Dudu Tassa brings his mother on to sing with Jonny Greenwood in Jaffa

Dudu Tassa brought his mother, Carmela, on stage to sing a song with him and Jonny Greenwood at the Barby club in Jaffa on Friday. He told the midday crowd that she came from Baghdad in 1951, that her name was changed from Amira to Carmela, and that as a young woman she had wanted to be a singer. Mum, I know you really wanted to be a singer when you were young, and we have a chance to put that right. Sometimes things can be put right.¹

The show ran about an hour and a half and was built on Jarak Qaribak, the pair's 2023 album of Arabic songs from around the Middle East, whose title means roughly “your neighbour is your relative”. It opened quietly with “El Hajar” and kept “La Trib” for near the end, with recorded spoken passages between the songs as on the record. They also played new songs for an album on the way, and Ami Friedman, reviewing for Israel Hayom, found more of the pair's own Western rock in them.

The stage was crowded with singers, soloists, percussionists and horns, with players from Israel, Europe, Jordan and Iraq. Sharona Katan, a musician and Greenwood's partner, played with them. Tassa and Greenwood go back about 17 years, Friedman writes, to the song “Eize Yom”, and Tassa's band once opened for Radiohead on a US tour.

Between songs Tassa remembered driving with Arabic music on full volume and switching it off when he reached a guard post, which put him in mind of his parents, who had been ashamed to listen to it. Now, he said, musicians with their own histories were on one stage together, playing Arabic love songs.