Thursday, January 25, 2001 The Jerusalem Post
	Cogan brings Israel’s pop past to life
	By JONATHAN KRASHINSKY For someone who was an Israeli pop institution back before the Yom Kippur War, Susan Cogan still looks pretty good. Her formerly dark hair may have given way to silver, but her golden voice has only improved with time. After 30 years of singing and performing professionally, first in Israel as part of the hit duo 'Susan and Fran,' and later in her native Canada, Cogan isn't looking much older, but she's sounding a whole lot wiser. Returning to Israel to tour and promote her new album, Mayim, she comes back to a country where her old folk songs are such standards that many radio listeners may be barely aware that she left in the first place. "Susan and Fran had such an unusual success, as far as the Israeli audience knew, we were still here all throughout the Eighties," says Cogan. "It seems we've had a presence here all along. " Her return to Canada - she currently lives on Salt Spring Island, off the coast of British Columbia - was motivated by many factors, including her desire to live close to nature. "If I lived here, I'd proba-bly be off in some obscure corner," she muses. More potent, however, was the pull of her art. "I never felt as comfortable being a poet in Hebrew," she says, with a hint of sadness in her voice. She went on to release a number of solo endeavors, beginning with Susan Cogan One and following up with Space Age Primitives and Gypsy Hill. Both received critical acclaim, if not necessarily making earth-shattering sales. However, says Cogan, Israeli music is still at the heart of what really makes her tick. "I was raised on Shoshana Darnari," she says, invoking the Yemenite singer whose music left an indelible imprint on the turbulent years surrounding Israel's independence. "I would sneak down to the record player - I wasn't allowed to use it by myself - and put on her albums." Now, Cogan cites numerous modem artists as adding to her inspiration and worthy of her respect, including Canadian megastar Alanis Morissette and folkrock queen Ani DiFranco. "Alanis Morissette can really write a lyric," enthuses Cogan, who also confesses to having "a real musical crush on Sting." However, influences aside, she has never strayed far from what is in her heart. "Israeli music is my cultural roots, somehow," she states flatly, as if, despite her Diaspora upbringing, it is an inarguable fact. "That's what prompted me to put together this CD of old Israeli songs." THE HEART of Mayim isn't Cogan's original work, although she did collaborate or write adaptations for a couple of the songs, including the concluding title track. Rather, it is a showcase of old Israeli favorites from Cogan's childhood and the first 25 or so years of this country's existence, mixed together with more traditional tunes from the Diaspora. The range of styles that Cogan showcases on Mayim: is commendable - including jazz, South American bossa nova, traditional Yiddish, adapted horas, and old folk standards like "Donna Donna." Cogan's fantastic liquid-clear voice flows throughout, like the water that gives the album its name; she is an accomplished singer, whose skill alone is worth the proverbial price of admission. The technical skill that both she and her band display is equally impressive. The soft, classical style guitar work, especially, is meticulously perfect, and dovetails splendidly and subtly with Cogan's voice in a manner that many pop musicians aren't anywhere close to matching. If anything, Mayim exhibits a superfluity of subtlety, for rarely does any of the music emerge with much raw energy or punch. The tone of the album is set early on, with the track "Hatizkor" ("Remember") and its somber,
					Canadian - Israeli Susan Cogan has returned here to tour and promote her new album 'Mayim'
					wistful tones of a woman pining for her lost love. Songs like "Magic Carpet," the hora "Sovi," and "K'sheyavo" ("When he comes") bring up the energy a little, but these are over-balanced by tracks like "Laila Laila" and the concluding track "Mayim," which though beautiful is positively somnambulant. Overall, the album doesn't exhibit the dynamism of other Cogan recordings and may well be too subdued for the tastes of some younger listeners. This shouldn't bother your average folk-music fan since most pop music is long on energy and short on talent, an accusation which could never be leveled against Cogan. COGAN has found Israel markedly different from when she left. Her natural inclination is to speak more about music than the oppressively unavoidable politics here. She offers a political tidbit in a musical milieu, though: "Jews and Arabs have so much to learn from each other... remember the Hebrew golden rule, and open your ears to Arabic music." She remembers an Israel of the Seventies where she was so well known that "it really got to the point that I didn't like at all," says Cogan. "Now, no one recognizes me, and I don't miss it at all!" More than her personal career, however, she recalls a country still young and flush with its victory in the Six Day War, with a culture, musical and otherwise, that was still basically a mix of imported cultures from the various points of origin of Israel's cosmopolitan Jewish mosaic. Is there a distinctly national style of music now? "It was too close in my generation," she says. "Everything was too new. My generation was pioneering a mixing of styles... it took another generation to get back to some sort of uniquely Israeli music." However, Cogan strongly rejects the idea of a "creeping Americanization;" instead, she insists, musically at least, the world is moving in the other direction. "I see the opposite - the Americanization of music has been going on for years," she says, calling to mind the widespread popularity in Israel during the Sixties and Seventies of her American folk-star contemporaries. "You listen to Israeli rock songs, and if you didn't listen to the words, you would never know where it was from. Now comes the backlash against the homogenization of music across the planet." Which is good, according to Cogan, because local music has its own identity and deserves the attention that she has always sought to bring to it. "There is a uniquely Israeli music, not just a compilation of styles. It exists, and I hope that I captured that on my album... the Israelis who hear these songs remember them, and I feel that they were bubbling up from a very deep place."