The song that became a symbol: Nir Yahav on "Mehari Na" (from: "Soon", 1996)
Ehud Banai broke out at a relatively late age.
His first album was released when he was 34 years old - an old man in terms of the music industry in Israel.
In many interviews he said that until the age of 30 or so he made a living from odd jobs, and among other things he was a construction worker and a stage worker.
He wrote his poem "Hurry Na" which came out a decade later, exactly about that period - just before the bad luck left him and success entered his life.
The story of the song is so beautiful, that it is hard to believe that it is based on the real life of Banai.
He tells there how he returned to live in his parents' house so that they would take care of him for his illness.
A builder, unemployed from work and love, a 30-year-old loser with no future and no plans, constantly gets angry at his mother who calls him to come to the living room and drink something hot - and angrily refuses, and only later it turns out that it was the last night of his mother Miriam's life.
The day after he got up from swearing on his mother, he meets his future wife.
This is perhaps what is so wonderful about Ehud Banai's work.
Beyond the one-time melody, in a rhythm of five-eighths that is so identified with him, the text is full of love and sensitivity.
The resentment turns to compassion, the loss turns to reconciliation, and even death turns to life when he decides to name his daughter after his late mother.
Eight years ago, the rapper Tona released the wonderful "Rock 30", which deals with the personal crisis he experienced when he reached that age, and opens with the words "The boy is 30 years old, he has a high debt".
The warmth has indeed become a debt, the mother has been replaced by the father, but the essence remains relevant as it was.
After all, "Hurry up" became a symbol - a symbol of closing a circle, a symbol of finding a balm in great pain, a symbol of longing for who we once were and reconciliation with who we are now.
Illuminate the truth: Hilleli Shpanzer on "Mix the Plaster", from "Ehud Banai and the Refugees" (1987)
Ahmed came out into the light in the summer of 1987. A whole history has been shaped since then;
Thousands of songs and albums were released, hundreds of terrorist attacks occurred, several operations and several wars, Rabin was assassinated, there was an upheaval, we left Lebanon and Gaza, houses were built and collapsed.
But Ahmed stayed.
Ahmed still wakes up at five in the morning, bleary-eyed, carries himself to the van, falls asleep on his friend's shoulder, shows his certificates, and builds the Zionist dream.
Because who will build us a house?
To the sounds of tense and monotonous music, against a background of desert guitars and in an almost despairing voice, Ehud Banai reveals a cynical and cold truth: the foundations of the state, some of which are currently in danger of falling apart, are no longer built by the pioneers.
They are built by people like Ahmed, and like others that Ehud Banai made sure to shine throughout his musical repertoire, with courage, class and above all accompanied by excellent music.
Many things will change.
I can only hope for the best.
But will life change for Ahmed?
A memory from the never-ending beret journey: Yaniv Granot on "The Winds of the North", from "Karob" (1989)
"Here is a peak, accept 'to mother'"
.
The legs are going too fast by any standard, and too slow for the MPH, the only standard that matters tonight.
"Accept 'No'"
. The score points begin to pile up, but the head knows how to calculate with advanced mathematical sophistication that the distance between the first and the second necessarily means that the road is further It's long.
"Here's a top, get 'remained'
." Mother didn't have any left. The riddle was solved. Ehud Banai will mark this beret's journey with green sticklights for us, in a choice that is sure to be a joke, and sure at our expense. "More."
I
quietly hum the houses. Understood In her expression, a few words make them up, and she wonders with sweat in her eyes why Nanai had to include the story about Diego as well.
"Strength
." There is none, and it is too early to cling to the hope of the morning.
"And father
." The body hurts, strange, exhausted, unnecessary.
.
I felt almost like I was in a movie, and I was undoubtedly the hero.
"Knowledge"
.
The sun is waking up.
Hadera's north winds are blowing.
"What"
.
There are chimneys in front of our eyes, although they are not getting any closer even though we have been walking towards them for an hour.
"
to say"
we arrived
One night, 65 km. The sea is great, it is almighty, but this will forever be the only song by Ehud Banai that I cannot hear.
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The piece that accompanied First Love: Tal Shalu on "I'll Bring You", from "Soon" (1995)
All my first loves had a lot of music.
Each new love opened a new musical world of the beloved with me, and whole evenings of the pains of falling in love, longing and innocent agony, were always accompanied by sounds and melodies.
This is how Ehud Banai entered my life, with a caressing and chilling guitar piece, which warms the heart and body even before the lyrics of the simple and moving love song.
"What will I bring you?", Banai asked me at Discman, sometime at the beginning of the millennium, and promised starlight, sea breeze, the whole world, children's laughter and startle all fears.
And all this while doing the same sexy, changing and increasing song, which plays on the inner capillaries the storms of emotion of young love and intense infatuation, and makes it different from the lovely words of love of a father to his little daughter.
In several nights of waiting I closed my eyes;
And I imagined my beloved, on his way to me, on a bright morning, to bring me his whole life.
As is the nature of first loves, we parted ways, but even today, when his guitar is played, I close my eyes and return to the magical love that brought him into my life.
Again, in high school: Sagi Ben Nun on "Your time has passed", from "Ehud Banai and the Refugees" (1987)
"In my dream I returned to high school, and this time as a vocal girl," I wrote on my Facebook page a year and a half ago, when my daughter Mika started studying in the 9th grade in the theater major of Thelma Yelin High School, where I also studied about 750 years ago.
This immortal quote from Ehud Banai's classic "Your time has passed" never left my mind, because he managed to distill the wonderful and strange feeling of nostalgic excitement mixed with a strange kind of dream about this surprising "return" to high school.
It was a classic moment where a song becomes a meaningful soundtrack that captures, defines and enhances a defining moment in your life.
And this is magic that Ehud Banai does again and again.
"Your time has passed", as he told in the documentary film "Havist Lezoz" created by Avida Livni, Gidi Avivi and Dror Nahum, he wrote after he really dreamed that he was back in high school for a Purim party, and asked himself if it was the 30-year-old Ehud who was there for an unknown reason or 17-year-old Ehud, and then woke up without a solution.
And then came the song: Banai expressed in it a play of times, longing for friendships and wondering about what is left of the 17-year-old boy he once was.
These are exactly the feelings that evoked a great empathy in me once again that morning, as well as in many other fans of this wonderful musician.
Happy birthday dear Ehud.
Your time really hasn't passed.
Hope you always keep traveling.
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Between Lou Reed and Carlebach: Dror Zamir on "Brooklyn", from "Answer Me" (2004)
Ehud Banai wrote quite a bit about people and places in Israel - but not only.
In one of his successful albums, "Answer Me", he wrote a song after a visit to Brooklyn, which describes, among other things, the cultural contrast of the New York borough.
In my eyes, it expresses more than anything the diversity that exists within the builder, the creator and the person himself.
Banai writes about the Brooklyn of "Reb Shlomo" (Rabbi Shlomo Karlibach) and in the same breath about the Brooklyn of Lou Reed, because he himself drew influences and combined elements of rock and roll made overseas, along with Jewish, ethnic and even Hasidic symbols in his songs.
He writes about a Brooklyn that says "Father is not dead", in correspondence with Chabad Hassidim who believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was the Messiah. The realist Banai did not agree with this, but the spiritual Banai believed that the Rebbe's legacy and spirit, a figure that intrigued him, would return in a big way and "blow up Brooklyn Until the Land of Israel" - the same Land of Israel that is always in the background, in lines like "Brooklyn of the Holy, Brooklyn of the Holy",
The connections in the song are the connections in the person: Hari Banai, the ultimate Israeli troubadour, is the one who taught us that it is permissible to be a religious person who believes and hold liberal views, and that it is not unreasonable to love Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson and John Martin while at the same time connecting to Persian, Arabic and Jewish music - Hasidim.
And when these different shades emerge from "Brooklyn", it demonstrates why Ehud Banai is still one of the few things in our country that are a consensus.
The truth of love, between the fireworks and the silences: Mittal Kaifman on "You and I", from "Yossi Banai: Last Songs" (2012)
Love is silence.
She is peaceful and calm.
A place where you can rest your head on a supportive shoulder, soothe a trembling body with a hug.
She is an invisible safety net, she is a bubble, she will overcome all obstacles.
Love is also a bloody battlefield, a stun grenade, a weapon in the hands of a person who was a stranger until a year or a decade ago and knows all the sore points.
All the traumas, scratches, bleeding wounds can be sprinkled with salt.
It is heartbreak, it is disappointment, it is mental and physical pain.
In a very rough breakdown, these are the main ways in which love is described in songs.
Indeed, it has many faces and forms, but between the two extremes of the scale lies a mediocre, ordinary love, an abrasive routine that most people have chosen to share with their beloved, but it is not sexy or dramatic enough to become a song.
Then came "You and I" written by Yossi Banai and Ehud singing with such great talent accompanied by string instruments.
The simple words show the same sleepy mediocrity that many live.
Anyone who has been in a long relationship knows that along with deep, old love, there are also question marks that don't let go.
Silence, pain and hope that it will be enough.
That this complex and confusing emotion, which can lift us up in seconds and destroy us just as quickly, will be enough to silence the voices, the doubts and the aching heart.
It's a small love song and it's so touching about love, without papers and unnecessary superlatives but with a lot of truth that many are afraid to acknowledge.
The truth that hides somewhere between the estate and the trauma, between the fireworks and the silence.
And when you love enough, you know how to accept both.
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There is no one who is not fucked: Amit Salonim on "The Rape Song", from "Mami: Rock Opera", 1986)
The "Rape Song" is the most memorable from the rock opera "Mami" not only because of the eternal lyrics ("Mami ya Mami open your legs"), and not only because of the political message ("You deported our children in the name of demography/ You robbed our fields in the name of geography") but Mainly because of the performance.
It starts with the young and relatively unknown Ehud Banai at the time, who hides behind his acoustic guitar, and sings one of the most aggressive lines written up to that point in Hebrew in the most embarrassed way possible.
It is a game of contrasts, internal and external.
Mazie Cohen, who has a huge voice, who hugs, scratches, caresses and kicks you at the same time, answers him with musical and physical drama (in the dramatized version she drops the plates in her hands out of panic), but the "rapist" builder remains back on the chair, behind the guitar, and promises revenge In an erection and in the seed for "20 years of occupation".
Banai is no longer the same unknown young man, and the occupation celebrated 55 last year - but beyond that not much has changed.
The same contrast that accompanies Banai's melodies has become the soundtrack of a people who continue to search for their eternal music.
Banai did not write the words to the "rape song" but Hillel Mittelpunkt, but there is no one else in the world who can sing these words in Banai's deep tone and sound more believable, more painful.
All the opposites, all in one person, who reminds us that we are all human.
we are all brothers
You screwed up, he screwed up too.
There is no one who will not be screwed.
The combination of anger and tenderness: David Rosenthal on "Longing Song (David and Saul)", from "The Third" (1992)
For more than a decade, Ehud Banai tried to occupy the center of the stage, but even the success of his debut album in 1987, which came after the sensation of the rock opera "Mami", did not lead him there.
Perhaps because of the demonstrable fury that somewhat deterred mainstream listeners, Banai, who was a sort of progressive version of "natural selection", was left behind - a huge creator, but one that is still underappreciated.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact place where an artist breaks through the last barrier, but in the case of Banai I can estimate that he crossed the Rubicon in 1992, with the release of the masterpiece album "The Third" and especially his flagship song, "David and Saul".
He was still angry, but much cleaner and softer, and with caressing touches.
After all, what is "David and Saul" if not a complex work, bursting with contrasts, of anger and tenderness, coolness and heat, love and hate, pride and pleas?
Later, in the movie "Must Move", Banai said that the song was written about the volatile and long-term relationship with Yossi Elephant ("loving, hating and jealous, addicted to his friend"), who passed away on the Logos stage a few months before.
As if the music is not harmonious either, as if the guitar solo of Dodi Halevi and Tal Herzberg and the wonderful background vocals of Uri Katzenstein were not enough to make the song a masterpiece, after this discovery "David and Saul" received a mythological place in the annals of Israeli music - a place that is not justified from him.
A leader is needed: Ziv Reinstein on "The Golden Calf", from "Ehud Banai and the Refugees" (1987)
I don't think there is a better poem by Ehud Banai, which explains our longing then, at the Mount Sinai situation, like our longing today - for a leader who would come down and "we will have a father".
"The Golden Calf" brings me back to the most special moment in Israel's history - the birth of a nation, which, in contrast, today, feels exactly the opposite - in its dying.
Banai succeeds in conveying in the song the feeling of disgust of the people waiting for Moses, begging him to come down from the "biblical Olympus" with the gospel, but he refuses to do so.
The people are at a loss, looking for a shepherd - but in vain, and have to settle for a calf made of glittering jewels.
"There is no signal, there is no sign, so many days in a closed circle go around, around the golden calf."
We are so desperate that we decide to do foreign work.
The song begins with desert music that puts you in the mood, with desperation evident in every word until the golden calf is ready.
That's when the song begins to take on a rhythm of a kind of worship to the sounds of Yossi Elephant's electric guitar and the rhythmic drumming of Jean-Jacques Goldberg, and one can only imagine the trance of the Israelites around that calf ("They go out in a mad dance").
The rhythm of the song is a childish soundtrack, of rock that seems to have been lost from the world, and I'm looking for it and almost can't find it.
"In the darkness here we fight for every crumb" of Dark Eighties music that has been lost from the world, and biblical words that can move even a secular person like me.
But this dance is a barren dance, which will lead the Israelites to perdition. Even today, we are looking for a father who will unite us, who will save us and bring us back us again to that founding event of the people of Israel, of togetherness. "We are here in the heart of the desert, thirsty for living water and you are on the top of the mountain above the clouds." Come on, Moshe, it's time to come down to the people and smash the golden calf once and for all.
The most magical adventure: Nadav Menuhin on "The Star of the Gush Dan District", from "Tip Tipa" (1998)
I remember how the album "Tip Tipa", a collection that includes all kinds of relatively rare songs by Ehud Banai, was played at our house, and how I was most turned on, as a child, by the third song on the album - a touching love song, which contains all the Ehud-Banaim love songs For their generations - the falling in love, the wanderings, and the colorful world and the spectacles around them.
Even the background to the song is exciting - it's a transition to an Irish ballad called "Star of the County Down" with a folk tune.
In a translation with a Jewish twist, Banai created a sweet vision that connects old and new, the song of songs with the dirt of the first Hebrew city: he turned the district of Down into Gush Dan, and the Northern Irish song into the most Israeli thing there is.
And in the case of a writer for whom love is always involved in a journey, this poem reveals the entire constructive map from end to end: from the Yarkon River to the Sembation, from Galilee to Rosh Satan, the village with the city, a physical land and a spiritual language, history with a legend, Irish sounds with frills - and all in a human story And mesmerizing, never ending.
So, in the late 1990s, I thought it would be a magical adventure to look for a glowing nut brown star to light up my nights.
Today it is clear to me: these are Ehud Banai's songs that manage to light up the darkness a little.
And also: Doron Cohen, editor of "Maariv", about one meeting with Ehud Banai, and a dream that came true
On the way to the Bialik-Rogozin campus, on bus 25, for a joint evening with Ehud Banai organized by the art curator Liat Zikron-Yafa, I asked myself which poem, if any, in the books "Tahum Moshav" might catch the eye and penetrate the heart of the beloved musician-poet on me
The answer came immediately: "Get Beck" - in which I describe how I leave the synagogue on Shabbat, flee from the sanctuary to the sand on the seashore, listen to Jeff Beck with headphones and sail in my imagination to London, until the voice of the muezzin from the mosque bursts into my ears Hasan Bek, who interrupts my fantasies and screams at me from the tower "Khalas Ya Habibi, Get Bek".
A few minutes later I went up the stairs and met Banai for the first time, for final arrangements before the show.
Once, years ago, when I was plowing through Italy in a car and listening to Banai's first records over and over again, I dreamed one night - in some B&B between Siena and Florence - that Banai and I were friends, the best of friends.
We drink coffee, light a cigarette, put on records and talk.
And in the dream I tell him that he is actually the golden bridge of my life - the only man who managed to connect the worlds that were so opposite in which I grew up: between the prayers in the synagogue and the rock and roll anthems, between "Yigdal God Hai" and Jimi Hendrix live, between the twisting Afghan music that I heard in my parents' house and that inspired It seeped into me, and the repetitious rhythms of reggae, dub and ska, which I discovered on a trip to London at the age of 17 and drove my father crazy.
There wasn't even the faintest connection between these worlds, until a builder came and proved to me that they can actually live in one subjugation - and even in happiness and wealth.
While I'm mulling over how the hell I'm going to tell him all this, he's already flipping through the book and then stops, of all the songs, precisely on "Get Back".
He sank into it, then looked up and said: "Jeff Beck, Get Beck, Hassan Beck, listen, you bought me with this song."
It was a wonderful evening, beyond all imagination, beyond even that dream in Italy - and even it somehow came true at the end, when we went out to smoke together.
Just like then, between Siena and Florence.
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