The program, which runs through June 24, takes in a diverse sweep of offerings, including concerts with some of the biggest names across a range of disciplines, guided tours, fruit picking, communing with Mother Nature and, of course, plenty of enticing tasty tidbits of both the solid and liquid variety.
The showcase concert lineup kicked off on May 25 with a sunset slot starring religious singer-songwriter Ishay Ribo, followed this week by singer-songwriter Marina Maximilan, at the Tznobar Center near Katzrin Forest. A little further down the line, on June 10, the same venue will host a rich program of Golan Heights Day festivities, including activities for all the family, and shows by percussionist Ziv Eitan, and Elai Botner and his Yaldei Hachutz (Outside Children) band as the Golan Beer Festival gets going with blues rock outfit Full Trunk, and a varied program of entertaining and hands-on stuff to keep visitors of all ages interested and engaged. Tasty sustenance will also be available.
Anyone out there remember the halcyon days of around 15-20 years ago when Irish sounds, jigs, reels, ballads and all, seemed to rule the music scene here? Well, it’s been a while, far too long, but perhaps this weekend’s Irish Festival (June 3-4), taking place at the Tznobar Center as part of the Land of the Golan agenda, will kick start something of a local revival of Celtic sounds and rhythms with The Bloomers.
Indeed, other than for devotees of the Jacob’s Ladder Festival, and those who enjoy a jar of the black stuff (aka Guinness) with, possibly, French fries and vinegar at the Molly Bloom’s watering hole in Tel Aviv, the sounds of the Emerald Isle have been hard to come by since the early years of the millennium when the Irish Music Festival enjoyed a regular annual berth at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque.
It was that very pub that drew Bloomers’ guitarist Daniel Manor into the world of Irish music, that and an unsuccessful romantic interlude.
“We, the members of the band, first met at Molly Bloom’s in 2007,” Manor recalls. “It was at a jam session there. That’s why we’re called The Bloomers,” he adds with a laugh. Logical enough.
While Manor started out on his musical path at the tender age of nine, when his supportive parents sent him to the music conservatory in Jaffa, it took him quite a few years to get to active grips with Irish music.
“I went to Molly Bloom’s because of a bad first date,” he chuckles. It seems that he and his partner for the evening had not hit it off too well and, walking along Hayarkon Street, they popped into the bar, hoping that the cheerful ambiance inside might improve their socializing a mite.
“It was a Friday afternoon and there was a jam session going on at the pub, and I was instantly captivated by the music there,” says Manor. “You can’t ignore it.”
ACTUALLY, MANOR’S soon-to-be former date was perfectly capable of ignoring it.
“She said she wanted to go after about five minutes, and I told her I wanted to stay. That was the end of the bad date,” Manor adds with a smile. They do say, somewhat paraphrased, that one girl’s loss is another guy’s gain, and the two went their separate ways. Manor was well and truly hooked on Irish music, and the rest is ongoing history.
In fact, the guitarist-bouzouki player-vocalist was introduced to the charms of Irish music much further away from its home base.
“I was exposed to Irish music for the first time when I was in Australia a few years earlier,” he explains. “I heard someone playing it on a flute. But I didn’t really know what I was. That time at Molly Bloom’s was the first time I encountered it in Israel.”
It was a musical fait accompli, although it took a few more years before Manor came across fellow Bloomers, Uilleann pipes and flutist Philip Khripkov and fiddler-vocalist Uri Schleifer. Today, Rotem Reich plays flute and keyboards with the group.
After that fateful Friday afternoon jaunt at the Tel Aviv bar, Manor got on with his life, and continued polishing his guitar playing skills while immersing himself in the Irish idiom. Things got a lot more serious in 2010, when Manor moved to Dublin and spent a couple of years accruing invaluable hands-on experience where it really mattered, with people who had the music coursing through their veins and genes. Manor put his heart and soul into honing his art.
“I had a daytime job,” he recalls. “But I’d clock off at 5 p.m., and I was in some pub by six o’clock, and played there until midnight. I did that six evenings a week.”
He returned to these shores far more adept at the art form than when he’d left so, by the time he met up with Khripkov and Schleifer for a proper musical tête-à-tête, he was ready to do musical battle with the best of them.
“It was at Jacob’s Ladder in 2012, you know, where they have all those spontaneous musical gatherings.” Indeed, for many Jacob’s Ladder stalwarts, the impromptu confluences in the hotel lobby at the festival’s former Nof Ginosar Kinneret lakeside base was where the real action was.
“The jams were over but I knew Philip Khripkov and Uri were due to arrive so I waited for them,” Manor says. “They eventually turned up at 1 a.m.”
It was well worth the wait.
“We started playing and there was this electricity between us. It was great.”
Unbeknownst to the threesome, a festival patron had caught some of their free-flowing vibes and later asked them to play a show in Rishon Lezion a few weeks later.
“Suddenly we had a real gig,” says Manor, adding that he was put on the spot. “The woman asked us what we were called. Of course we didn’t have a name back then, but I just pulled out The Bloomers, because of where the three of us first met.”
Since then the band has been playing and recording traditional and original material all over the country, with Manor doing a pretty good job of a convincing Irish accent with his vocals. He says the band’s end product is greater than the sum of their individual variegated stylistic baggage, which takes in Scottish textures and blues seasoning.
This week’s Land of Golan Festival Irish bill also features Single Barrel with celebrated American-born fiddler Jonathan Miller, and the Irelandia trio.
For more information, go to tourgolan.org.il/festival.