by Keren Setton
JERUSALEM, June 17 (Xinhua) -- Eyal el Wahab has been playing guitar since five. Later in life, he became a cellist. Four years ago, he felt he was missing something in his musical journey, something about his family roots in Yemen.
When the Wahab family and some other 50,000 Yemeni Jews emigrated to Israel shortly after the Jewish-majority country's establishment in 1948, most of them were in dire conditions. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of their descendants in Israel.
For years as a musician, Wahab did not feel an attachment to his ancestors in Yemen. Now at the age of 38 and well rooted in Israel, a strong sense of connection has found him.
To quench the longing for the past, he came up with the idea of performing Yemenite music with instruments made of everyday utensils. He would spend hours and sometimes days in repurposing saucepans, cans, and barrels into fully functional percussion and string instruments.
He then formed a Yemenite folk music band, performing on these homemade instruments he sees as symbols of the basic conditions in Yemen.
Notes played with a recycled pickle can is melodious sound, and such simple instruments are more in tune with the Yemenite music, the artist told Xinhua in his workshop in central Israel.
The genre "comes from a very simple place where the music is based on groove, on beats, on singing," he said. "It is very simple, it comes from the soul."
"I wanted to illustrate this ... simplicity by taking stuff you find around you. I wanted to make something out of what you have, not buying, not consuming anything, and to use this concept to make music," Wahab noted.
"I want to contribute or give them to people that don't have anything, and maybe teach them music," he said, hoping to display the tools in a museum one day.
El Khat, the band el Wahab formed and named after a leafy plant that grows in Yemen, has released two albums of traditional folk music.
He also founded an orchestra of 15 musicians which incorporates his musical instruments and plays old Yemenite music as well as new original pieces. ■
