On tour in Boston recently, Idan Reichal encountered something he’d never seen before.
Snow.
A recent storm had dumped several feet of the white stuff on Beantown, and the Israeli superstar was amazed, along with his fellow musicians in his band, the Idan Reichal Project.
It never gets down to five below back in Israel. Reichal is more accustomed to the hot winds that blow in from East Africa.
That heat seems to have cooked up a musical recipe that’s proving to be enormously popular in Israel. The Idan Reichal Project has released two multi-platinum albums there, emerging as the country’s No. 1 pop band.
A lot of that, says the dreadlocked Reichal, has to do with the band’s multicultural emphasis, especially on the musical style brought to Israel by the influx of Jews from Ethiopia.
“We represent the music of Israel 2005 as I see it,” says Reichal in a phone interview. “This is about emerging cultures and blending cultures. In Israel, about every 10 years there’s a new immigration — from Iran, from Russia, from Ethiopia. This project is about merging it all.”
In honor of Black History Month, the Idan Reichal Project will make a series of Bay Area campus concert appearances, with stops in Santa Cruz, Davis and Palo Alto.
Concerts, all beginning 7:30 p.m., are scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 10, at U.C. Santa Cruz; Monday, Feb. 14, at U.C. Davis; and Tuesday, Feb. 15, at Stanford University.
Reichal’s seven-piece band includes musicians of Ethiopian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Palestinian and Caribbean extraction. Like Israel itself, this band looks a little like the whole wide world.
“My work,” adds Reichal, “and my destinations are not political. We talk about society, about the common denominator of the people on the street.”
The 28-year-old singer-songwriter has an Eastern European background, but he fell in love with the music of Israel’s Ethiopian immigrants from the time he first heard it just after completing his tour of duty with the Israel Defense Forces.
Reichal had been a sought-after session keyboard player when he started recording a few demos drawing on the Amharic-language music of Ethiopian Jewry. He wrote in Hebrew, and his bandmates wrote in Amharic or Arabic depending on the song. Those demos (and the band that performed them) evolved into the Idan Reichal Project.
The group’s self-titled 2002 premiere album hit No. 1 on the Israeli charts. The group was named “Artist of the Year” in a nationwide poll. Its new 2005 album, “Out of the Depths,” similarly shot straight to the top of the Israeli charts.
Right away the group began touring both locally and internationally, even performing at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco last year. Reichal loved the Bay Area and is happy to return. “San Francisco is great,” he says. “Very warm, open-minded people.”
The upcoming dates include a stop at U.C. Davis, a concert co-sponsored by Hillel and Black Family Week, an African American campus organization. All the proceeds will go to help the victims of the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. With a perceived strain in Black-Jewish relations in recent years, concert organizers see this as a chance to help heal the rift, if only a little.
Reichal says bringing people together like that is his stock in trade, and he’s used to seeing people from all over the world in the audience, Jews and non-Jews alike. “If you have a light,” he says, “you have to share it with other people. I think the people on stage with me have the light, they have the passion, and they bring this message of Israel 2005.”
As pleased as Reichal is for his own personal success, he is even happier for his Ethiopian bandmates and their community. The group has injected Ethiopian Jews with a renewed sense of belonging in the country they now call home.
“They are proud, all these great artists,” he says, “because the Project is now mainstream. They walk the streets and everybody knows them. All the teens want to look like them. The Ethiopian community here had identity problems, they forgot their own roots. Now it’s different because of this.”
How to account for all this stemming from a couple of CDs? Reichal chalks it up to the power of music.
“It’s all about love and respect,” says the singer. “We have a saying in Israel, that something is like bread, sugar and water. That’s what we’re like: the basics.”
Idan Reichal Project plays Feb. 10 at Kresge Town Hall, U.C. Santa Cruz. Information: (831) 426-3332; Feb. 14 at Freeborn Hall, U.C. Davis. Information: (530) 752-1915; and Feb. 15 at Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University. Information: (650) 736-1199. All tickets $5-$30.