Micha Biton has put in the roadwork and paid all his dues, and then some.
The singer-songwriter, 59, has traveled a long and winding road to get where he is today, physically and emotionally, and strutted his stuff here there and everywhere around the country. Next up is his berth in the Oud Days Festival, which takes place at venues around the capital under the auspices of Confederation House, on December 27-30. Biton stars in the curtain raiser (December 27 at 6 p.m.) when he leads a quintet in a roll-out of his personal and creative story.
The four-day event was put together by Confederation House CEO and artistic director Effie Benaya to replace the far grander annual Jerusalem International Oud Festival, which was due to take place last month and would have presented a glittering array of artists from here and abroad. But, it must be said, Oud Days is no makeshift surrogate offering. The artists Benaya has called upon to entertain us at shows at Confederation House, the Yellow Submarine, and the Mazkeka can hold their own in any ethnic musical company anywhere in the world.
The festival roster includes celebrated ethnic rocker Ehud Banai; veteran pop, folk, ethnic music pianist, flutist, and singer Shem-Tov Levy; the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod; and internationally acclaimed pianist, conductor, and composer Nizar Elkhater, who plays on all sides of the Arabic and Western classical musical tracks. And there’s some higher energy contemporary stuff lined up for the Mazkeka spot in downtown Jerusalem with the multidisciplinary Land show (December 28 at 9 p.m.) featuring a high-octane blend of spoken word, rap, hip-hop, and liturgical material. On the morrow, the Mazkeka hosts the Acik Telli (“open string” in Turkish) trio playing classical Turkish and Sufi music.
Being Biton
Micha Biton has quite a life story to relate, right up to the challenging present day. The guitarist-vocalist was born in Sderot to Moroccan-born parents. He grew up in a warm, loving domestic environment where music and merrymaking were very much the order of the day – that is, betwixt the logistics of a large family. “We were seven boys and three girls so, for example, if there was a brit [circumcision], we’d have it at home,” Biton recalls. “My father would improvise tables and, of course, you couldn’t have a Moroccan celebration without music. We’d have a band with an oud player, and a percussionist on darbouka, and others.”
The impromptu musical gatherings opened the door to a magical world of melodies and rhythms for Biton, and he quickly got in on the act himself. “My father would get me up to sing with the band from the age of five, and I soon became a sort of attraction.” The kid clearly had the requisite gifts and got all the seasoned parental encouragement he needed. “My father nurtured my talent. He wasn’t a musician himself, but he’s had a café in Morocco and would host all sorts of artists there. He was very musical and loved music. He had a strong bond with artists and was very sociable. He loved playing the host.”
Not a bad domestic backdrop for a budding musician. “I think all of that fed into who I became,” Biton observes.
However, tragedy struck a few years later. Biton’s father died suddenly when the youngster was just nine years old, and his world was turned on its head. The distraught boy began playing truant and couldn’t keep his mind on his classwork. That was hardly surprising, considering the seismic emotional shift he’d experienced. “My mother was left to take care of 10 kids, and my father took my [musical] dream with him when he died,” Biton says.
Matters took an even more dramatic turn when, on the advice of a social worker, Biton found himself farmed out to a foster family in Jerusalem. That was tough on him, and he went through the emotional mill at the beginning of his Jerusalem sojourn, despite the improvement in creature comforts. “It was a very difficult transition for me. It was a very tough crisis for me. I remember my first night there was very frightening. Instead of being curled up with my siblings in the same bed – head to toe, I was suddenly in a bed of my own, on my own.”
However, it wasn’t a total disaster. Far from it. Biton’s new temporary home belonged to famed children’s book author Galila Ron-Feder Amit who, naturally, appreciated the arts and showered the displaced child with warmth and love. Biton’s story found its way into Ron-Feder Amit’s oeuvre when she based her 1976 book To Myself on the Sderot boy she took into her home and heart.
For Biton, finding his place at school, and in a totally new and different social environment, was something of a rite of passage. The mostly Ashkenazi classmates made fun of his Moroccan accent, which he quickly tried to refashion to more socially acceptable diction. Eventually, his musical gifts came to the fore, and the newcomer from Sderot was admitted into the fold. “There was a social hour, and the teacher wanted to get me interested in what was going on, so I sang a song called ‘Chaneleh Hitbalbala’ [Confused Chaneleh],” Biton recalls. The somewhat risqué lyrics were written in the 1930s by Israel Prize laureate poet and playwright Natan Alterman and became one of the country’s first Mizrahi music hits.
The impromptu classroom performance received a dismissive official response but still paved the way to Biton’s social emancipation. “There’s a line that goes ‘How come there’s a brit mila when she’s still a virgin?’” Biton laughs. “The teacher stopped me right there and scolded me for using such words.” But it was a different story the next day in the schoolyard. “The guys from the class invited me to play soccer with them for the first time – actually, I was a pretty useful player,” he chuckles. “Things changed, and suddenly I had friends.”
Being in the mainstream thick of things in Jerusalem rather than remote Sderot also meant that Biton had more immediate access to the evolving Israeli Songbook, as well as imports by the likes of stellar singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
Down south
Biton’s road to artistic expression took him to the Beit Zvi School for the Performing Arts in Ramat Gan. But, true to his unwavering determination to follow his own singular path through life and music, he abandoned the fleshpots and relative comfort of being where the entertainment action was and returned to Sderot before relocating even farther away from the center of the country to Netiv Ha’asara, the closest Israeli community to the Gaza Strip.
On Oct. 7, Biton was at home with his wife, four children, and two grandchildren when Hamas terrorists began infiltrating the moshav. His house, at the northern end of the moshav, was very close to where the terrorists began their murderous rampage. Miraculously, the killers passed by the Biton household, leaving the family terrified and isolated for hours, but physically unharmed, before they were eventually rescued by IDF soldiers.
Despite that harrowing experience and the constant missile attacks and red alerts he and his family have endured over the years, Biton does not regret his decision to return to the South. “So many people from the center of the country have told me I was crazy to try to develop a career in music from the South. When I was at Beit Zvi, I realized it couldn’t work for me being somewhere so cold. I needed the warmth, the human warmth, of my community in the South.”
And so it came to be, with a little help from some like-minded professionals. In the late 1980s and 1990s, a music scene began to emerge in and around Sderot. The Teapacks Mizrahi-rock band was one of the first to blaze a trail for the region, and Biton followed suit.
“I knew the South was where I was going to achieve the breakthrough, and I did it!” he exclaims with undisguised pride. “I did it with my band Tanara.” The group’s self-titled debut album, which came out in 1996, offered an intoxicating mix of rock and Biton’s Moroccan roots with such hits as “Ezor Dimdumim” (Twilight Zone) and “Atta Lecha Ve’anee Lee” (Each on His Own), cementing the southern rocker’s place in the popular music domain.
The southern local scene was well and truly bouncing at the time, and a large-scale rock concert took place in Sderot later that year. That was an unprecedented event in the Tel Aviv-centric commercial music sector. Biton eventually went his own solo way and continued to resist calls to set up camp in downtown Tel Aviv. Instead, he devoted himself to nurturing new generations of southern artists, establishing a performing arts facility in Sderot.
Over the years, he has maintained a busy solo performing and recording schedule, putting out three albums under his name, and even published his autobiography last year. Not bad for a traumatized social misfit kid who refused to budge an inch from his chosen personal and creative path.
WHEN I ask him about how he views his musical road over the past three decades, he characteristically initially references his quotidian life as the formative platform for his artistic endeavor. “Of course, after I got married and the children were born, new things began to form [in the music]. Over the years, the content has always changed shape and appearance. But I think one of the things that hasn’t changed is the songs that come from that time when I was a kid with an unusual life.”
Biton continues to mine that emotionally turbulent and rich biographical seam. “In my latest album, which is called “Baderech el Atzmee” [On My Way to Myself], I tell my story, about a kid who is sent to a foster home far away from Sderot, and all the things he went through.” True to his warts-and-all style, Biton spells things out per se. One of the stanzas from the title tracks reads: “On my way to myself, the sky did not fall in. The bed is so big, the fright at night. On my way to myself, I am riding a bike. Hey, black kid, want a beating?” That spells out that trying character-forming episode as is.
All these years down the road, Biton is coming back to Jerusalem for Oud Days to show us just how far he has come since those trying youthful times. He is looking forward to it for all sorts of reasons. “That past is part of who I am today. And Galila will be in the audience at Confederation House,” he smiles. “I have always related to the Oud Festival as something special. It is a great honor for me to be invited to perform there. Coming back to Jerusalem, and Confederation House, that connects all sorts of dots for me.”
For now, Biton is living the life of an evacuee, but he says that he and his family plan to return to Netiv Ha’asara just as soon as they possibly can. He says he has tried his musical hand at generating some goodwill between the neighbors. “I have tried to set up some kind of collaboration with musicians from the other side, but it hasn’t worked out yet. They are suffering so much, not because of us but because of the [Hamas] people that control them. They have to be involved. They have no choice.
“The ones that came here, that murdered, raped, and looted, were not just soldiers in uniform; there were simple country folk, too. That really broke me. Until they have some hope or some other way, they will all be in darkness there.”
Perhaps at some stage, Biton’s dreams of cross-border musical confluence will become a constructive reality. One can only hope. ❖
For tickets and more information about Oud Days: *6226, tickets.bimot.co.il, www.confederationhouse.org and (02) 539-9360 ext. 5
