- Video: Anything Goes
- Video: Oh, Lord
Press inquiries:
ronkadishpr@gmail.com
songsforcrickets@gmail.com
With roots and upbringing spanning Yemen, Israel and the United States, Achinoam Nini aka Noa, is Israel’s most highly acclaimed international singer, songwriter, percussionist, speaker and activist.
Together with her longstanding musical collaborator Gil Dor, accomplished musician and co-founder of the Rimon School of music, Noa has released 16 critically acclaimed albums, performed hundreds of concerts the world over, graced some of the most important and prestigious stages like Carnegie Hall and the White House, and performed for three Popes. She has been mentored by Pat Metheny and Quincy Jones and shared the stage with a long list of international musical icons, including Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli and Sting.
In addition to her prolific musical activity, Noa is considered Israel’s most prominent cultural advocate of dialogue and co-existence, her “Voice of Peace”.
Noa was the only major artists to agree to perform in the fateful Peace Rally where Yitzchak Rabin was murdered, a shattering event that changed her life. She was the first Jew to perform in the Vatican for an audience of millions, singing her own lyrics to Bach/Gounod’s Ave Maria, a song that has become an intrinsic part of her career and mission: building bridges and breaking walls between cultures and religions. Among the endless activities she has been involved in to foster peace and dialogue, her historic participation the 2009 Eurovision song contest stands out, representing Israel together with Israeli-Palestinian artist Mira Awad with her original song “There must be another way”, in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Among her many awards is Commander of Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, one of Italy’s highest honors, Pilgrim of Peace from The Franciscan order in Assisi (awarded in the past to Bill Gates and Mother Theresa), and the Christal Award from the World Economic Forum. Noa is Israel’s first ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and is active as board-member and public advocate of a score of Human Rights and Peace organizations in Israel and abroad.
Noa is married to her childhood sweetheart, Dr. Asher Barak. Together they have three children, Ayehli, Enea and Yum.
Connect with Noa:
After 30 years of performances and recordings, Noa and guitarist Gil Dor release their first, and long awaited, true jazz album: Afterallogy
Catch the World Premiere livestream from the legendary Blue Note club on May 1 after you hear what Noa herself says.
Noa and Gil have been working together for 30 years. They met in the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary music in Ramat Ha Sharon in 1989. Gil was the co-founder of the school, the academic director and a highly respected musician and educator fluent in myriad styles but specializing in jazz. Noa was an aspiring 20 year old singer and songwriter, who had recently moved to Israel form the US, completed her military service in a Military Band, and came to Rimon in search of education and collaboration. She was immediately labeled a ”jazz singer” due to her proficiency in English, her natural improvisational abilities and her inbred connection to “The American Songbook”. Having been born in Israel to a Yemenite family, and raised in NY until age 17, Jazz is part of her identity, as natural as her Yemenite and Hebrew roots.
The duo’s first concert was in a jazz festival in Tel Aviv, Feb 8th, 1990, where they performed standard tunes with unorthodox arrangements, and some of Noa’s original compositions. That first night was an enormous success that set the stage for the incredible journey to come.
Their first international album was produced by Pat Metheny, one of the most highly respected jazz musicians in the world, but did not include standard tunes, rather focusing on Noa’s songwriting.
Over the years, Noa and Gil explored many different regions of music, wrote and performed hundreds of songs, worked with ensembles ranging from acoustic trio to bass and drum quartet to symphony orchestra, explored and fused different styles, sounds and languages, always reaching for that unexplainable, unpredictable moment of magic every musician lives for. It has always been impossible to categorize them.
Afterallogy (April 30, Naïve/Believe) is another step in their fascinating journey, where they have put the musical language they have developed and their past experience at the service of these great, classic jazz tunes, and added a few originals as well. The release of Afterallogy will be celebrated with a livestream concert via the legendary jazz club The Blue Note’s Terminal 4 in Tel Aviv on May 1.
The name, beyond paying homage to the greats that inspired them (Charlie Parkers “Ornithology”), is a statement about life and music, exacerbated by the Covid 10 crisis:
After all is said and done, after 30 years, after a pandemic which shattered, jolted and stripped the world bare, after thousands of kilometers travelled and many more thousands of notes played and sung, what remains?
A deep love and respect for great music and the greatness in music, a deep love for the humanity that is brought to life by it and elevated and illuminated in whoever experiences it.
A deep appreciation for the gift of friendship…for a unique partnership, for the power and resonance that brought and kept them together all these years.
And that curiosity and passion, that meticulous quest to unveil the deepest mysteries of music that drives them always onwards.
Afterallogy is the first part of a Noa and Gil’s jazz project. The are currently working on part 2, which will include their band and be more improvisational and experimental.
Press for Afterallogy
- Musical News, 4/1/21, Noa – Afterallogy (Naive)
- Republic of Jazz, 4/14/21, Noa and Gil Dor present online the world premier of their new jazz album, “Afterallogy”, live (Saturday, May 1 2021)
- Take Effect Reviews, 5/5/21, N.O.A
- WMNF Sunday Simcha, 5/9/21, Interview
- The Oakland Press, 4/30/21, New Music: Thomas Rhett, Julia Michaels, DJ Khaled, Royal Blood, more…
- Cleveland.com, 4/27/21, New album from country star Thomas Rhett tops this week’s new releases
- FYI Music News. 4/15/21, FYI Schedule of Upcoming Releases: April 15, 2021