Translating from Nothing and Everything: Israel’s Habrera Hativeet (‘Natural Gathering’) in Retrospective1

Israeli music emerged as a convergence of musical memories anchored in the diverse cultures shared by Diaspora Jews with their co-territorial non-Jewish societies and brought by Jewish immigrants to Palestine/Israel. Decades before the concept of ‘world music’ emerged in post-colonial musical discourses, Israeli Jewish musicians experimented with a variety of forms and styles attempting to fuse elements from diverse ethnic provenances in order to create a new soundtrack. With the advent of the rock aesthetics in Israel around the year 1970, the ideal of mixing ‘East’ and ‘West’ took various expressions, such as musiqa mizrahit (‘Oriental music’) and other ‘ethnic’ pop-rock hybrids. Among the Israeli artists operating within this scene were Shlomo Bar and his band, Habrera Hativeet. Their pioneering work that started in 1979, whose early stages is the focus of this article, preceded the inception of ‘world music’ in the international market as well as Israel’s significant contributions to it.