Well, here it is, at long last…the Schalom-Bakhshayesh website. I can't believe it's taken us three years to get round to it, but I hope you all enjoy it and come back soon.

Anyway, I'm supposed to tell you how I started playing Jewish music and how Schalom-Bakhshayesh came about. To be honest, I've played and sung Jewish music ALL my life. Being born in Israel, I was taught Hebrew folk songs at playgroup (Gan) and school. But at that age and especially in a country where the majority of the population is so over-awed by the West, I mainly listened to pop artists such as Michael Jackson. Like many Jewish families we sang together on Friday nights and at festivals like Chanukah. Then of course, once we'd moved to Manchester, England, I went to a Sephardi synagogue with my grandparents and so learnt loads of tunes there - although I never imagined I'd be STUDYING them in years to come. My late grandmother also used to sing Ladino songs for us.

Anyway, I always wanted to play drums and took lessons for a year at school. This set me up with a few basic skills and I went on to play in brass bands, rock 'n' roll, funk, jazz and big bands…blah-di-blah - you get the picture. While I was at Uni studying Popular Music and Recording, there were a couple of major breakthroughs. My best friend lent me a CD of the Klezmatics, as did Dave Hassell - my teacher at the time. From then on everything changed. I knew this was it! This was the music I had to play.

I then developed what at the time must have been nothing short of an obsession and I absorbed as much klezmer as I could get my hands on - old and new. I spent months studying the drum lines and grooves (in between college work) and eventually a piano/vocalist I was working for mentioned that a klezmer band was starting out not too far away. I hooked up with the bandleader, Jilah Bakhshayesh and we hit it off straight away. Although this band wasn't without its weaknesses, I saw it as an opportunity to play the music I loved, and stuck with it. The band eventually fell apart but by then Jilah had started making some very exciting sounds on her violin.

We jammed klezmer tunes and I was studying Middle Eastern percussion at the time, so we did some small gigs as a duo and were really surprised at the extremely positive response we received. The more we played, the better we gelled and the more we realized that we'd both finally found the vehicle for the music we both felt so passionate about. The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. We've both had a few helping hands along the way, notably for me Dave Hassell who fixed my drumming and got me started with the Middle Eastern percussion; Tim Garside the Tabla Man! Del Reid who was a fantastic source of material and information; Lorin Sklamberg at YIVO; Karni Eldad our friend and superb composer from Israel who we played and recorded with. There are several others, some whom we haven't even met, but by striving to keep the "Jewish spirit" at the forefront of our music we hopefully will be on the next page in the long story book of Jewish Music.

Hi! I suppose it's necessary to tell you something about myself, although it feels a strange thing to do -sit here telling you my particulars. But as this is the biog part of our web site, I shall suspend discomfort and proceed:

I was born on the 1st May in 1968 to English and Iranian parents. To play the violin was something I wished for from a very early age, and eventually once I became 7, lessons began. My introduction to the violin was within the classical and I was lucky enough to be at the receiving end of much encouragement and excellent teaching. Whilst enjoying the Classical style of music, I also loved gypsy, jazz, and Eastern European music and when I left home to live in London, I chose those styles to busk with at the tube stations, parks and on the streets. Busking was not the most financially satisfying way of earning a living and saving enough money to travel, so my violin soon became a leisure time source of enjoyment; jamming with other musicians in many different styles of world and folk music.

For the next 2 years, I travelled round Ecuador, Peru, lived on the Isle of Skye and ended up being smuggled into France with the lift I had hitched to London. There in France I narrowly missed ending up as an "aging" hippie couple's child-bearing wife on their new commune and fulfilled one of my childhood dreams to make music with the gypsies. To play my violin with these people was one of the most exhilarating, exciting and musically rewarding experiences I am ever likely to experience. Nothing can beat their intense love for music making and the unparalleled expertise with which they play. To my mind, they are the most formidable of musicians and unfortunately the least acknowledged.

I eventually went to university and studied Anthropology and Comparative religion. My area of specialisation was Native American history and culture and the Shamanism of indigenous peoples.

My introduction to Klezmer music came in 1995, when a Jewish friend of mine asked me to join her in a Klezmer band she was forming. As soon as I started playing the tunes, I felt that I had found "my" music. Nothing else apart from the Gypsy style set me alight in the same way, and from then on my main area of music making has been within the Jewish tradition. I played with Klezmik (my friend's band) for 6 years as well as the story-telling band Tashbain for a while and a group of Arabic musicians called the Nile band. I also formed my own band Doyna that was a Jewish/Jazz fusion (more like confusion!) group and it was there that Guy and I met and discovered our love of playing Jewish music together as a duo. In 2001 I decided to commit myself solely to Schalom-Bakhshayesh and since then I have been enjoying the process of digging deep into the ethno-musicological aspects of the various Jewish musical traditions around the world and exploring ways in which I can apply what I have learnt in a way that is hopefully both innovative and does justice to the authentic aspects of this style of music and its various cultural contexts.