Eilat and all that jazz

-


The Vienna Art Orchestra letting loose in Eilat - filmed with my digital camera. My first video on this blog. Turn up the sound!

Back from annual jaunt to the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat. Three wonderful sleepless nights of jazz, booze and more jazz. Three days of sleep, reading, food and pool. If only real life was more like this. After the official shows at the port (attended largely by wrinklies like us) the action begins at the jam session at the Riviera Hotel where the audience is mainly under 25 and where even younger musicians can share a stage with some of the big names who come back to the hotel to jam until dawn. There's hope for Israeli jazz if so many young people are prepared to take the trouble to head for Eilat, often just for the jam session.

My personal favourites at the official shows were the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, saxophonist Chris Potter and the Vienna Art Orchestra but there was something for everyone including the slick British soul band Incognito (whom I'd never heard of).

The trip down to Eilat transports you, via the emptiness of the Negev, to a place without a sense of place, a town with no history that exists only for tourism; in other words, Israel's very own Las Vegas (only without the casinos). Lacking any natural attraction other than the harsh, dry heat, a few strips of beach and a small, rapidly disappearing coral reef, Eilat is constantly in search of new "attractions" to keep the punters coming. After the Underwater Observatory, the IMAX and Amazing World we now have Kings City (see below) which seems to feature a very big water chute and which, together with the architectural absurdities of Herod's Palace Hotel, is turning Eilat into our very own Disneyland.
Lying in our beds in mid-morning the noise of hotel aerobic instructors exhorting their flabby customers to push harder competed with the drills and jackhammers of a new hotel under construction.

Israel's plastic paradise in the desert - the pool at the Agamim hotel.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of both sides would somehow provide me with the tools to weave a b
Read more

Four Views From the Roof - Introduction

-
Image
  Four Views From the Roof   Introduction      In 1994, against the advice of friends and family, we managed to scrape together the deposit for a dilapidated three room, third floor flat in an old apartment building on Yehuda Halevi Street in south Tel Aviv.  It was all we could afford if we wanted to put down a stake in Tel Aviv.    The building and its environs literally reeked of negligence. The once impressive but now deserted building opposite ours that had once served as a courthouse, was populated by  drunks and junkies. To the west was tumbledown Neve Tzedek just starting to attract artists and students. To the east was a business area heavy on cheap eateries, wholesale textiles and low-end fashion outlets. Old men on tricycles navigated long bales of textiles against the traffic on the narrow streets (and still do). On parallel Lilienblum Street, dubious characters would whisper “Dollar? Dollar?” to passers-by interested in by-passing official restrictions against holding for
Read more