go along with that premise. The Dagestan-born Israeli composer, educator and master of the long-necked tar string instrument native to the Middle East and Central Asia, says his latest album, Sharkiya, was inspired by the eponymous eastern wind. “My wife and I go off to the Judean Desert, every so often, and we spend time there, in the peace and quiet and the clean air,” he says. “There you have the sharkiya, which blows across. It sweeps everything before it. It has great power.”
It also blew the proverbial muse in Eliyahu’s direction. “The wind inspires creativity, as it blows across the desert,” he explains. It also put the composer in mind of bygone times. “When I was younger I used to go to the Caspian Sea. There you have really strong eastern winds in the winter. I think I started writing music – when I was 14 or 15 – because of those winds. There is nothing like it.”
At the time of writing, it was still hoped that Eliyahu and his band of qanun player Ariel Qassis, internationally acclaimed percussionist Rony Iwryn, together with the band leader’s equally lauded son, kamanche (spike violin) player, composer and producer Mark Eliyahu guesting, would all be taking the stage at Jerusalem’s Nocturno café and music venue this Saturday at 10 p.m. But on Wednesday, the show was officially postponed until September 3.
Just having a conversation with the senior Eliyahu feels like a powerful curative and regenerative experience. The boyish 59-year-old musician exudes a delightful sense of calm, and you feel somehow more in tune with the world around you and – in particular – with Mother Nature after just a minute or so of chatting.
Hence,  it comes as no surprise to hear that his new release was initially fueled by the great outdoors. “A lot of the music [for the new album] was ‘written’ in the desert,” he notes. In fact, Eliyahu did not sit in his tent pen in hand, or laptop to hand, jotting down charts for the new composition.
He says he imbibes the music in his head and then gets it down, in corporeal chart form, when he returns home to Abu Gosh. “The work has several sections which are connected with nature, and with my own feelings. This work, all my works, are very personal to me. I don’t feel they are concert works per se. Yes, they do become concert works but they start out as something personal, a personal diary, what I experience.”
The elements and the treasures of nature are front and center throughout the album. “The first section, for example, is called ‘Almond Blossom.’ Over the past few years I have seen so many blossoming almond trees here, in and around Abu Gosh. There aren’t any almond trees in the desert,” he laughs. “The second piece is called ‘Dancing Under the Moon.’ In the desert, I felt myself dancing under the moon. And the third part is the title track, ‘Sharkiyah.’” That, Eliyahu notes, can be something of a double-edged sword. “The eastern wind gives a lot of people headaches, and it blows everything around. My soul wrote a work inspired by the wind.”
That sends Eliyahu back, once more, to his youth. “I remember how the eastern wind at the Caspian Sea sparked musical sounds inside me.”
Like his fellow professionals, Eliyahu has not been able to perform publicly for around four months due to the novel coronavirus regulations. But you won’t hear any gripes from him. He is a singularly cheery character who always seems to find the positive side of any situation. “I always looked up to the sky and, after a day or two [of the lockdown] I saw the sky becoming clearer as the air became cleaner. After a week or two the sky was even clearer and, suddenly, after about a month and a half or two months the sky reminded me of what it was like when I was small. I think the air was even cleaner, maybe like it was 100 years ago. That is wonderful.”
Sharkiyah was recorded at a suitable location, a cave at the Samson Farm on Moshav Kfar Uriya. “It is a place that belongs to an old friend of mine. I have been playing and recording there for over 20 years. Normally, from there, you see the sea as a black strip. But when we made the record [in April] you could see it clearly and even the boats. The sky cleared up and my head cleared up, too.”
If nothing else, this crazy pandemic time has, at least, spawned this wonderful musical work which, hopefully, the ethnic music-loving Jerusalemites will be able to savor live before too long. It sounds like a definitively spiritually and emotionally enriching musical experience is in store.


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