Childhood pearls

The Jewish holiday of Hanuka is here, and as Israelis, it floods us with associations and memories. Here, as always, I mention these nuggets that waiting for the right time – this is the best time to present a nugget that expected, much longer before I even thought I’ll have such a thing as a blog for sharing my musical schemes. This is a great musical collection of songs that originally created for the Israeli children in the 1970s and 1980s. As a straight sequel to the previous mixtapes ‘Israelick I’ and ‘II,’ this nugget features some of the Israeli music giants. I remember one interview of one of these musicians, Yoni Rechter, about his amazing masterpiece for children “The 16th lamb”, and from his own point of view, he came to compose this project like every other musical job he did for adults before, with the same eye level. This was in 1978, and as the years go by this immortal piece is crossing through generations and different backgrounds in the Israeli society.
This time, because I found so many decent songs (for my opinion of course), not that I only exceeded the usual length of a radio hour per mixtape, I created a double release for the first time, and here you have an extended double nugget.
Most of the songs were digitized from vinyl records. Unfortunately, this time I really understood what my soundman colleagues and teachers spoke about old Israeli recordings – for the first time as an adult listener with experienced ear, I discovered that the sound job that was done on many of these recordings was amateur in our current notions. Lot of the songs have pretty bad audio mix work, and about Mastering I can’t talk at all. I also tried here to bring the best I could from the original records, and I think that I got a pretty satisfying result. If we pass over the names of the writers and the composers and the arrangers of these songs we’ll discover the names of the giants from the Israeli creators. Starting with Moshe Vilensky through Matty Caspi, Shem Tov Levi, Roman Kuntzman, Shlomo Gronich, Yair Rosenblum, Kobi Oshrat and of course the best leader Israeli well-known performers like Chava Alberstein, Arik Einstein, Yehoram Gaon, Nurit Galron, Netanela, Ariel Zilber, David Broza, Sasi Keshet and more. I want to make a spot for paramount two musicians. The first is Rafi Kadishson that unfortunately doesn’t get enough credit that he deserved for his making which is very extensive. Here in this nugget, I picked some amazing tracks that he composed and arranged for the Israeli version of Sesame Street TV show. (pay attention to the songs that performed by Mazzy Cohen מזי כהן, it is pure crafted Progressive Rock!). The second musician that I want to mention is Ilan Wirtzberg – I think that at least one-quarter of the songs that presented here been done with his wand if we are talking about compositions or ‘only’ arrangements that are amazing by themselves, even innovative for the time they been made. I want to dedicate this nugget for some beautiful friends of mine that are going to be new parents in these days and in general for those who have already children. May it be so the door will open for new, innovative, sophisticated, valuable music creation for children, like the former great musicians that treated this job not less, maybe more seriously than they do when they create for adults.
Happy HANUKAH!