The sound of Jerusalem where east meets west

Imagine the hypnotic, syncopated vocals of traditional Moroccan musicians, bobbing and chanting before an orchestra of soaring strings and horns that seem perpetually on the edge of tipping into klezmer.

Add keyboard, played by one of the coolest pianists on the planet, and you have what Neil Diamond called “a beautiful noise”.

It is a beautiful sight, too, given the colourful costumes of the Moroccan frontmen. If you’ve visited Marrakesh, you’ll have seen Gnawa musicians dressed in colourful robes busking every night in the central square.

But now you can hear three dozen of them in London, playing Western and Arabic instruments alongside one of Israel’s most popular pianists — creating an unlikely fusion that works so well it has already commanded millions of YouTube views.

Conductor/composer Tom Cohen is bringing his Jerusalem Orchestra East & West to the Barbican with a show called Gnawa!, showcasing a pair of guest soloists he calls “the Ronaldo and Messi of today’s world music scene”.

Tom Cohen by Moses Pini Siluk

Tom Cohen (Moses Pini Siluk)

The Ronaldo is Mehdi Nassouli, a charismatic singer from the Moroccan city Taroudant, who accompanies himself on a gimbiri, his country’s equivalent of a bass guitar. Messi is pianist Omri Mor, a fixture of Israeli jazz festivals, who was raised in Jerusalem in a half-Iraqi and half-Argentinian family.

These two musicians from very different disciplines share the language of the displaced, says Cohen. “Jazz comes from the same roots as Gnawa music,” he says, “both were created by West Africans who were taken from their homes and sold into slavery.

"The difference is that the Gnawa stayed in Morocco, while other West Africans were gathered there to be shipped across the Atlantic.”

Add in the music of east European Jews who settled in Israel after their own displacement by pogroms and the Holocaust — music with mournful undertones reflecting generations of persecution — and you have a highly emotional fusion sound that Cohen describes as “very communicative, really touching the heart and soul of the listener”.

While the Gnawa music at the heart of this particular production harks all the way back to the first muezzin calling Muslims to prayer, the interpretation is as much a melding of Eastern and Western influences as the orchestra and its creator, Cohen himself.

He was born in Beersheva into a family that blended Iraqi, Polish and English heritages. “I grew up in an area where Arabic music was predominant,” says Cohen. As a boy, Cohen longed to play an electric guitar “but as my hands were too small, I settled for the mandolin”.

After 10 years of studying his instrument he was picked to join Israel’s
Outstanding Musicians’ Programme, which sends the most talented to the country’s top music academies instead of Army service, and his obsession with the mandolin — “it suddenly seemed too small” — gave way to the thrill of the full orchestral score.

He studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and became a conductor at 26.

“I loved studying Western classical music, but it didn’t give me the full connection with the listeners I craved.”

He had by that time a lifetime of exposure to the sound of the oud and the kanoun, the new flute played in Iran and Turkey as well as the Middle East, and the Arabic violin, which is tuned completely differently from its Western counterpart.

He started arranging for both Eastern and Western instruments and in 2009 formed his own ensemble of 35 Jewish, Muslim and Christian players based in Jerusalem — “the best place in the world”, he says — to meld musical cultures with the help of players who have grown up with an ear for Western and Eastern music.

Gnawa! 2 By Ariel Efron

The Gnawa! show