For Yair Dalal, the Bay Area is starting to feel like home. The Israeli musician has been here since early February, living in a Berkeley flat, shopping at Safeway and learning the difference between I-880, 580, 980 and just plain 80.
That road knowledge has come in handy. For more than a month, Dalal has been the advance man for the Jewish Music Festival, headlining a string of concerts, workshops, classes and jam sessions all over the region. The festival officially begins March 19.
His extended visit culminates with a show March 20 in Point Reyes Station. Dalal will perform his bracing brand of Judeo-Arabic music leavened with a wide world of other influences.
The son of Iraqi Jews, Dalal grew up steeped in the jasmine-scented music of the Mizrachi (Jews from Arab lands). He studied violin as a youth and went on to master the oud, an 11-string lute-like instrument common in Arab music.
Taking that music to Bay Area schools and other local institutions over the last month has been a revelation for both Dalal and the students he’s met.
“It’s been a great experience,” he says. “The kids like the music. I tell them the music is somewhere between the blues and the Orient.”
Dalal happens to be a lifelong blues-lover and counts violinists like Stephane Grapelli and Papa John Creach among his many influences. “For me, [Papa John] came from Iraq then came to San Francisco and found the Grateful Dead. The quarter tones and microtones, the trills and slides of the blues are similar to Arabic music.”
He loved not only the blues but Western classical music, European folk music and rock ‘n’ roll as well. Growing up in Israel, Dalal studied classical violin as a child and appeared to be heading for a successful career in music. But in his late teens he abruptly set his career aside and moved to the Negev to “be a nature guy.”
Time in the desert changed his outlook on life and art. “I had my violin all the time,” he recalls. “I’d sit on a camel and play folk and Iraqi Jewish music mixed together. I started connecting to my Jewish Arab roots. My inspiration came from the desert.”
Eventually, he returned to the city and connected with Iraqi Jewish musicians, most of whom were reluctant to take on a disciple. “I forced them to teach me,” he says. “They said, ‘Look, this music is going to die with us like our language and our food. We came from another world. Israel is not going to stand for this music.’ But I insisted, and eventually they saw that they were wrong.”
That’s because Dalal and his Alol Ensemble are now among Israel’s most acclaimed performers. He has toured the world many times over and collaborated with such diverse artists as Shlomo Mintz, Zubin Mehta, Hamza El Din, the Oslo Philharmonic and many more. “I was the first Jewish Israeli guy to pick up the oud and go on stage to play,” he says. “Now there are a lot of oud players.”
He even spent time in the Bay Area leading university-level master classes in Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Mendocino.
And while he’s performed before thousands, Jewish and non-Jewish, around the world, Dalal seems most gratified by his efforts to close ranks with the Arabs in and around Israel. He is fluent in Arabic and not afraid to use it.
“Middle Eastern people are crazy about respect,” he says. “Respect is about language, culture, food and manners. If I speak the language when I meet Arab people, in 10 seconds you are a friend. Then if you play the oud and sing in Arabic it’s, ‘Come on, guy, where are you from?'”
As an Israeli with an Arab connection, he has a strong desire to see a further thaw in Israeli-Palestinian relations. “You have to have lower expectations,” he says. “We had this before and it blew up in our face. But there is hope. People want to finish with this war. I hope there will be a solution.”
And just to accentuate his point, he recites from memory a passage from a poem by Israel’s late great poet Yehuda Amichai.
Says Dalal, in a drowsy cadence that sounds not unlike the music of the oud: “Let it come/like wildflowers/suddenly/ because the field must have it: wild peace.”
Yair Dalal performs at the Jewish Music Festival 4 p.m. Sunday, March 20, at the Dance Palace Community Center, 5th & B streets, Point Reyes. Tickets:
$5-15. Information: (415) 663-1075 or www.dancepalace.org.