Musician Yoni Avi Battat Combines Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew on Debut Album “Fragments”

As an accomplished violinist, Yoni Avi Battat has performed around the world. He has toured as an actor and violinist with the Tony Award-winning musical “The Band’s Visit” and performs with his Yiddish Jazz band, Two Shekel Swing. 

While growing up in Woodbridge, Connecticut, Battat sensed something missing from the layers of identities of his ancestors. On the surface, he connected to the Israeli roots of his father who grew up in Jerusalem. Battat’s mother came from Polish ancestry, so she was Ashkenazi, like most of their community. Battat had little to no connection  with his paternal grandfather’s Iraqi-Jewish roots. But a trip to Israel with his grandfather set Battat on a journey of connecting with and questioning his belonging to each identity as he immersed himself in Arabic music.

The album’s nine songs show a meditative reverence for those before him and a love of the music that eluded him for the first half of his life.

And now on his debut album, “Fragments,” Battat showcases his talent and passion for Arabic music, while including lyrics in Arabic, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. The new album is a culmination of more than 12 years exploring all of those identities to connect more deeply with the music of his Iraqi-Jewish ancestry. The album’s nine songs show a meditative reverence for those before him and a love of the music that eluded him for the first half of his life.

Battat spoke with the Journal about the new album. 

What were the challenges that kept you from finishing the album? 

“Every time I went to put pen to paper, I was really hit with this deep sense of imposter syndrome of feeling not enough, for having come into this music and into this work as a latecomer. I feel a lot of regret that I didn’t grow up in an Iraqi community, that I didn’t speak Arabic from a young age, that I had to learn this music and this tradition that I’ve come to love and respect so much as if I’m an outsider.” 

What did you do to get over the imposter syndrome you felt?

“By embracing that sense of fragmentedness, by embracing the fact that it’s okay that I don’t speak Arabic like a native speaker, and it’s okay that I’m coming into this tradition, even though I see so many other amazing musicians doing it who have grown up in it. I also still have something to say as someone who didn’t grow up in it. And despite the fact that I feel so distant in a lot of ways from my ancestry, that’s part of the human experience. Fragmentation is part of the human experience. Once I was able to harness that instead of it being a roadblock for me, I was really able to release this album.”

To you, what does it mean to be Fragmented?

“We’re all fragmented in some way, especially for people that have had integration in their story in the last couple generations. We live in a society that is so interconnected and is so global and people are often moving to places so far from where their ancestors grew up. So many of us are fragmented in that way, just geographically removed from the places of their ancestry. That’s just one level. 

“On another level: memory. I feel like there’s so much that I wish I could ask my grandparents that I can’t because they’re not alive anymore. And when they were alive, we had a great relationship and I have wonderful memories of them, but I didn’t know then what I know now. I wasn’t curious about the things I’m curious about now. So that’s another level of fragmentation for me. 

“It’s also just the content. I don’t speak Arabic. I’m coming to my own ancestral language (which my ancestors spoke for 2,000 years) as an outsider. I’m learning it, but so many layers removed from it.” 

Was there a specific moment that began your connection with Arabic music?

“When I was 16, I took a trip to Israel with my family and with my [paternal] grandfather, who was still alive then. And on that trip, he took me to a Middle Eastern music center where he wanted me to get a taste for the music. He knew I was a good musician. I started playing violin when I was 4 years old, so I was already an experienced musician by then. He said, ‘oh, you should also learn Arabic music.’ I said, okay, great. He took me, and I learned for the first time about microtonal music — this amazing, beautiful, and rich system of modes that have notes that don’t exist in Western music. As a musician, intellectually it really appealed to me. It was really exciting to think about this whole system that I’d been raised in, of Western classical music being turned on its head, and the idea of intonation and the idea of expressiveness.

“I heard a little bit from my dad while growing up — he played a little bit of Israeli Mizrahi pop music, which is not the same as what I was learning that day. I also heard my grandfather singing in synagogue sometimes, but I went to a Chabad synagogue growing up. I didn’t really have any connection to Iraqi-Jewish practice or prayer.”

“If you imagine the keys of a piano, white keys and black keys are next to each other. There are notes in Arab music that are between those two [white and black] notes.“

What does that mean, “non-existent notes”?

“If you imagine the keys of a piano, white keys and black keys are next to each other. There are notes in Arab music that are between those two [white and black] notes. We have this concept in Western music that there’s 12 notes per octave. Instead of just half-steps in Arabic music, we actually have quarter-steps, and we have certain modes that specifically and intentionally use what (to our Western ears) would sound out of tune.”

Tell us about the musical instrument, the oud.

“On that trip to Israel, my grandfather bought me an oud. And I started casually experimenting with it, but not really having much formal training. But then again, 12 years ago, I was in college at Brandeis, there was a Middle Eastern music ensemble that I was able to participate in, which was a really special opportunity and a temporary thing that they were doing. So I started singing in Arabic. I started playing the oud, I started playing Arabic violin.”

Tell us about the lyrics on the album.

“The album mostly uses texts from existing sources that are historically and thematically significant to me. Each song pulls from a different text. The first song, “Water and Air,” uses a text by Anwar Shaul, who was in one of the last waves of Jews to leave Iraq. Most Jews left in the early 1950s, but Anwar Shaul stayed through the 1970s. He was a journalist and writer, and he represented Iraq in a delegation — an international delegation — of Arab writers or Arabic writers. And in that delegation, he recited this poem, which I use as the text for this first song, which pretty much says how much he loves his country and his homeland, and how much he identifies with the Arab culture of his homeland and how his mouth proudly speaks the Arabic language. And to me, it felt like a poignant way to start the album, because he talks about how in his youth, he grew up on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. And for me, I’m so far removed from that. I can’t even go there if I want to.”

Yoni Battat’s album “Fragmented” is available on Spotify and Apple Music. For translations and more, visit his website: www.yonibattat.com