Esther Shamir Did Not Wait for the Revolution in Israeli Rock, She Helped Create It

Of the three women who laid the foundations for female Israeli rock and set out in a very male-dominated era, only one now remains, Yehudit Ravitz. We parted from Corinne Allal about a year and a half ago, and now Esther Shamir has joined her, she died at the age of 71 after battling cancer.

Like Ravitz and Allal, Shamir also took her first steps in an army band, the Nahal Band in her case, where she served alongside Miki Kams and Yehuda Eder, and even commanded the band during her military service. While still in uniform, and as the band accompanied members of Kaveret in performances before soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, she met the man who would become her first husband, Ephraim Shamir. The first song she wrote, “I Passed by Only to See,” composed by her husband and later included on their 1977 masterpiece album, was a sign of things to come.

After Kaveret disbanded, the Shamir couple joined Erich Einstein as backing performers on his tour, immortalized on the album “People Love to Sing.” In 1977, the Shamir duo’s only album finally arrived, on which Esther wrote and performed several of the standout songs, including “I Passed by Only to See,” “The Little Neighbor,” “Let’s Play Hide and Seek” (which she also composed), “The Naked King,” “The Magic Carpet,” and more. Even nearly 50 years after its release, “Ephraim and Esther Shamir” remains a rare time capsule that presents the Hebrew rock created here in the late seventies in especially fine form.

It was a soft, rich production that blended soft rock with electric jazz arrangements, some of them stretched to six minutes or more, and benefited from top-tier musicians who were given plenty of room to show their studio skills. Among them were Ohad Inger, Eitan Gidron and Alon Oleartchik on bass, the late Meir Yisrael and Ahreleh Kaminsky on drums, while Alona Tural, may she rest in peace, handled the piano and keyboards brilliantly. The album was also something of a mini Kaveret reunion, as alongside Oleartchik, Yoni Rechter also appeared on piano in “A Bright Day Eve,” and Gidi Gov provided backing vocals on several of the songs. Anyone who listened to the album then could not have ignored the young singer with the curls and the clear voice.

After her short-lived phase with her husband Ephraim, Shamir began collaborating with Yehonatan Geffen in the show “They Call It Happiness,” where she presented her first feminist song as a writer, “One-Night Man,” which was composed by the man who would soon become her ex-husband, Ephraim. “One-Night Man,” along with other songs Shamir wrote during that period, eventually appeared on “The Lowest Place in Tel Aviv,” her debut album released in 1982. Even before Ravitz and Allal connected with unapologetic electric rock, Shamir presented, on that important album produced for her by Louie Lahav and arranged by Gidron, a new and groundbreaking persona for those days. No longer just a singer who sang beautifully and almost half in a whisper, but a woman who knew how to stand her ground and deliver brave texts wrapped in a rough, and often not easily digestible, package for listeners not yet accustomed to women singing like that in Hebrew.

“The Lowest Place in Tel Aviv” was more than just a wake-up call for Israeli music. It also gave Shamir the final stamp as an important songwriter. Later in 1982, the peak year of Shamir’s career as a performer, she wrote and composed “Unequal Covenant,” which she performed with Shlomo Artzi. “Unequal Covenant” dealt with a brief, occasional renewal of a past love. Among other things, Shamir writes there, “But beneath the surface / all their bodies tremble so much / they cannot part again with certainty / because their hearts will rise up and rebel, oh,” seeking to describe the gap between the pair’s yearning for connection and the understanding that it may not be possible.

Shamir continued releasing albums throughout the 1980s, and although they offered several songs that received respectable airplay on the radio, including the protest songs “Jungle Rhythm,” “We Are in the Same Boat,” “Strong Card” and “The Train Has Already Passed the Station.” In 1988, as a response to the events of the First Intifada, Shamir wrote the song “A Moment Before the Storm,” which was banned from radio play because of its sharp lyrics, mainly due to the line, “Don’t send my brother to the trigger, as if a higher power demands it. The earth asks nothing of us, only man asks.”

Although Shamir reduced her musical activity from the 1990s onward, she remained a prolific and sought-after writer. Among the many hits she wrote for others are “Mid-September,” “Stronger Than the Wind” and “The Day After,” sung by Gali Atari, “Time” performed by Rita, “Ice Palace” and “Barefoot Girl” recorded by Yardena Arazi, “Broken Picture,” which became Moni Arnoni’s biggest hit, and “Today You’re Laughing,” sung by Yehuda Poliker.

About a month after the October 7 massacre, Shamir re-recorded her song “May You Know No More Sorrow” together with Dany Bassan. In her words, it took her back to the days when she served in the Nahal Band and had to see coffins with the bodies of soldiers on the plane that flew the band to performances among the dusty outposts in Sinai. That was not the last time Shamir addressed the current war, and later she wrote the song “Coming Home,” dedicated to the hostages and based on the melody of “Hiking to Caesarea.”