DUDU TASSA & JONNY GREENWOOD’S NEW COLLABORATIVE ALBUM JARAK QARIBAK OUT NOW VIA WORLD CIRCUIT
June 9, 2023—Celebrated Israeli singer, musician and producer Dudu Tassa and award-winning composer and guitarist Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead, The Smile) today release their brand new collaborative album Jarak Qaribak via World Circuit Records. In celebration of the release, a new video for “Ahibak,” an Israeli song featuring guest vocals from UAE singer Safae Essafi, will launch on Monday June 12.
Produced by Tassa and Greenwood and mixed by Nigel Godrich, Jarak Qaribak translates, more or less, as “Your Neighbour Is Your Friend.” It’s an expansive, inclusive sentiment. The songs on the album, and the singers, are drawn from all over the Middle East—and, in keeping with the theme established by the album’s title, each singer takes a turn at a tune from a country other than their own. The album is preceded by two singles, “Ashufak Shay,” featuring guest vocals from Lebanese singer Rashid al-Najjar, and “Taq ou-Dub,” a defiant love song featuring Nour Freteikh from Ramallah.
Tassa and Greenwood will tour in support of Jarak Qaribak in November, including appearances at Le Guess Who in the Netherlands and Pitchfork Music Festival in London and Berlin. A full list of dates can be found below.
What’s going on is a remarkable collaboration between two remarkable musicians. Israeli rock star Tassa and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood have known each other a long time. They’ve collaborated before; Jonny played guitar on “Eize Yom” (“What A Day”), a track on Dudu’s 2009 album Basof Mitraglim Le’Hakol (“In The End You Get Used To Everything”). Asked what he likes about Jonny’s playing, Dudu replies, “It’s everything I can’t do, and don’t know how to do.” Jonny, who is married into an Israeli family hailing originally from Iraq and Egypt, remembers hearing Dudu’s music twinkling amid the prevailing gloom of mid-noughties Israeli rock when Radiohead first visited. “What Dudu was doing had its roots in the Middle East,” says Jonny, “and I just found that more interesting. I was hearing that music at home a lot, as well.”
Jarak Qaribak is scarcely the first time that Jonny has stepped beyond the boundaries of guitar rock. He has had a parallel career as a solo artist going back 20 years to his soundtrack for Bodysong; he has since composed the soundtracks for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, The Master and Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog, among others. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
But while Dudu grew up with this music, Jonny had to learn it, which meant unlearning a lot about being a rock guitarist—a challenge he’d previously confronted when working with another Israeli musician, Shye Ben Tzur. “Jarak Qaribakpresented a similar set of problems,” says Jonny, “in that you have all these scales which don’t conform to western major/minor scales, and have notes which involve quarter-tones, and it’s very hard to impose a chord sequence on these melodies. It usually makes them collapse. It’s like reducing the resolution on a color photo until it’s just squares.”
When assembling the tracks on Jarak Qaribak, Jonny reflects he was “trying to imagine what Kraftwerk would have done if they’d been in Cairo in the 1970s,” which is actually a pretty deft characterization of the overall sound of Jarak Qaribak. The singers mostly recorded their contributions wherever they happened to be, which presented some logistical challenges. Dudu recalls that trying to locate a functional studio in Beirut so that Lebanese singer Rashid al-Najjar could do his vocal for “Ashufak Shay” was something of a struggle. There were other difficulties peculiar to the region whose music Jarak Qaribak celebrates. Dudu acknowledges that some singers they approached were uneasy about working with an Israeli artist. “And,” he says, “it’s not like all the Arabic countries of the Middle East are friends among themselves.” Getting the Iraqi singer Karrar Alsaedi to Tel Aviv to record the Yemeni song “Ya Mughir al-Ghazala” was a considerable bureaucratic feat. “I think,” says Dudu, “he was the only Iraqi passport holder in the entire country at that moment.”
