Jonny Greenwood to join Shye Ben-Tzur at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

Jonny Greenwood plays guitar tomorrow in the band of Shye Ben-Tzur, an Israeli musician who settled in India, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Ben-Tzur has seldom played outside India, and this is his British debut. The concert is part of the Southbank Centre's Alchemy festival of culture from the Indian subcontinent. Greenwood has written about Ben-Tzur in today's London Evening Standard.

He will play on some of the songs, perhaps something built on the drone of the tanpura or the rhythm of the dholak, a two-headed Indian drum. I've never performed in this genre before and I certainly don't plan on anything soloistic¹, he writes. He may also bring the ondes Martenot, which plays one note at a time and so might suit music that does without standard harmony.

Greenwood first heard the music a couple of years ago in the Negev desert in southern Israel, where a band played a song that mixed Arabic and Indian music. The best song, he found out, was Ben-Tzur's, and he tracked him down.

Ben-Tzur studied music in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. After a concert by Indian musicians in Jerusalem he dropped everything to study music in Rajasthan, and he settled in India and married into Sufism. His songs set devotional Sufi poetry, mostly in Hebrew with some Urdu and Hindi, sung by Indian singers over harmoniums and percussion. To Greenwood they sound more like gospel than anything else. Tomorrow's band has two Rajasthani rhythm players from the Manganiar community, two Sufi qawwals from Ajmer, a cellist and a percussionist from the Israeli band Yemen Blues, and the drummer Itamar Doari.

Greenwood spent two months in India last year, hearing classical music in Kerala and a Sufi festival in Rajasthan. I've started using some of these instruments in my music because I can't think of any other way, electronics included, of making such sounds.¹ He is wary of rock musicians dabbling in world music, and makes two exceptions: Damon Albarn's work in Mali, and Ben-Tzur.

Shye Ben-Tzur with Jonny Greenwood, “Dil Ki Bahar”, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Alchemy festival, May 2014· Southbank Centrewatch on youtube →

Shye Ben-Tzur with Jonny Greenwood, “Challa Wahi Desh”, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Alchemy festival, May 2014· Southbank Centrewatch on youtube →