Heart and Soul: Homegrown Jazz Cat Comes Back to His Roots

"I'll tell you a story that exemplifies the dream I'm living in now," says jazz saxophonist and composer Eli Degibri. "When I was 16, [jazz musicians] Iris and Ofer Portugaly adopted me. They brought me into their ensemble and we performed together all around the country. I remember that when Ofer phoned me I was stunned. It was as though Herbie Hancock was inviting me to join his group" - something that actually happened to Degibri five years later.

"Iris and Ofer had returned from studies in Boston, and en route to gigs, when we talked about their time abroad, I was envious because they'd already experienced that. They'd been there and come back. It's a bit strange that a boy of 16 would think that way: I was supposed to dream about going on a trip abroad, not about coming back from it. But that's how I felt, even back then. And now at long last it's happening, after so many years. Half a year ago, I fulfilled my dream: I came back to Israel, and since then I've been living that dream."

Degibri, 34, is one of the best jazz musicians to have emerged here in the past 20 years. Two years ago, he felt he had made the most of life in New York, where he had been living for more than a decade. "But I was close to getting American citizenship and I gave a final push for that," he says.

Why was that so important?

"Being an immigrant, legal or illegal, is a terrible feeling," he explains. "In New York I felt completely at home, but always had this airport trauma hanging over me. There you are always feeling that fear: Will they let me in or not? You feel like a liar, a thief ... So now, when I'm an American citizen, they say, 'Welcome back, sir,' and don't take my fingerprint. This is a wonderful thing. For this it was worth waiting."

Two weeks after receiving citizenship, Degibri was already settling into his new apartment in Holon: "Eight minutes by bike from my parents' house, 15 minutes from the center of the music scene in Tel Aviv."

Asked if the return to Israel has effected a real change in his career, and perhaps even in his music, Degibri smiles and embarks on an enthusiastic speech: "Sure it has made a change. A huge one. When I was living in New York I loved to fly out on performance tours but the return to New York was always a terrible drag. Now it's fun to fly and fun to come back. I see the sign 'Tel Aviv' and I can't tell you how much this excites me. And then my father comes to pick me up at the airport and I go home to my apartment, with my piano and cat. In New York I couldn't have a cat because I was always traveling. It's the most cliched feeling of stability, but it is everything I have always dreamed of - but also combined with instability!

"I can't give up the thrill of performing abroad, of waking up drained and flying to another country. I never will. But when you come back from the instability of a performance tour to more instability, it's terrible. The most important thing," continues Degibri, "is that today I am a much better musician than I was half a year ago. A better instrumentalist. A better composer."

It's only been half a year since you came back. What can happen in such a short time?

"I'll explain. Do you see this piano?" he asks, pointing to the grand in his living room. "I am proud to say I bought it with the help of Yoni Rechter and Shlomi Shaban. My two favorite pianists helped me pick it out. This is still a dream. A grand piano is something I have always wanted. In New York I had only a keyboard. Because of that temporariness. I mean, are you going to move a piano from the apartment in Queens to the apartment in Brooklyn? So now I have a piano and it seems to say to me, 'Come, play me, caress me.'

"I've never played so much in my life. And I'm writing all the time, too. This stability has made me a thousand times better as a musician, after I'd been in a regression in New York for three years."

What do you mean, regression?

"I would sit at home and if there wasn't a performance I wouldn't practice. I didn't feel like using the keyboard ... so I wouldn't write anything either. And I certainly didn't have rehearsal sessions at home, because I was embarrassed to invite pianists to my place. Look at the difference between there and here. A few days ago Alon Oleartchik was here. We're working on an album of his that I'm producing. Tomorrow Yoni [Rechter] is coming. And my neighbors love it and are really good to me. Their children come to see the piano. Sometimes I even get applause from downstairs. True, it's not some black American guy shouting 'Yeah!' but it is just as exciting."

Degibri adds that "a friend of mine said she's never seen so many people 'making pilgrimage' to Holon."

It sounds so idyllic. As though you're talking about some other place, someplace perfect and not this complex country you have come back to.

Degibri smiles. "My friend Lior is an activist who helps refugees, and her biggest criticism of me is that the only thing I see is myself. And she's right. It isn't some sort of rapacious egoism. But Lior is right when she says I bury my head in the sand. I'm not proud of it but I'm not ashamed either. I am living my life, and that's what's important. I believe that when things are good for me they are good for the people around me. Insecurity is sometimes a terrible thing.

"Now I really am in an idyll. It isn't that I don't have anxieties and disappointments, but ever since I came back things have been really good and thanks to that I have so much love to give."

Throbbing heart

Degibri's tendency to emotion also comes out in his music and distinguishes him from other local jazz musicians. There is beauty and even courage in Degibri's choice not to hide his throbbing heart in the music he makes but there are also moments when this emotional inundation becomes too much.

Sometimes your music lacks a certain ...

"Don't be afraid to say it. Depth?"

No, not depth. Maybe the right word is distance. Something less sweet and gushing.

"Let's go back again to age 16 again and to Ofer and Iris Portugaly. I remember one trip with them to a gig, when on the way we were listening to a song by Frank Sinatra. The sweetest there is, the most romantic but also the best. He's singing with his vibrato and I am in the clouds. And then the song ends and ... I say to Iris and Ofer, with the naivete of a 16-year-old kid, 'I don't get it, why aren't people making music like Sinatra's? Why do they also make music that isn't beautiful?'

"Today I understand that there's a place for many kinds of music. Take [double bassist and jazz composer] Charles Mingus. He makes the most critical, sharpest, angriest and bluntest music - and at the same time his harmonies are the most romantic there are. I admire this, but it's not who I am. I accept the criticism and I am trying to change things, to be better. There are moments when I listen to myself and I say, 'You've gone too far. Couldn't you have lowered the energy a bit?' But basically I can't change. This sweetness is who I am. This is how I see the world. But I do think there is depth in my music. The two things [sweetness and depth] are not mutually exclusive."

A few months ago, Degibri, who started serving this year as the artistic director of the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat, together with Dubi Lenz (see box ), won the Mifal Hapayis national lottery Landau Prize for musicians who have made a significant contribution to their field (full disclosure: I was a member of the jury that chose him ). And indeed, together with his contemporaries - (trumpet player ) Avishai Cohen (saxophonist ) Daniel Zamir and (pianist ) Yonatan Avishai, and older musicians like (bass players ) Omer Avital and Avishai Cohen, and (composer-trombonist ) Avi Lebovich - Degibri helped bring about an impressive flowering in Israeli jazz and became a role model for younger musicians.

When he was 18, Degibri attended Boston's Berklee College of Music. Several months later, though, he was glad to leave when he was accepted to the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz program in Los Angeles. Thereafter, pianist Herbie Hancock invited him to join his ensemble and thus Degibri played saxophone with one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world. Not bad for a kid of 21 from Jaffa.

In 2003, Degibri issued his first album and also joined the ensemble of Al Foster (formerly the regular drummer with Miles Davis ), with whom he plays to this day. Since then the saxophonist has issued three more solo CDs, the most recent of which, "Israeli Song" from 2010, is performed with a dream team: Foster, the great double bass player Ron Carter and renowned pianist Brad Mehldau.

"I didn't want to make an all-stars record just for the sake of the all-stars," says Degibri. "I wanted to make a record that has meaning, in which musicians who have influenced me and have made me who I am are intertwined. It was clear that Al would be the drummer. Ron was my first teacher in the Thelonious Monk program and taught me not only music; he bought me my first necktie and taught me how to dress for a performance. And in my opinion Brad is the genius of our generation. He is doing today what Coltrane and Miles did in their day. He is reinventing jazz. Reinventing the piano."

The title "Israeli Song" may give one the impression that the CD features jazz versions of classic Israeli songs, something quite a number of local musicians have been doing recently. But there are no Hebrew classics on Degibri's album. Indeed, most of the tracks, whether original pieces by him or not, derive from the jazz tradition as it is interpreted by him. Only in some of the compositions are Israeli elements evident, above all in the title track, which includes, among other things, Yoni Rechter-ish harmonies. (It's amusing to think that Degibri got Mehldau to play Rechter without the latter knowing the famous Israeli musician. )

"I'm playing with the musicians I've always dreamed of playing with," says Degibri, when asked about the relative lack of numbers with Israeli musical characteristics. "Am I going to stick them with 10 numbers in a seven-eighths beat, which is natural for Israelis but strange to the American ear? What good would that be? They won't be able to play it. It would be brutal on my part.

"One of the numbers on the album is called 'Liora' and it has a distinct Israeli coloration," he continues. "We tried to record it with the quartet but when we came to the seven-eighths part, Al and Ron couldn't make headway. Who is the only person who can do this without blinking an eye? Brad. So during a break, I went up to Brad and asked him if he could stay another 10 minutes after the session, and he did and we recorded the passage as a duet. With Al and Ron it just didn't work."

Foster, Carter and Mehldau "are huge musicians, but there are things they don't know how to do. It's a matter of a different computer, no doubt about it. A different processor, not the one we have today. Its analog versus digital, and what does analog have that digital doesn't have? Warmth, feel."

According to Degibri, the fact that the album is called "Israeli Song" is of great significance abroad: "People say I've changed the way they think about Israel. Good music instead of ugly headlines. I am very proud of this. I've always been afraid to say I am a patriot. Why? Because I didn't serve in the army. That's what they instill in you in Israel. But I am a patriot. I love this country, I have come back and I am so happy I did."

Author: Ben Shalev
Publication: Haaretz