Sometime in 2010, over a dozen years ago. Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv. A boy with overgrown hair (which has since grown even longer) juggles the electric guitar to the applause of the audience. Then the star of the evening, Shalom Hanoch, who suddenly almost stole the show from him, announces amid the growing applause – “This is Omri Keren, he is ten years old and my grandson!”
Now, two days before his appearance at the “Amplifier” guitar festival, at the Enav Center (whose participants will include Ehud Banai, Rona Keenan, Tamar Eisenman, Geva Alon and “Roquefort”), Amri Kern, Hildon Maz, returns to that defining evening. “I remember a huge excitement from there and in front of her I gave what I could in my guitar solo,” he recalls. “I was immersed in this without glancing at the audience. As a child I still had no awareness of the audience and the stage.”
how is today
“Since I’m in the front, being the singer as well, I understand that it’s worth looking at the audience and it’s also fun.”
So you were already sure that this is what you will do in life?
“Yes, even then, although as a guitarist first.”
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And here, when you are holding a debut album – lovely, if I may comment – that you will automatically celebrate one year, you will have the honor to host Peter Roth at the festival the day after tomorrow, who, coincidentally or not, is also his son and grandson.
“We will perform a song of his, a song of mine, and a song of ‘Monica Sex’, his band, together. Besides, I will perform the album songs there with songs from the next album, which should be released in the near or distant future.”
Without some medical cover?
“There will be one cover – a song by George Harrison. I will do this as the one who died for the Beatles and for each of them individually.”
I won’t be original if I ask why your album is in English and yet…
“From a young age I like to speak in English. When I started writing songs and I had to choose which language, it was translated for me into considering how many people I could reach with my songs.”
That is, you strive to reach where your grandfather tried to reach and did not persist in doing so.
“Exactly! Grandpa Shalom went to London in his youth, after a language he started a successful career and people flocked to him. When he arrived in London, he was a cute kibbutznik who didn’t know English. I’ve known for a long time that in order to sing in English, you need to know how to speak that language. Against the background of what happened to him, when I started writing Songs at the age of 15-16, I said to myself ‘Come on, if I’m good at English, I should take advantage of it, hoping that this way I’ll reach many places in the world.’
“Love in Mind”, that’s the name of Keren’s acclaimed album. If you can expect a young singer like him to storm the microphone, then this is not his story. “As a singer, I sing calmly,” says Kern, who, in addition to the Beatles, grew up listening to the blues as well as Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. “When I got to high school, I got into jazz really hard and then I was completely a jazz guitarist until I went back to what I loved.”
What made you withdraw at the age of 16 from your studies at Thelma Yelin?
“It was the realization that I knew what I wanted to do, after I had already learned what I wanted to learn about music and that I wanted to learn through doing, what’s more, I wasn’t interested in matriculation who-knows-what. I felt ready already.”
Where did you go?
“Home! I bought drums and other instruments – and for work, that is, to make music.”
If your grandfather starred in the Nahal band and your father served in the IDF theater, we can guess that it was not on your mind.
“Exactly like that. I preferred to be stuck at home with my music.”
If we mention your father, the actor Dror Keren, you found a way to collaborate.
“It was in Corona at a kind of children’s festival over the Internet, where he read stories and I played songs on the acoustic guitar, while dad also sang a little. It was a filmed and very strange performance without an audience in front of me, but also very fun.”
On his album, Kern plays all the instruments – guitar, bass, drums, percussion and keyboards – except for one song where he was helped by a friend who played the violin. When asked how important it is to him to do almost everything himself, Keren replies: “It’s not from a place of ego, or anything like that. Although I have friends who play amazing music and I’m dying to hear them, it turned me on to get into it myself, what’s more, I’m kind of a control freak “.
But what you didn’t do was design the album cover, which you entrusted to your mother, Maya, married to your father’s wonderful song.
“I know how to create more through the ear than through the eye. If my mother is good at it, why not?”
In fact, not only did you grow up with your parents, but you actually grew up in an artistic hotbed from all angles.
“Indeed, coming from such a family it was the most natural thing to get into making music. On the other hand, as I grow up I understand that it is not obvious that I have artists in the family and it is also quite scary and requires courage and perseverance from me.”
If you say ‘courage’, you have taken on a piece of the bag, as no matter what you do, comparisons with your father will always arise. Does it sit on your shoulders?
“Perhaps somewhere, but when I look at the audience that comes to my concerts, I get the impression that they don’t come to them because of it. It’s already me. Perhaps there is something else here, that makes me want to go out into the world, and that is the knowledge that only in Israel will I be compared to peace, which the majority of people there do not We know who it is.”
We are on the eve of a flurry of Hanukkah concerts, where singers make a good deal, from which they will earn hundreds of thousands of shekels, and it seems that you are as far from that as east from west.
“The ones you are referring to are not really my market. I prefer to concentrate on making the second album, which I am already in the middle of. Besides, I am working on a visa for the United States, to promote the realization of the dream of traveling far from here, to see what will happen when I sing the songs Mine is in places like America, in the hope that there I can screw up in some particular scene. As exciting as it is, it’s also daunting, but I have a feeling that I have to do it.”