sami yaffa: israel is no older than 70 years, but the jeish nation-state has been influenced by tribalism, religious conflict, and from one generation to the next, a history of blood and violence. the jews have brought with them their musical traditions from all over the world. meanwhile, the palestinians under israeli occupation are trying to keep their own culture alive. they say powerful art is bn out of conflict. let's hear what the locals have to say.

i'm sami yaffa, and i'm a rock and rolling globetrotter with an endless curiosity about all things musical. this is my exploration into why music is so important to us all. this is "sound tracker." my first time in tel aviv was in 1983 with hanoi rocks. a couple of decades later, i was here again with the new york dolls. it's a great pulsing city with culture, but the vibe can be a little misleading. when you're kicking back on a beautiful beach, it's easy to forget what's going on, for example, in gaza, less than 60 miles away.

[man sings in foreign language] yaffa: there are three musical traditions that get away with turning major into minor or minor into major. the first one is balkan gypsy music. then there's the blues, and the third one is klezmer. klezmer combines joy and melancholy; happiness and sadness; tragedy and cedy. oy division is a time machine of the genre, bringing klezmer's age-old sound and message to this day in a way that will make even the most callous listener smile. assaf: originally it means a profession, not...a style of music in yiddish. so klezmer is the guy that plays music for a living. in that society, it means it's the lowest of the low of the social ladder. yaffa: oh, no! assaf: so in jewish music in eastern europe, you actually have mainly two kinds of music-- one which is vocal, liturgical, that happs in a synagogue-- it's very holy. it' rabbinical. these people

can be very high in society-- and the instrumental musicians, used mainly for weddings and events. and now, of course, klezmer is completely different, a completely different class. then during the years, it also became the word we describe the style of this music. yaffa: right. but there's a lot of similarities to romani music, the roman music of east-- like balkan music. assaf: you know, it depends on your perspective. if you tell it to a real romanian music--that it's the same, he will not agree. yaffa: right. assaf: and if you go to the old masters that play both genres-- for examplemil, whom we studied with, you realize that they play differentlyor christian, gypsy, or jewish. ffa: jewish, yeah. assaf: but, of course, it has a lot of melodic and rhythmic material that is shared. so both theews and the gypsies had a massive cultural communication network.

if you look at the folk music of romanians and hungarians, right--the locals, it will be very different. not the gypsies. the village music will be very different-- different scale, different motive. when you look at the gypsy music of these places or the jewish music, you see many more similarities because the language--language and the traveling and the religious interaction gave rise to transfer of information. [assaf singing in foreign language] yaffa: do you have families that will pass it down, that everybody in the families basically... assaf: no, we are not from a native. and in this case, i think a lot of immigrant cultures and cultures in the modern world ffer-- earlier it was a family thing, it was a lineage. again,

it was a-- yaffa: it was it was work, job. ass: it was work. it was a class in the society. and i guess in all the times, you know, it was a family tng. it's very rare to find it. you have to go to more primitive places in order to still find lineages of musicians. we are totally fing it. eyal: especially here in israel in many cultural aspects, it was cut in a way in the fifties and sixties. and it was, like, flattened into israeli culture. and then it took some years for different genres to uprise again. so in a way, the musicians in the states, they kind of, you know, continued the tradition. assaf: up to a point... eyal: yeah, of course... assaf: because in the states, also, for different reasons, also, there was a big wave-- klezmer, and theit kind of stopped. so again. eyal: yeah, because it's boring music. ha ha! assaf: people had to, eh, revive it in the seventies

aneighties. and, i mean, also in the states, you will have problems finding a consistent lineage. yaffa: but this is really complex music. it's not like, you know, you can just kind of like pick it up and... assaf: no. at a certa point, it's all the same. [yaffa laughing] assaf: you know? seriously, you have it also when you play with bluegrass musicians. you know them? or irish musicians. you say, "wow! it's amazing! how do they play?" then you realize they just can play this thing. that's what they're doing. so klezmer is kind of the same. it's not concert music. i mean, we love it. it's amazing. it's clever, and it's weird, but it's also iectious. these melodies, you can play them at an airport in japan. you play, like, 3 melodies like this, five people will come, right? not because it's so... i mean, there's nothing high about it. it's just like, stuff that was tested over the generations. this makes people happy. you take something that is sad to say and you put it in a happy note, and you make pele dance tit.

this is--this mixture is, i think, seriously, you can find it in any folk music. that is part of what is nice in it. man: ♪ hardly wakes, his eyes are heavy he didn't get that much sleep he barely crawls he's barely standing headed off to another week ♪ yaffa: a fearless gang of well-informed young musicians, kids insane is a punk band from tel aviv. these guys have pushed themselves out onto the margins

with a message and attitude that is far from popular in the present-day israel. there's always room for some proper anarchy. singer: ♪ he's gonna flip he's gonna flip he's gonna... ♪ yaffa: this area has such a heavy, long history. so how does it kind of affect your way of thinking and being? you know what i mean? because it's so separate, but it's together. it's beautiful. it's creative, but it's really vicious, and it'really ugly in a way. musician: yeah. nadav: i think the first thing, itakes you stay away--for us, it makes us stay away from religion like from fire, you know? seeing everything that goes around here, the first thing is, like, this guy in the sky is not going to tell us what to do. we're not ing to fight another guy because wh your book says and the other way around. and i tnk tha's the main thing. like,

the typical israeli is not religious at all, you know? and tel aviv is an atheist city if you ask me. musician: people are just sick of the situation, and i think they lost trust in even fighting for their own beliefs. you know, it's that bad. nadav: i think speaking about the israeli left, which is, i guess, the only kind i can speak about, people try to be ok on all sides all the time. and, ke i said, i would not want to encourage violence, but there's not enough uprising, you know? there's not enough showing what we say. we write on facebook, but the streets are still silent. so... corey: the way we feel about the whole society and the situation and us feeling outsiders, i think our answer to this and what we feel about this is kids insane. nadav: it will drive you mad. corey: this is how we put it out. this is our anger. this is our emotion, and this is what we feel. and i think this is, like, the most extreme way

that we feel and how we put it out, you know? i can talk for hours and tell my opinion, but this is really how i feel... ♪ dress me up wear me down i work for no one else but me don't work, don't work for no one else but me ♪ yaffa: you guys have the mandatory military service over here. i can kind of relate because finlanhad it kd of hardcore in the seventies and eights. and how old ar you when you have to do it? coy: 18. yaffa: and for how long? corey: three years--men, two years--women or a little bit less, i think. yaffa: that's a long time. nadav: it's a crucial ageand at this age, dropping everything, giving all of your life for this country, i think you have to feel very patriotic to go and do that. yeah, hence the name kids insane, because we had to make ourselves look crazy when you go do all e tests in the army. yaffa: so it's the same thing.

corey: i tnk a lot of kids not necessarily want to go tohe army and feel that eir parents, as a tradition of israelis, want them to go to the army. nadav: i mean, i wouldn't say it's impossible to live here as somebody who didn't do the military. but it still plays a big role, like, when you go to a new workplace or the way-- just the way the society looks at the people who didn't take part in this. you're straight away an alien. you're straight away a traitor. corey: an outsider. it's something you have to do if you like it or not. or you're insane, and you might not get a job and you might not get your driver's license because you didn't go to the army. they--yeah. yaffa: oh. they ... you with many ways, then. corey: oh, yeah. ffa: i had to do the same thing ininland when i was a kid. and i went to a pchiatris and i said that ias this and that, and, you know, i sold my ass and things like that. and it turns out that the psychiatrist was my dad's friend. ha ha! corey: so he knew all about you. and he knew tt--yeah.

yaffa: because he's got the-- you know, he can't really tell anything. there's a professional, you know, silence thing, so just 10 years, 15 years later, my dad was like, "you know, i knew the whole time." corey: no way. well, yeah... ♪ won't stop, no rest here catch my breath tmake a sound my body starts sailing like a sunken ship rose from the ground... ♪ yaffa: is there any communication between the palestinian side and the israeli side? musician: not enough. not enough. no. yaffa: it doesn't really happen. nadav: i think for a kid from-- for example, if a kid fm ramallah hears about our band, and he's stoked, and he wants to come see us play, he just can't make it. yaffado you think the situation will ever change? nadav: once people stop putting other people in boxes, maybe. once people start opening their mind and, you know, not believing just one source but doing their own research... yaffa: yeah. nadav: talkinto other people,

meeting other people. yaffa: yeah, not letting the race... yoni: i'm sure change will come if it's an apocalypse, you know, or it can be fixed to the right way, you know? nadav: what i'm afraid is that when the change will come, it would be a change for the worse, not for the good. corey: ♪ for your confession... right on down i'm headed home i'm headed home ♪ [crowd cheering] [new song playing on soundtrack] yaffa: better known by his pseudonym kutiman, ophir kutiel is a psychedelic multimedia multitalent,

a renaissance man who is open-mindedly reforming music and animation. he was brought to the attention of wider audiences by his youtube show "thru you." kutiman was born and raised in a kibbutz, where he has since returned. the mais definitely no one-click wonder. recently, he started a hell of a funky psychedelic funk band. kutiman: so i started as a just regular musician just playing piano and then trying different instruments. and i think around 2008, i got introduceto youtube. and i think tha's the first time i had my own internet connection. and i fell in love instantly with youtube. and starting--learning a lot from youtube, anything i want to learn, i search on youtube, and started watching a lot of musical tutorials to improve my own playing. so watching guitar tutorials and

piano and drums. and after a while, i had a couple of them opened in different tabs, and they just kind of played together, you know? and i felt i just need to tweak them a little bit. yaffa: oh, wow! so it almost started by coincidence. kutiman: yeah. yeah... yaffa: ok, it fell in place. kutiman: definitely. i had a couple of rules, but one of them was not doing pitch shift. because if i do pitch shift, so i can take anything and turn it into anything else. again, i had, like, this kind of a rule for myself that i searched for the videos with the least hits. it's like kind of searching for this rare record that nody knows. so, like, 10 viewers is like gold, you know? yaffa: that's amazing. so what do you think about the whole thing with modern technology and how to make usic today? kutiman: i feel that in both methods, it doesn't matter if i sit on a piano or sit on youtube. it comes from the same place,

just the technique is different. with youtube, it's almost spiritual. you know, searching so many things, so many instruments. you know, and a lot of the times, i searched for, like, a guitar and then i find a sitar. and then i find different drums i like, and then i see this funny cat. and then i find myself at 4:00 in the morning just watching stupid stuff on youtube. so it wasn't straightforward, you know, sitting on just music. it was like research... yaffa: it's following the instinct and where it takes you. kutiman: yeah. it was really interesting, you know? yaffa: so do you have anything, like, the original idea, like a seed for a song, for example? it's like, do you have something like, "i'm going to do it with this kind of beat, so i'm gonna go and search for

this kind of beat," or is it just that you jump into youtube and something grabs you? timan: actually, with the singer--with mantha with the song "give it up," i started with this girl with a piano, and i had all thmusic ready. and then i searched for vocals. and th is what i say when i say it's spiritual, you know? she just--this vocals just... it's like somebody wrote this song for this vocals, but it was the other way round. samantha: ♪ i know you want us to grow making time making love on the shore and... my passion leaves it never lingers i realized you were my demise all this time

ooh ooh... ♪ yaffa: bause it is kind of like visual sampling in a way. it's kind of like what happened, yoknow, with hip-hop and all that, you know, back in the eighties. you know, people took bernard purdie's drum hits and, you know... kutiman: definitely. yaffa: all this kind of stuff, man. do you play some of the songs live? [different song starts] kutiman: no. usually i don't do it on the stage. and it creates something weird, because a lot of people, like, they know me from these projects, and they see something. and then they buy a ticket: "why, i love kutiman." and they come to the show, and they get, like, this crazy psychedelic freedom music. sometimes they say, "what is this? i want to hear the songs."

[acoustic guitar music] yaffa: in the early nineties, an angry new generation vented their frustration through a music born in american ghettos, resonating with young people who were struggling under oppression and now had a way to get their desperation out of their system in the form of rhymes and beats. palestinian rap exploded into the attention of the world. a torchbearer who spoke his mind during the first wave, muhammad mughrabi, is still keeping up the fight. [man rapping in native language]

[men rapping] yaffa: so what is life ke in here? muhammad: it's not easy. it's not easy. the place is tough. and growing up here is weird, very weird. growing up and knowing that you have no identity-- no palestinian, no israeli. you have no nationalities. you're a refugee, and it's never ending. the place itself, it's crowded

and suffers from many problems. there's no services here. we have no police. if you face any ki of probm, you need help or anhing... yaffa: there'no one to turn to. muhammad: you can't get it. you're on your own. it's not possible for the police to come here. yaffa: right. muhammad: and we also--we don't talk to police. yaffa: yeah, yeah, yeah. muhammad: there is some good things about the refugee camps. there's this bond between people. like, if you get into trouble, like in a fight or you got threatened or something, ople will help you. like, your neighbors and your relatives. [rapping continues] muhammad: i believe that music is a very powerful tool to

create change and to influence people and inspire the young. yaffa: yeah. muhammad: the life that i live in the refugee camp and in the whole area, it's inspiring, and i want to talk about it. and i use music to talk about what i think and what i believe. yaffa: yeah. muhammad: i encouge young people to be free and to dream and to have hopes and to move forward and have a vision for the future because as a palestinian, you're young and you are distracted by everything that happens around you. and if you're lucky, you'll survive through that and be free and focused on your future. many people are not lucky, and they... yaffa: yeah, they get stuck. muhammad: they get stuck into some things,d and they go desperate. yaffa: yeah. can't see forward.

muhammad: and that's the thing that, we don't want this. yaffa: yeah. [muhammad rapping in native language] yaffa: is there any mixing between the communities--the jewish communities and palestinian musical commuties? muhamma well, some people n't like it. yaffa: right. muhammad: but you have this boycott movement that i don't like, because i believe that culture and art is the thing that connects people. you cannot boycott culture and art. no one chose what i do and how i live in the refugee camp on

the news or talk about it on the rad. i feel i's a responsibility for me to introduce my culture to the israelis. i go to play concerts in tel aviv and in west jerusalem. and i have many friends, and i think it's very important. [music continues] [man singing in native language] yaffa: this lively and joyful dance performed in palestinian villages is called dabke. located in east jerusalem, cultural center sabreen is a meeting place for palestinian artists. said is the manager and the soul of this important place. he has tirelessly organized concerts and art exhibitions

and supported young artists who need ways to express themselves in order to survive the struge. bu how is palestinian culture surviving under the occupation? said: i think culture usually survive because culture is inside you. and palestinians are... you know, when you don't have weapons, when you don't have money, when you don't have power in general or resources to adapt, you can sing, you can write music, you can make a painting, you can dance. no one can stop you from this. so palestinians are doing this on a daily basis. like, it's one of the few choices left to them. yaffa: palestinian culture is so old, and it's been going on r so--a long time. all cultures and, i think, all arts, they always transform,

and they mutate, and they become--how is the forward movement with palestinian arts culture? said: i remember, when we started, it was a few musicians, a few singers and painters--you can count them. this was--i'm talking about the seventies, how it started. and then after the first intifada and when the authority came here, i see it as explosion. we are not established as institutions. for example, we don't have author rights association here to protect the artists... yaffa: yeah, rights. yeah. said: and we don't have art producers that are financially strong and they have the artistic vision that they control--or help getting the good quality. so the producers--or the money

comes from donors or from private investors. and they have their, you know, their own needs and size and style. and this is not good for the art. yaffa: yeah. said: en we have art associations that can produce good things, which i aim, actually, to have this in palestine, and this is what s missing. and we're not protected. woman: i sleep, and my heart is awake. the voice of my beloved knocking. [imitates 4 knocks] [singing in foreign language] [speaking foreign language] [singing in foreign language] and my heart is awake.

[snging in foreign language] yaffa: you could say that jerusalem is the world's most contested city. great rulers have tried to conquer it throughout history. people have died and killed for jerusalem, and its residents have been the ones to suffer. and why is that? maybe it's because of the three major abrahamic religions that each have their holy places here. religion is power, and when you control it, you contr evything. [woman speaking native language] yaffa: victoria hanna was bullied in school but was saved by her ethereal singing talent-- an orthodox jew and a feminist who was born and raised in jerusalem. [victoria singing in foreign language] victoria: you know, in all of the ancient traditions, they treat the sound as the source of the creation.

yaffa: yeah, exactly. victoria: so we are talking here about creation, not about making music, having fun. this is ok. but we are looking at the sound, at the silence. and then from the silence comes the sound. and the sound's changes, they provoke the space, provoke the environment. yaffa: exactly. vioria: anthe environment is being influenced by that. ♪ ooh-ooh ooh ♪ you know, speaking is like making music. speech is music also. yaffa: that's true. victoria: it's not only a way to deliver information. [victoria singing in foreign language] and voice is magic. ♪ ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ♪

the voice is made to communicate with something which is beyond here and now. yaffa: yeah, yeah. exactly. victoria: it's a way to communicate with a different level. ♪ ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ♪ the jewish tradition is a very oral tradition. it has to do-- a lot with the mouth. every letter is in a specific place in the mouth. imagine, jews were living many, many different countries in the world. and they still kept--they didn't really assimilated. why? because the language... and the hebrew language and the alphabet and the text, it was like their home. so basically what i'm talking about is that i like to look... to look very, very much in