I am from there: Unpolished songs for a raw nation

The post on Yehudit Ravitz’s official Facebook page a few days ago was simple. It went:

I am excited to share with you my new album, Ani Mi-Sham (I Am from There). Thanks to my fellow travelers on this journey: Izhar and Ilai Ashdot who played on and produced the record, and to all the lovely musicians who joined us.

There is a restraint to the post that is surprising, because for more than 45 years Yehudit Ravitz has been one of our most beloved singers, and then eight years ago, with no announcement, she stopped singing. She stopped making records. She stopped performing. Instead, she took up painting, and she has been raising her daughter, and who knows what else. And people missed her because for most of the lives of most of us, she has been a singer almost everyone admired and many people revered, for the songs she wrote and for how beautifully – no, for how perfectly — she sang them.

I know that for me, pretty much for as long as I’ve been listening to music from Israel, starting back when I was a kid in Silver Spring imagining a different life in a different place where I’d be different, Yehudit Ravitz stood out because her voice was flawless. It was shiny-hard like a crystal or a diamond or a highly buffed-and-polished stone. When Susan and I moved in together on Kibbutz Keturah and we put our record collections together, she had all the records Yehudit Ravitz had made till then because, Susan said, Yehudit Ravitz’s voice cuts right through me. Like diamond cuts glass.

Maybe you, too, will hear what I am talking about – about how Yehudit Ravitz’s voice is a polished stone – in this song that she sang in the 1977 Hebrew Song Festival, when she was 21, just out of the army:

And maybe you’ll hear it, too, in the songs she sang a year later on that famous kids’ record of the poems of Yonatan Geffen set to music — Hakeves ha-Shisha Asar (The Sixteenth Lamb), like this one:

And maybe you hear it most, like I do, when Yehudit Ravitz sang old Hebrew folk songs like Ein Gedi.

Yehudit Ravitz’s first record album, in 1979, the first one, anyway, where her name was on the cover, was called, Be-Ofen Kavua ve-Had Pa’ami (“All the Time and Just This Once”). This was the name of a concert she had been doing with the great mostly-jazz pianist and composer Yoni Rechter, who’d become famous playing for the most famous band Israel’s ever had, Kaveret (“Beehive,” though you might remember them as “Poogy,” a nickname that came from their first record, which was called, “Poogy’s Tales”).

After their show was a hit, Yehudit Ravitz and Yoni Rechter booked the historic Tritone studio in Tel Aviv, where they played straight through their show, taping it. The record is their live performance, just done for a sound engineer instead of an audience, and it is beautiful. It opens with a not-quite-a-song called, “Opening Melody,” because it is just a melody, it has no words:

Yehudit Ravitz’s new record, Ani Mi-Sham, I Am from There, is a collection of mostly new recordings of old songs, some very familiar, some not-so-much, and there are some new songs, too. Yehudit Ravitz said on the radio that she made the record

because of the war, which is one hell of a gash for all of us. And [the title] “I Am from There,” it means, my heart is there. At that “there” – what happened to us, what happened to people. In the south. In general. This war bound me very strongly to my Israeliness, to my Jewishness, to my identity. It was a painful sobering-up, what happened to us. You understand that you can take nothing for granted. And, yes, I want to be an Israeli. I am happy I am an Israeli and a Jew, I am happy for all of those things. The “there,” it is here.

And Yehudit Ravitz’s new record, “I Am from There,” opens, like Ravitz’s first record did 45 years ago, with “Opening Melody.” It is the same tune she sang in 1979, but it is also so very different:

What’s different about the melody now is that it is not perfect. It is not diamond, it is not crystal, it is not a perfectly polished stone.

Yehudit Ravitz said:

One of the reasons I stopped performing was because I felt I was singing like a magician. That I already know where and what and how to manipulate my voice and all that. Here, on this record, I sound as if I was flayed. Without any pretense. You need to be a little thin, impoverished, in order to get back to being real.

I have admired Yehudit Ravitz for decades, and I have been enthralled by her virtuosity for decades. That voice, the voice of a 21-one year-old and 22-year-old Yehudit Ravitz on the records in Susan’s collection, it had something of God or the gods to it. It was perfect. When the new record came out, Yehudit Ravitz turned 68. And it is the 68-year-old Yehudit Ravitz, the flayed Yehudit Ravitz, the thin and impoverished Yehudit Ravitz, the Yehudit Ravitz who has no use for magic, who is tired of appearances, who wants only to be real – it is that Yehudit Ravitz who moves me the most.

And I see what she means when she says how this version, where the notes are not perfect, where they are rough and they tumble one after the other like they’re caught in a storm, it somehow comes from the war.

It is early, too early, way too early, to do any real reckoning of this war, though lately, I cannot keep myself from trying. But already I know that, when the hostages are all safe at home, when the dead are buried, when the guns are silent and the planes are at rest on the tarmac, and when, in Gaza and in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns around Gaza and up near Lebanon, stones are once-again being laid on stones, and concrete is once-again being churned and poured, and schools and hospitals and theaters and museums and apartment blocks rise again from the rubble, we will all of us find ourselves thinner, poorer, painfully sober, and more aware than ever of how we can take nothing of what we have for granted – and of how much we have.

There is a meme you see everywhere these days that goes, We will dance again, but the fact is, we never really stopped. The old songs, and new ones, we’re singing them. They are not the same. They are not perfect, polished stones.

But they are real. And they are beautiful.