Noa & Gil Dor to perform their first concert: Tel Aviv; Israel "Jazz Movies and Videotapes" Festival. February 8th 1990

Noa's career began with a duet concert with Gil Dor in a festival in Tel Aviv’s "Cinemateque" called "Jazz, Movies and Videotape", on Feb.8, 1990 .This concert, attended by 120 curious people (they were utterly unknown), included specially arranged cover versions of old standard tunes ("Imagination", "You are Too Beautiful", "Masquerade", "'Freight Trane"," We’ll Be Together Again".), and original arrangements of a variety of songs that Noa and Gil love, in Hebrew and English, like "Drive My Car" (Beatles), "Material Girl" (Madonna),"Shir HaYakinton "(Rivka Gvili) and "Yalda Im Tzamot" (Gershon Prensky). In addition, their show had a ‘creator’s corner’ for songs penned by an aspiring young songstress (Noa). It included, at first, only two songs: "Eyes of Rain", and 'She Went to the River". Later, that corner grew to become an entire room, with songs like "Uri", "Mishaela" and "Eye Opener" its permanent inhabitants. The album "Achinoam Nini and Gil Dor , Live in Concert" released in 1991 is a faithful documentation of this period. © (info by www.noasmusic.com )
 

ACHINOAM NINI SETS THE PACE by Jerusalem Post - Jerusalem 
Author: Tirzah Agassi Date: Aug 17, 1990 
Abstract (Document Summary) 
"You can't get away from your roots," she says today, "sooner or later they're going to surface." This observation is borne out by her musical performance. [Nini]'s deepest roots are decidedly Oriental. And it is when she connects with them, singing in Hebrew and making classic Oriental movements, that she has a clear artistic signature. In these high points of her English-dominated performance "excellent" turns to "brilliant" and even "unfor-gettable."

This contrast is most evident in her song "HaShaked" (The Almond) in which she alternates between Hebrew and English. The overall effect of both her presence and her voice is reminiscent of the Nikos Kazantzakis quote: "St. Francis said to the almond tree, 'Speak to me of God.' And she blossomed." When Nini sings in English, you see the impossibly delicate white blossoms. However, when she sings in Hebrew, you feel them flutter in the breeze. On a technical level, this seems to have a lot to do with her use of a certain kind of Oriental ornamentation called silsul in Hebrew. It is this Levantine flavor that boosts her grade A performance to A+.

Her accompanist/mentor 37-year-old Gil Dor, who taught her for a year at the Rimon School of Jazz after she finished a stint in an army choir, pauses when he hears this analogy. They have set their guitars aside and are taking a break in the perpetual rehearsing which fills most of their days. Like Nini, Dor has spent considerable time in New York, the city whose standards they aim at meeting. How, he wonders, can they make the most of Nini's cross-cultural talents?