As one of Israel’s finest peace-promoting ensembles prepares to grace the UK, we speak to founder Tom Cohen to discover what drives their distinctive sound

In 2009, a few years after graduating from the Jerusalem Academy of Music, Israeli composer and conductor Tom Cohen founded the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West (JOEW). His mission? To create “a new musical language” that would represent the capital in all its diversity. “I wanted to melt together the best of Western harmony with Arabic passion and the classical world. Something that would speak for Jerusalem, as a place where all these styles live.”

Cohen’s love for combining cultures is rooted in his Be’er Sheva upbringing, in southern Israel. “I grew up in a family that’s half Ashkenazi and half Mizrahi,” he explains. “One of the great things about my childhood house is that you could hear The Beatles played just as much as [French composer] Camille Saint-Saëns or [Egyptian singer] Umm Kulthum.” It wasn’t until he started studying at the academy, however, that he realised people pigeonholed music and considered certain styles more important than others – a realisation that would end up informing his “life mission”, eventually leading to the formation of JOEW.

It’s not just musical differences that Cohen works hard to bring together – he feels the same about religion. “One of the ways I deal with identity – and mine in particular – is to look at my late grandfather,” he says, speaking of his father’s father, who immigrated to Israel from Iraq. “He wasn’t religious at all. In fact, he was radically secular. He didn’t fast on Yom Kippur, for example; but at the same time, he was very religious when it came to Arabic music and, in particular, Iraqi and Egyptian music. So, here you have this character of an Israeli-Iraqi Jew, who is Jewish by birth, but doesn’t practise in any way, yet he’s immersed within the culture and feels completely at home with it. That [sort of] character doesn’t get enough exposure today. If it did, it may offer a solution to many of the problems we face.”

“It’s rhythmic and groovy and full of passion”

— Tom Cohen

Despite the multi-cultural ethos of the orchestra, and the fact that its name references the grave divide between Arab and Israeli communities in Jerusalem, Cohen is careful when touching on politics. “Not because I’m afraid,” he clarifies. “I’m a very political person. It’s just that I’m not speaking only on behalf of myself, I’m speaking on behalf of the orchestra.” That’s around 60 members, if you count the stand-ins and people working behind the scenes. It’s an awful lot of differing opinions to keep at bay on a daily basis, so it comes as no surprise that Cohen has set one particular rule. “It’s simple, but makes everybody’s lives a lot better,” he says. “That is to accept the fact that each person can be and believe whatever they want, as long as they don’t harm anybody else. As long as we agree on this, it enables us to, for example, perform in a Palestinian village one day, play liturgical Jewish music for an Orthodox cultural centre another. We can play a concert of Édith Piaf songs, followed by an homage to Dana International, the first Israeli trans singer.” Or even a show at Barbican Hall, which is exactly where JOEW will be in February.

The orchestra will be performing for one night only in London, and will be accompanied by Israeli jazz pianist Omri Mor (“there’s no other word to describe him but genius,” says Cohen) and Mehdi Nassouli, a prominent figure in modern Gnawa (Moroccan religious music), who plays guembri (a bass made from camel skin), which resembles “a big smile with a human attached to it”. Having these two together on stage alongside the orchestra is like “playing with Batman, Spider-Man and Superman”, says Cohen. “And at the Barbican! It’s a few layers of dreams coming true at the same time.”

So, we know who will be there, but what can we expect musically? Something that’s incredibly complicated to play, but wonderfully simple to enjoy, of course. “It’s rhythmic and groovy and full of passion,” Cohen enthuses. “It’s music that the African slaves – the same people who brought the best music in the world to Cuba, Brazil, the States and Morocco – blended together with their spiritual beliefs to create a complex and enchanting musical style that’s not usually performed in such a big orchestral structure.” It is not just the sound of Jerusalem, says Cohen, “it is the sound of the new Middle East”.

By Danielle Goldstein

Jerusalem Orchestra East & West plays Barbican Hall on Sunday 5 February. 7.30pm. From £15, £5 under-25s. Barbican Hall, EC2Y 8DS. barbican.org.uk

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of JR alongside interviews with other members of the orchestra.