Haim Moshe

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

To add to what Simon says about Haim Moshe, he's part (a central part)
of the "Musica Mizrakhi" ("Eastern" or "Oriental" music) phenomenon. If
you go to Klezmershack, I think you'll find that Ari's posted my old
piece on "Israeli bus station music" (short - one pagehttp:
//www.klezmershack.com/articles/cohen_j/bus_station_1993.html); Amy
Horowitz and others have treated the subject more seriously and I nbow
see that Galeet Dardashti's article - part of her thesis - is up on the
web, really interesting, comparing musica mizrakhit and musica etnit. 
When I first went to Israel in the early 80s, it was still a
"lower-class" genre (see Peter Manuel's book "Cassette Culture" for
great insights) basically ignored by academia and also by the media, and
the intelligentsia more or less turned their noses up at it. You could
buy it at very few places, if any,as cassettes (often pirated and very
cheap)  outside the bus station stands (hence the other names for it,
Musica kassetot, and Musicat tahanat merkazit, "Bus Station Music"). As
Simon says, the early music was often translations/adaptations from
Greke (and also Turkish) songs , but performers often didn't like to say
form Arabic songs as well; to accomodate this, more recently an accepted
term has been "(Israeli) Mediterranean music",(musica yam tikhonit
[israelit])  Then by the late 80s, academia embraced it as a fertile new
subject for ethnomusicolgoical , anthropological etc analysis, it also
became accessible to mainstream media, Haim Moshe became a Star (and
some of his original colleagues said he'd "sold out" but that didn't
bother anyone for too long) and it became legit (but still with issues
around distribution, image etc). Also, I'm told that for quite a while
it was really popular in the Arab market, outside Israel too,till the
political situation put an end to that. It's  a fascinating story.
Judith

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