Tel Aviv Rooftop

Omer Avital Been especially busy and ignoring my blog commitments but not my commitment to listening to some live music from time to time. As luck would have it Thirld World Love were playing on Thursday night at Levontin 7 , a funky , fringey performance place and bar in the now trendy Gan Ha- chashmal (Electric Garden) area. Thirld World Love are bassist Omer Avital , trumpeter Avishai Cohen , pianist Avishai Cohen and drummer/percussionist Daniel Freedman. The first three are Israelis who live or lived in New York while Daniel is a New Yorker who got sucked into the Israeli Jazz milieu there. All are virtuoso jazz players. Omer can make the double bass sing (and played a long solo in which he made it sing like an oud ), Avishai's lyrical trumpet is as clear as a bell, Daniel is a wonderfully talented and knowledgeable percussionist and Yonatan is a quirky , brilliant pianist. As TWL their music is often based on African and Middle Eastern rhythms that get the ...

Apologies to all my reader. I deserted the rooftop for a week or so in favour of greyer climes and richer food. But there too (in Europe) as well as in Washington, Moscow, New York, Jerusalem, Ramallah , Gaza and the settlements of the West Bank, all the players are jostling for the most convenient positions in the run-up to the Annapolis peace conference that may or may not be held on November 26. The official music coming out of both Washington and Brussels is that 'failure is not an option" . When asked if there was contingency plan if the talks didn't work out, State Department spokesman McCormack said "Plan B is to make Plan A work..." This sort of rhetoric might be good for western team building and perhaps also for motivating the parties to make real progress but taking a look around the arena from the vantage point of the (still hot) rooftop, the obstacles seem formidable. Here are a few scenarios for illustration: Annapolis will turn out to be nothin...

Officially, the rooftop misses the original border of Neve Tzedek by about 20 paces but according to other definitions we are well inside. Whatever our precise relationship, it's our neighbourhood; pretty, leafy, old, charming, quaint, constantly changing and now hopping with activity. Neve Tzedek established in 1887 , the result of the first attempt by Jews to break out of the confines of Yaffo , (see link above for history) is celebrating its 120 th birthday, and its streets are filled with people seeking the exhibitions, open houses tours and concerts. The original narrow terraced houses painted in shades of ochre were soon joined by grander residences and also by new adjacent neighbourhoods. In 1909 Ahuzat Bayit (later renamed Tel Aviv ) was established on the adjoining sand dunes, Neve Tzedek gradually fell into disrepair and by the 1960s was considered a slum. Now, after a hundred years of Tel Aviv's expansion and development, Neve Tzedek (in its tastefu...