It’s all about the Miri

By anybody’s standards – and yes, that includes the standards of the One World Week team i.e. the most open-minded people in the world – Miri Ben-Ari is an extraordinary proposition. The official premise is intriguing enough – an Israeli-born classically -trained violinist who, inspired by an ‘overnight’ longing to improvise like Charlie Parker, won herself a scholarship to study music in New York City, a career-move which ultimately resulted in her ‘discovering’ that she was ‘something else’ entirely: the world’s first ‘Hip-Hop Violinist’. But such a PR-friendly narrative doesn’t do any sort of justice to the compellingly unorthodox and remarkably contradictory figure that a career-path as meandering as Miri’s apparently shapes.

An obviously media-trained diva so confident in her own abilities and reputation that she is willing to claim, without a trace of irony, that she ‘represents’ a new ‘outside of the box’ genre in a manner that places her in the creative company of ‘y’know, Jimmi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock, Santana’, and yet a performer whose rather nervous onstage banter (during the OWW World Music Concert) stood at uncomfortable odds with her prodigious musical gifts. A musician fiercely proud of both her ‘Jewish soul’ and her classical training, and yet a woman who chooses to litter what is already a remarkable part-Israeli, part-American accent with superfluous hip-hopisms – y’all, wassup, m’ man – in a manner that feels utterly forced. The passionate co-founder of a Holocaust remembrance charity who chooses to share stages with misogynistic rappers. An Isaac Stern-nurtured prodigy who practises for four to six hours a day, only to market herself as Wyclef Jean’s favourite violinist.

Wyclef bloody Jean. One wonders how many other violinists the man can actually name.

I meet her in the Union North Lounge. For a couple of moments, the combination of a pair of elegantly dressed meatheads guarding the door, and Miri’s astonishing hair extensions and enormous sunglasses, intimidate the fuck out of me. And then she takes the latter off, and the wholesome face of a slightly gawky girl materialises from out of the JLo-esque trappings. And this is representative, I suppose, of the overall impression I get throughout the half hour I spend with Miri Ben-Ari: of a woman still rather uncomfortable with branding, with imagery, with a hip-hop superstar-status that she’s only had a couple of years to get used to. Of a woman enjoying the fact that she’s expected to play a part that is a great deal of fun to play – Miri namedrops the likes of Donna Summer, Jay-Z and Kanye West with a relish that belies the fact that she is arguably more talented than any of them – and yet unable to play that part particularly convincingly. Of a woman not really hip enough to be The Hip-Hop Violinist.

But more on that later. I begin by asking Miri about England. ‘Oh, after New York, it’s so nice; it’s all like I can breathe!’ she giggles in a silly voice, before falling into the age-old American-musician-in-England trap with a charming mispronunciation of ‘Birmingham’. I ask if she feels any sort of connection with the English classical tradition, and she becomes even more enthusiastic. ‘So many classical composers were either born here. Or captured [I can only assume this is a joke…]. But then, Israel’s the same – so I don’t feel like I’ve missed out’. I ask if she finds the lack of tradition in America stifling, and she very reasonably points out that ‘for jazz and hip-hop and r&b, there’s nowhere better – so no, because I’ve had the best of both worlds’.

It’s immediately obvious that despite the fact Miri has had the best of two worlds, the world in which she’s convinced she’s found her feet is the United States, or, to be more specific, US hip-hop. ‘I’m American’, she snaps towards the end of our conversation, despite having spoken at length about her ‘Jewish soul’, about the fact that she was formed by the violin tradition that dominates music in Israel, about the fact that ‘all the best violinists are Jews’. And when I ask her about whether she finds the Hip-Hop Violinist title somewhat constricting considering her exceptionally diverse musical background, she is unambiguous in her reply. ‘People say I invented a genre. I don’t know about that – but I was introduced to the world by Jay-Z and Kanye West as The Hip Hop Violinist. That’s how they boxed me. And it’s a great box to be in. Nobody else has this title. I am hip-hop with violins. It’s really an original sound – but if I were to define it, I’d just call it soul music.’

I ask whether she feels the time she spent playing classical and jazz prior to finding her ‘true you’ was wasted, or whether the training was necessary education. ‘The violin is a classical instrument. If you don’t know classical techniques, you can’t really get the most out of your instrument. You just have to. When I was a teenager, I was practising up to eight hours a day – this is why I have the technique I have, this is why I know how to arrange strings, that sort of thing. But the way I play, that’s not classical. And that’s where jazz came in – jazz is the highest form of improvisation. And I really worked with the best jazz musicians. And that was the jumping-board for me – but I paid a lot of dues first.’ I ask if the parallels that have always been drawn between string instruments and the body, between violins and cellos and femininity, are significant to her, and she is equally emphatic in her reply. ‘People always tell me I dance with the instrument. I don’t know. A violin is known to be the closest instrument to the human voice – you’ll hear that from everyone, not just me. You can talk through a violin – it’s a fact. I play like a singer. I play like a rapper. So yes, that is important.’

I’m not going to pretend that the absolute self-confidence with which Miri addresses me throughout our conversation isn’t, at times, slightly unappealing. When I suggest that she is bringing what popular music has, for too long, regarded as a ‘background’ instrument into the foreground, and ask her whether she feels like she’s in a position to start something radical, to change things for violinists, she responds with an extremely self-assured smile. ‘Already done it,’ she laughs. ‘Instrumental artists – violinists anyway – already have an easier time of it because of me. In the States, there are a lot of violinists following in my footsteps – violinists who have got recognition because of me, because they’re imitating me. You don’t see hip-hop pianists, you don’t see hip-hop flautists: I started something.’

Let me be clear, it’s not that I have a problem with a musician as utterly brilliant as Miri talking about her instrument and her musical language with absolute authority – that is a right she has earned, a privilege she deserves. No, what bothers me is the fact that she seems entirely convinced of her own cultural significance, despite emphasising to me several times that nobody can really know anything about what, musically, will endure – about what, culturally, will have a genuine impact – ‘without hindsight’. And what bothers me even more, is that I don’t believe Miri’s self-belief can even be defended with the argument that it has been the driving force in a remarkable career (creative egotism’s favourite defence) because I’d suggest (yes, rather presumptuously) that it isn’t actually a facet of her natural personality – I get the impression that it is more a regurgitation of everything her record company (and, perhaps, Wyclef, John Legend et al) have told her about herself: that it is more part and parcel of the ever-bullshitting ‘Hip-Hop’ that makes up a half of her unique title ( and we can only hope that she doesn’t start to lose sight of the ‘Violinist’ part because of it…)

What inspires me with a certain amount of confidence that Miri won’t just turn into another self-indulgent disappointment as her profile becomes more and more unavoidably enormous – won’t go the way of Kanye, then – can be summed up in one word: ‘Gedenk’. Gedenk (Yiddish for ‘remember’) is the Holocaust remembrance charity Miri co-founded because ‘if you have popularity, and you have the opportunity to influence other people, and you don’t take advantage of it – I mean, in a good way – then something’s wrong with you. You have to spread messages that are bigger than yourself – that’s what I’m talking about.’ Miri, whose own grandparents were Holocaust survivors, is never more engaging, never more sincere than when she talks about American teenagers’ ‘mind-blowing’ lack of awareness about what the Holocaust was and is: ‘over fifty percent of the kids graduating high school in America don’t know what the Holocaust is – I don’t even know how to approach that. It’s unbelievable – kids are like “it’s something you put by the Christmas tree, oh, it’s something you do for Hanukkah, it’s Jewish isn’t it?”’

And I have little doubt Miri’s absolute disbelief at a state of affairs she can’t comprehend, her desire to cry out about a situation that she desperately wants to see change, is in no small part behind her decision to dedicate the rest of her career to a genre that, I genuinely believe, has the potential to both corrupt and cheapen her extraordinary gifts. US hip-hop, for all of its myriad faults, is probably the world’s most significant and versatile platform for people who have a desire to get in people’s faces and shout about something, anything. And Miri quite obviously wants to shout with her violin: ‘Music is the strongest thing, really. There is instrumental music where the advantage is that it doesn’t have words – because it takes things on that go beyond words. Go ahead and describe the word love – what does it mean? But when you’re being touched by somebody’s music, and then you hear their message, it’s priceless.’

Miri Ben-Ari is on the cusp of global superstardom, and unquestionably deserves the recognition that some of the talentless idiots that she’s collaborated with have, inexplicably, received instead of her – indeed, her message is an incredibly important one. But as artist after artist has proved before her, global-superstardom-with-a-message-attached is only a few baby-steps away from global Bono-dom. And so although she deserves every decibel of the riotous applause she continues to inspire in everybody from the World Music Concert audience to Hillary Clinton, I can’t help thinking that it’s probably best we all wait and see.