A Review and Retrospective on Shani Shavit’s Performance at Teder (May 26)
June 9, 2023
Few places in Tel Aviv are as suited to music that transcends the official boundaries of a standard gig as Teder. Tucked into the courtyard of Romano House, it has operated for years somewhere between a club, a bar, a radio station, and a gathering spot for the city’s musicians. Artists perform there in countless configurations, the audience ranges from those pressed against the stage to those watching from afar, and even a planned release show manages to retain the loose, laid-back feel of a Friday afternoon hang.
It was an especially fitting backdrop for Shani Shavit on May 26. The bassist, singer, songwriter, and arranger came to Teder to celebrate the release of her single “Basar Vadam” (“Flesh and Blood”), with Sagiv Cohen joining as a guest alongside a band made up of musicians whose collective resumes could easily fill several other stages that same weekend.
Shavit has been a steady presence in Israeli music for nearly two decades. Her career has never followed a single, straight path. She has played with singer-songwriters and jazz musicians, embarked on international tours with Ester Rada, spent years performing with Miki Gavrielov, worked extensively with Odelia Berlin, and became a regular musical partner of Sagiv Cohen. You can find her in recording studios, at festivals, and in major concert productions with equal frequency—sometimes as the bassist anchoring the band, and in other settings as a singer, arranger, or an active force shaping the music around her.
On paper, this amounts to an unusually broad resume. In practice, it is easier to hear the connections between these different worlds than to explain them.
Cohen is a particularly good example. Shavit has been playing with him since 2013, and over the course of a decade, the two have shared far more than the standard relationship between a bandleader and a sideman. She has played bass in his core band and joined him for a series of larger productions where Yemenite music met Israeli pop, soul, jazz, and Mediterranean musical traditions.
Perhaps the most memorable of these was Cohen’s long-running joint show with Daklon. Until the COVID-19 pandemic cut its run short, the production toured the country, bridging Cohen with one of the foundational voices of Yemenite and Mizrahi music in Israel. For a significant period of its run, Ahuva Ozeri was a regular guest performer, up until her passing in 2016.
From “Silsulei Pa’amonim,” with Sagiv Cohen, Daklon and the late Ahuva Ozeri.
There was something deeply moving about seeing Daklon and Ozeri together in that setting. Both belonged to the generation that helped establish the sound and vocabulary of Yemenite and Mizrahi music in Israel; Cohen represented a younger generation that grew up on their records and carried those influences into his own songwriting. This was no museum-like preservation of a musical tradition. The music passed from generation to generation right in front of the audience, with musicians like Shavit helping to give the classic repertoire the living, contemporary feel of a full band.
This partnership continued across many other contexts. Over the years, Shavit and Cohen repeatedly found themselves on the same stage for major productions and special shows, including tributes to Zohar Argov and Ahuva Ozeri. They also performed together in a concert dedicated to the works of Shalom Shabazi, alongside artists such as Ester Rada and A-WA. Their shared musical playground was often Yemenite classics seasoned with the genres both love—reggae, funk, soul, R&B, and other streams of Black music—a blend that provided them with a rich common ground over ten years of playing together.
At Teder, the direction of that relationship simply reversed: Cohen came to sing one of Shavit’s songs.
The Band on Stage
Joining Shavit at Teder were Adi Rennert on keyboards, Shahar Haziza on drums, Guy Strier on guitar, and Yair Tzabari on oud and percussion. Shavit played bass and sang, while Cohen joined her for the two songs at the center of his guest appearance.
It is hard to imagine a band better suited to music that refuses to stay in a single stylistic neighborhood.
● Shahar Haziza: An extraordinary jazz drummer who feels equally at home in contemporary music and indie, bringing a level of technical mastery that never feels the need to turn a song into a display of chops.
● Adi Rennert: A pianist, keyboardist, arranger, and one of the country’s premier musical directors. His musical range and skills have made him a unique presence across decades of Israeli productions – television, recordings and live shows.
● Guy Strier: Brings a completely different sensitivity. A formidable groove and rock ’n’ roll guitarist known for his work with Karolina and Ester Rada, he has a way of coloring an arrangement without cluttering it—adding just the right amount of grit, movement, or texture while keeping the core of the song front and center.
● Yair Tzabari: Whose presence explains a lot about the distinct character of this ensemble. An exceptional percussionist, drummer, and singer known from Avihu Pinhasov’s Rhythm Club, he also works with Shavit in Cohen’s band, where he plays drums. At Teder, holding an oud and percussion instruments, another side of his musical vocabulary was revealed.
None of these musicians require a stylistic roadmap. Jazz, rock, groove, Middle Eastern music, and contemporary sounds are simply part of their daily working life. That matters in Shavit’s music, where the distance between genres can sometimes be crossed in just a few bars.
The Music
“Basar Vadam,” released on May 15, is a duet that seems to understand precisely why Shavit and Cohen’s voices belong together. Its opening carries an almost Caribbean feel that somehow still sounds distinctly Middle Eastern, as the rhythm moves in circles beneath a melody that leaves plenty of room for both singers to maintain their individual character. As the arrangement builds, it gathers momentum, eventually landing on a grittier groove with a touch of African feel.
After “Basar Vadam,” Cohen remained on stage for “Shamayim Kmo Chultza” (“Sky Like a Shirt”). It was a natural choice. The song, released in November 2022 as Shavit’s previous single, also carries a Yemenite flavor interwoven with funk and reggae, and Cohen’s voice blended into it effortlessly. If “Basar Vadam” was written as a duet from the start, the joy here was hearing how an existing song took on an extra voice that sounded as if it had been at home there all along.
Those were the two songs that defined Cohen’s featured role most clearly, but the show itself ranged far beyond them. The set moved between rock, jazz, blues, Latin music, Middle Eastern sounds, and rhythm-rich arrangements without ever turning the evening into a dry survey of influences. With this particular group of musicians, shifting between styles was simply part of the vocabulary available on stage.
And that has been true of Shavit’s professional life for years.
Her time with Ester Rada took her across Europe, Russia, and China to major festival stages, performing music shaped by soul, funk, jazz, and Ethiopian traditions. It also placed her in a band where rhythm was a central element, requiring far more from the bassist than merely providing a steady foundation.
Alongside these collaborations, Shavit worked for about seven years with Miki Gavrielov, one of the most enduring and significant figures in Israeli popular music, touring the country and recording with him. That repertoire belonged to a completely different history of Israeli music, demanding a different style of playing: songs carrying decades of cultural memory, performed before audiences who often knew every single line.
Her ongoing work with Odelia Berlin exists in yet another world. Shavit has participated in Berlin’s productions since 2016, including the major women’s concert series “Ochila,” performed before audiences of thousands with a band featuring some of Israel’s finest female musicians. In addition to playing bass and singing, Shavit works on these shows with a talkback system, calling cues for the band. On other projects with Berlin, she has also contributed arrangements and taken on musical direction duties.
It is a role that is nearly invisible to the audience, but musicians immediately recognize its importance.
A large production can feature magnificent players, yet it risks losing its shape without someone inside the band constantly keeping track of what needs to happen next.
In recent years, Shavit also joined “Ha’Ivriyot” (The Hebrew Women), an all-female supergroup composed of leading Israeli musicians. The ensemble creates deeply moving tributes to Israeli classics through innovative arrangements, drawing enthusiastic crowds in halls and festivals nationwide.
Teder itself is no random stop in this story. Shavit has performed there in other contexts as well, including an event marking the opening of Hebrew Book Week alongside a broad lineup of Israeli artists, including Berry Sakharof, Miri Mesika, and Yoav Itzhak. It is precisely the kind of eclectic collaboration that feels right at home in Romano House, a place where the boundaries between different music scenes have always seemed a bit less rigid than elsewhere in the city.
A Natural Home
Perhaps that is why the May performance felt so natural there.
There was no need to decide whether the oud made a song Middle Eastern, whether a bassline belonged to funk, or if a particular rhythmic shift came from somewhere across the Mediterranean or much further west. Those are questions that might be useful later; in the courtyard itself, they were secondary.
What mattered was the group of musicians Shavit assembled around her and the musical history each of them brought to the stage:
- Cohen: Brought ten years of shared stages and a connection to a Yemenite musical tradition both players know intimately.
- Tzabari: Brought percussion, oud, and familiarity with that same world from a different angle.
- Haziza: Could shift seamlessly from the freedom of jazz into the groove of a song without losing his identity.
- Strier: Brought a rock ’n’ roll instinct and impeccable taste.
- Rennert: As usual, seemed capable of finding precisely the harmonic or textural space left to fill.
And Shavit stood at the center, bass in hand, leading a band whose members’ personal musical histories were as varied as the songs they played.
On a warm May evening at Teder, all of it came together into an exceptionally good band—and an exceptionally good place to hear those songs.
