In musical comeback, Razel sister goes solo
Ahead of debut performance to all-women audience, Ricka Razel Van-Leeuwen talks about life after break-up of popular 1980s sibling band
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Until a few months ago, all members of the extended Razel family lived in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighborhood of low-slung houses set along twisting alleys, with an entire set of grandparents, siblings, in-laws and 33 grandchildren all located within a 10-minute walk of one another.
That was until Yonatan Razel, the eldest in this family of musicians, moved with his wife and six kids to another Jerusalem locale.
Sometimes, said Ricka Razel Van-Leeuwen, Yonatan’s younger sister, you have to do what’s good for you.
Razel Van-Leeuwen would know. It’s been some 27 years since the Razel Band, the family’s musical quartet of the four Razel siblings, dissolved as Yonatan joined the IDF army band, Aaron finished high school, and Ricka and Yehuda, the two youngest, completed their adolescence.
Now it’s time for Ricka Razel Van-Leeuwen to emerge again, this time as a solo artist.
After years of composing music and singing for her family and friends, Razel Van-Leeuwen has spent the last year and a half recording her songs — 18 so far. “It’s a compilation,” she said, laughing. Later this month she will perform the songs with an all-female band as well as her brothers, Yonatan and Aaron, for an audience of only women at Jerusalem’s Port, a local bar and performance space.
Razel Van-Leeuwen’s music, a mix of Israeli pop-rock, she likes to say, bears the stamp of her history, coming from a family of musicians and then creating her own in a process that took many years.
Razel Van-Leeuwen, who just turned 40, is sitting in the small, tidy and colorful living room of her Nahlaot home, where she and her American-born husband, Yoni Van-Leeuwen, are raising their eight children.
She isn’t the Razel sibling with the most children; that award goes to their youngest brother, Yehuda, who is “more Haredi,” said Razel Van-Leeuwen, and has 12 children, including his two stepchildren from his wife’s first marriage. (Yonatan Razel has six kids, and Aaron Razel, the second-oldest, has seven.)
It’s been from this home, some of its high walls painted turquoise — one of her favorite colors — that Razel Van-Leeuwen has conducted her life for most of the last decade. Her real estate office, which handles residential listings in Nahlaot, is below the house, and her upright piano, as well as a silver flute, the other instrument Razel Van-Leeuwen has played since she was a girl, anchors the family living room, cornered between the dining room table and the alternating tread staircase that leads up to the second floor.
This is where Razel Van-Leeuwen tries to sit for a few minutes each morning when the kids have left the house.
“That’s my breather each morning,” she said, as she tapped the heel of her much-worn cowboy boots on the floor under the piano to the beats of “Little Boy,” one of her songs.
https://youtu.be/RY2aQDrtuWA
Music has been part of Razel Van-Leeuwen’s life — part of all of the Razel siblings’ lives — since they were young. They are the four children of an American mother and Dutch father who had met during post-graduate studies at New York University and made aliyah to Israel, settling in Nahlaot.
The family was always a musical one, with each of the four children learning piano from an early age. Ricka Razel Van-Leeuwen took up the flute when she was 10, although not voluntarily.
“I wasn’t so into music when I was young,” she said. “It was always pushed on me, it was a chore,” she added, reflecting on her psychologist father’s educational theories, which included an intense dislike for leaving the kids with too much free time.
“It was his way to educate us,” she said. “He hated to see us not doing anything.”
When the Razel children ranged in age from around 10 to 16, they visited their grandparents in the United States and performed an impromptu concert for the neighbors in the senior citizen housing where their grandparents lived. That was the start of the Razel Band, and the four siblings began performing live and composing music.
“They called us the local Jackson Five,” she said, holding up the cover of their album, “Why Not Today?”
But this wasn’t a casual project. The Razels’ father paid to record their music, bringing the kids to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem for lengthy studio sessions that often lasted from six in the evening until three in the morning. They performed as well, from sets at Tel Aviv pubs to live television shows with presenters Rivka Michaeli and Dan Shilon, both popular during the 1980s.
The band fell apart when Yonatan, the eldest, entered the army band, only later finding his own fame with his mix of spiritual music based on his classical piano training.
“He still asks me if I’m angry at him for breaking up the band,” told Razel Van-Leeuwen. “I say, ‘Well, no, it’s life, I mean, I understand why it happened.’”
As kids, the siblings each composed music for their band; the words of one of Razel Van-Leeuwen’s songs, “Babysitter,” were translated into English, telling about a night spent trying to put a baby to sleep only to be told by the parents that they would pay her the following week.
Another song on the album wasn’t as personal, she said, remembering that she copied a poem from a book written by Rachel the poetess.
“It was very strong stuff, and I was just 13; of course I didn’t understand anything,” she said.
Once the band dissolved, the Razel siblings each went their own way but still stayed close to home base in Nahlaot. When Razel Van-Leeuwen married at 19, she first supported her young family with a small catering business, eventually leaving that for residential real estate.
Like other members of the family, the Van-Leeuwens also adopted various trappings of a more religious lifestyle. Razel Van-Leeuwen began covering her hair when her oldest, now 19, started first grade — and her brothers’ families became more religiously fervent than Razel Van-Leeuwen’s own family.
Those are changes in the family dynamic that affect them now as well. As Razel Van-Leeuwen began planning her first performance coming up in a few weeks, she had to decide whether she would perform in front of men, or just women, in accordance with the restriction of kol isha, the Jewish law prohibiting men from hearing women sing in public.
“It’s all so different now,” she said. “Everything is very strict.”
With two of her brothers performing with her — Yonatan and Aaron Razel will sing four songs with Van-Leeuwen — Yonatan also had to be sure if he was comfortable performing in front of women.
“Yonatan is very strict about the kol isha issue,” said Razel Van-Leeuwen. “Even mixed audiences are complicated.”
The issues about mixing religious practices and music are new to Razel Van-Leeuwen, and there are times that she feels like throwing her hands up, given the restrictions.
“Sometimes I say, ‘Forget it, I don’t want to do this if I can’t do it the way I want to do it,’” she said. “And on the other hand, women’s-only performances are more popular now, and some of my songs are very feminine, about life and kids and come from a space that I’m with my sisters and in a good sense and bringing power to that circle.”
She envisions future performances in the woods, creating circles of women and the unique power of female bonding and music.
There’s also her album, which she recorded over the last year and a half by spending one day a month in a Tel Aviv studio, a span of time that gave her enough space to work on each song, “even if it’s not perfect yet.”
https://youtu.be/ZVrCKlMqAHY
“When you want to do something, you find the time,” she said. “I’m always mixing it up, showing apartments, and coming back to try something on the piano, and listening to the recordings on the way. My mind is always on something else.”
She’s hoping that performing live will help solidify her sound and songs.
And then she returns to the realities of her Jerusalem performance, which will be attended by her husband and sons — family members aren’t restricted from hearing the voice of a female relative — but not by her male friends, she said, who are annoyed about not being able to attend and are threatening to dress up in wigs in order to pass muster and be present at this new stage in Razel Van-Leeuwen’s life.
Yet doing this without her brothers, despite their own issues, was never an option.
“For my 40th birthday, I wanted our band again, I wanted to play with them. I feel most natural playing with them,” she said. “For me, it’s a very sore point that I’m not able to sing with them anymore [in front of a mixed audience], it’s a real bummer, but that’s the situation, and that’s how it is.”
While some things have changed, Razel Van-Leeuwen found her way — at least with this performance — to being on stage with her brothers.
“I want to have my own thing, but doing it with my brothers is even more powerful,” she said. “It’s helping me in this beginning, and it’s more interesting to see three siblings who are each a little different.”
Ricka Razel Van-Leeuwen will perform on Monday, March 28, at Jerusalem’s Port on 22 Hillel Street. Tickets are NIS 85. For more information, call 02-625-4447.
