Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa on their ‘love letter to Arabic music’

The makers of an excellent album of reimagined Arabic songs have convened in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Reading, a town on the Thames upstream from London. This nondescript location, redolent of The Office rather than the oud, is where Radiohead’s merchandise is managed. Among the memorabilia strewn around the open-plan workspace, I notice some costly bottles of olive oil from Jonny Greenwood’s Italian farm, available for purchase from Radiohead’s website.

Greenwood is best known as the Oxford band’s lead guitarist, although that bald description hardly does justice to his myriad talents. He’s rated among rock’s top players, but his musicianship goes well beyond the six strings of the old-fashioned axe; the ondes Martenot, an early electronic contraption, is a longstanding favourite in his extensive repertoire of musical tools. Outside Radiohead, he has a side-career composing Oscar-nominated film scores and highly rated classical music that receives world premieres at the Proms.

His latest project is a collaboration with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. The pair’s album Jarak Qaribak is a collection of covers comprising eight Arabic songs and an Israeli one. They are sung by vocalists from throughout the Arab world, a jumbled mix of geographies and vernaculars. Traditional Arabic instrumentation is intriguingly blended with Radioheady guitars and vintage modular synths.

Two thousand vinyl copies of the album await signing by the pair at the merch office. The idea for the venture came when Greenwood guested at one of Tassa’s gigs. “We both like Arabic music, and Jonny was very curious about it,” Tassa says, sitting on a sofa at right-angles to Greenwood’s. Both are in the T-shirt-and-trainers garb of Gen-X rock lifers. Tassa is 46, Greenwood is 51.

An impertinent observer, taking in the olive oil and the world-music-adjacent side-project, might wonder whether the Radiohead star is in the process of turning into the new Sting. But Greenwood isn’t on some kind of rock-aristocracy grand tour in Jarak Qaribak. He has a close association with the region’s music through his Israeli wife, the artist Sharona Katan. (The Italian olive oil, incidentally, comes from a surplus quantity pressed last year.)

“My wife’s family are from Iraq and Egypt, so I’ve known this music for 30 years, really,” he says. “That has always been my favourite part of being in Israel, going to the markets and getting great Arab CDs of singers like Layla Murad and Umm Kulthum. Every time I’ve watched Dudu, the most exciting moments for me are when he has these elements in his songs.”

Tassa, from Tel Aviv, is a celebrated figure in Israeli music. Having released his first album as a child, he made his name in Israel’s Hebrew rock scene. But he took an intriguing left-turn in 2011 when he made an album of songs written in the 1920s and 1930s by his grandfather and great-uncle. They were Mizrahi Jews living in Baghdad who released best-selling Arabic records before being forced to leave Iraq in 1951 amid anti-Jewish violence. Relocating to Israel, their glittering career never revived.

Jarak Qaribak is related to Tassa’s recuperation of his forebears’ forgotten music. “But specifically I consider this project as a love letter to Arabic music in general,” he says. “In Israel, something like 70 per cent of the origins of the population is from the Middle East or the Maghreb. In my childhood, every Friday, Arabic movies were screened on TV and everyone was hooked to them. Today people are very nostalgic about it. Young people now say, ‘I’m Iraqi, I’m from Iraq,’ to me.”

Ariel Qassus from Tassa’s backing band, the Kuwaitis, adds: “They used to be embarrassed, now they are proud.” Qassus plays qanun on Jarak Qaribak, a zither-like string instrument. He sits opposite Tassa, translating the singer-songwriter’s mostly Hebrew remarks into English for me. Greenwood is proficient enough in Hebrew to follow their exchanges.

The album doesn’t take a purist approach to its material. Egyptian singer Ahmed Doma sings an Algerian song, “Djit Nishrab”. Morocco’s Mohssine Salaheddine covers an Egyptian track, “Leylet Hub”. For his turn at the microphone, Tassa performs Moroccan song “Lhla Yzid Ikthar” in Arabic, a language he can’t speak. “Interestingly someone said I sounded Iraqi in this Moroccan song!” he says. “But it feels right to me that it’s not right. I think that’s what makes it beautiful, this fusion of all the singers.”

Greenwood’s contributions are unmistakable. “Djit Nishrab” has a tense violin motif reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch”. The same song also features a sinuously probing guitar part that one could imagine hearing in The Smile, his spin-off band with Radiohead’s singer, Thom Yorke. It isn’t the first time Greenwood has worked in non-western musical idioms, having made the album Junun in India with Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur in 2015. Nonetheless, he found adapting to Arabic music scales a challenge. 

“There were times in a song when Dudu would say to me, ‘There are quarter tones here, you’ve got to be careful,’” Greenwood recalls. But he has tried not to be too careful: the notion of appropriation — that he shouldn’t be inserting himself into other musical cultures — receives short shrift. 

“If I worried about that, then I wouldn’t play electric guitars or use blues scales or even use violins, which are Italian,” he says. “Where do you stop? It’s sort of insane. I can’t just stick to morris dancing music and accordions, which probably aren’t English either. It’s about being respectful. But there’s also something slightly exhausting about the respectful world music recordings which are done so tastefully and without any dirt or passion or energy. We were keen to avoid that.”

Greenwood and Tassa are also keen to avoid politics. However, this is surely a forlorn hope, considering the disharmonious state of the wider world in which Jarak Qaribak lands with its beguiling fantasies of Arab-Israeli harmony.

An unwitting emblem of that dissonance is found in the album itself. It has been mixed by Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s long-term producer who, by a curious coincidence, also works with Roger Waters. The ex-Pink Floyd leader is rock’s most prominent, and controversial, pro-Palestine activist. He supports a cultural boycott of Israel and criticised Radiohead when they played in Tel Aviv in 2017, with Tassa as support.

“It’s sad when you’re a progressive and you see fellow progressives sort of gleefully silencing orchestras and artists and film-makers, even when they are themselves film-makers and artists and musicians,” Greenwood says of Waters. “That doesn’t feel progressive to me.”

Jarak Qaribak takes its name from an Arabic proverb that it’s better to have a close neighbour than a distant relative. (Its English language equivalent, Greenwood drily notes, is the mind-your-own-business adage “Good fences make good neighbours”.) Neighbourliness is currently in short supply in many of the countries spanned by the songs. This applies not just to Israel with its rightwing nationalist government, but also Arab nations beset by warfare and autocracies.

Palestinian vocalist Nour Freteikh appears on the album, singing the Lebanese song “Taq ou-Dub”. Her presence goes implicitly against the grain of the Israeli government’s suppression of Palestinian rights. But Tassa doesn’t intend it as a political message.

“I believe that music in some ways can move things, but I haven’t done it thinking like I’m making a political statement. We’re not politicians, we’re making music. If it will somehow contribute to better neighbourship, so be it. But our first mission is to make music,” he says.

Like the films that he remembers watching on Fridays, Arabic pop was once staple listening in Israel. The Israeli song on Jarak Qaribak is an example of that. “Ahibak”, sung by Safae Essafi from Dubai, was written by an Iraqi musician in the 1960s and recorded by the Israeli Arab Orchestra. 

“It shows how profoundly Arabic music was in the Israeli culture,” Tassa says, speaking in English. The past tense might be a slip, but it’s telling. His and Greenwood’s love letter to Arabic music also comes across as a love letter to a cosmopolitan Israel that once was, or perhaps might have been, and could still aspire to be.

jarakqaribak.com