All about that folk

Folk music was never played in Philippa Bacal’s London home, but this didn’t stop her from sneaking out to listen to it at a local university or while watching the 1967 movie The Graduate.

Decades later, Bacal is still listening to one of her favorite genres of music and has spent the last six years as one of the organizers of Folk Music Evenings in Jerusalem along with Dena Maltinisky, Robin Cohen, Angela Ben-Gur, Hachmoni, Yehuda Brumberg, Cecile Panzer and Elazar Brandt, who have helped keep the events going.

“There has been a folk club here since the early 1970s,” Bacal explains, noting that it has switched hands over the years. “It began when people from the States who liked folk music came to Israel and wanted to hear it.”

In addition to folk, this lover of bluegrass and British artists of the 1960s like Petula Clark rattles off with ease a list of famous and up-and-coming musicians who have performed over the years at festivals, house concerts, sing-alongs and the monthly Tuesday evening club: Tom Paxton, The Taverners, The Sands, Sean Altman, Lazer Lloyd, Judi and Lynn Lewis, the Hazel Hill String Band, Ro’i and Inbal Zultan, Shelley Ellen and many, many more.

“I have a list of hundreds of acts,” she notes. “People recommend people or I have names from other folk clubs – for example, in Tel Aviv.”

The first event Bacal organized was a 2010 hoot (short for hootenanny) in Gan Hashoshanim. During the event, she says, musicians performed 10- to 15-minute sets “to give listeners a taste of different types of folk music.” Now there is a twice-yearly hoot, in July and August.

The folk-music lover believes that the presence of this music adds to the culture of Jerusalem and Israel, but needs not be mired in politics.

“I don’t think music should be political,” she says of the music. “A lot of people think folk music is background music, but it’s not. You want to hear the music and the message. The artists write very personal songs. I think it’s something we can share with each other.”

Raised in a Zionist home where her father collected money for the Jewish National Fund, Bacal arrived in Israel in 1971.

“My whole environment was Israel,” the former B’nei Akiva girl explains. “It was always, ‘Wow, Israel!’ It was the place where things were blossoming in the desert and wars were being won. I wanted to live away from home. I was young and naïve and wanted to enjoy life. I didn’t have a care in the world.”

When she arrived after high school, it was with four or five albums, including those of Peter, Paul and Mary, and Simon and Garfunkel. She began attending events such as the Jacob’s Ladder Festival. It all complemented her love of folk and Balkan dancing.

“I like different cultures and different people,” Bacal says. “At the folk club, we have things in common, and it’s a very cultured group. We also are fortunate to have the cooperation and collaboration of volunteers and musicians from all over the country that help make the folk music evenings very special, including Dr. Eli Marcus Blues and Judi and Lynn Lewis, among others who are too numerous to mention.”

A semi-retired English teacher who received her bachelor’s degree in education at Baruch College in New York, Bacal says: “We want to be a place to support young, new musicians. We would love to attract younger people and expose them to this music.”

Toward that end, she has reached out to the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, a Jerusalem-based high school, and Hebrew Union College’s cantorial program to introduce them to music that has demonstrated its staying power over many decades and multiple generations of music lovers.

“Our contribution to the Jerusalem scene,” Bacal says, “is a unique little music niche that helps make up the rainbow of cultural activities and contributions in Jerusalem from many different people from different cultural backgrounds and from all walks of life.”

From intimate evenings to twice-yearly hoots, Philippa Bacal knows that folk music is where it’s at.