Pioneers at Israel's Rimon School bring jazz education to a new frontier.

By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
June 18, 2004

Good jazz soloists take a simple musical idea and build from there, laying the architecture down phrase by phrase. There's no score as signpost, and there's no conductor to keep the rhythm on track. Soloists simply must trust their skills and their inspiration—and believe that the music will be born from that. As it turns out, that's not unlike founding a school, as demonstrated by the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Israel. In 1985, its founders didn't have much more than an idea—and they didn't have a score to work from.

Guitar students in a Rimon classroom.

"In Israel, there wasn't any alternative for a young musician who wanted to become a professional in music that was not classical," says Orlee Sela, chair of the Rimon board and a member of the group of six young musicians and educators who helped establish Rimon. "There wasn't anyplace."

Before Rimon, aspiring jazzers often left home to study music, many attending Berklee. Some of Rimon's founders, including guitarist Yehuda Eder, the visionary of the undertaking, went to school here. Their experience at Berklee made them realize that contemporary-music education was something viable and offered them a template of sorts for their own undertaking. Though the founders had faith in their idea, the problem at first was persuading others to buy into it.

"None of us had funds, and nobody basically believed in what we were doing," Sela says. "We were 25-, 28-year-old enthusiastic people with a pioneer dream and no money."

The group approached education officials in Tel Aviv for assistance in finding a building. The officials, says Sela, told them that opening a school in Tel Aviv would cost $1 million. So, the group looked to the suburbs. In Ramat Hasharon they finally found what they wanted, an elementary school for special-needs children that was going to be closing because of low enrollment. The mayor, who drove the group to the site himself, said that if they wanted it, the building was theirs.

"Naturally," Sela says, "we said, 'Of course we do.'"

Even as the hunt for real estate was proceeding, the group was putting the other pieces together. They wrote a prototype curriculum; they recruited some teachers who filled in some of the instrumental gaps not covered by the group's own musicians and who for the time being would be willing to work for no salary; they assembled something of a music library.

Orlee Sela

Of course, the school also needed students, and, to that end, the group put ads in newspapers and relied heavily on word of mouth. Soon, young musicians—many not much younger than the school's administrators themselves—were coming to audition.

"We realized this was going to happen," Sela says.

The Berklee alumni among Rimon's founders kept in touch with their alma mater. A curriculum advisor from the college visited Rimon around the time the school opened, and toward the end of the decade, Executive Vice President Gary Burton traveled to Israel, as well. Both gentlemen offered useful advice about Rimon's programs. Actively cultivating its connections to other schools of contemporary music around the world, Rimon became a founding member of the International Association of Jazz Educators, and through that organization strengthened its ties with Berklee. Finally, in 1993 Rimon—along with the Philippos Nakas Conservatory in Athens, Greece, and Fundacio L'Aula de Musica in Barcelona, Spain—became one of the three charter members of the Berklee International Network (BIN). Sela says her school's relationship with Berklee has provided it with an important sense of recognition.

"It was a breath of fresh air," she says. "It was a vote of confidence, and I think an energy boost to go on doing what we were doing in Israel because we were basically doing it in a bubble. There was no one who could really give us feedback on what we were doing and who came from our musical milieu, so this partnership meant a lot to us...it was a partner to share thoughts with and ideas, and we used it, and we still use it all the time."

Rimon has been operating for almost two decades now. It offers eight majors, and its small group of original faculty has grown to almost 50. Its enrollment of approximately 350 students is 10 times that of its inaugural class, and Sela estimates that at least five Rimon students go on to matriculate at Berklee each year. In other words, it's safe to say that Rimon has arrived. Although infrastructure limitations sometimes make it difficult for the school to keep up with demand, at least the interest is there. But that doesn't surprise Sela.

"Over the years, Israel has become a place for jazz," she says. "There's a lot of jazz activity on a regular basis. There's jazz joints, there's jazz musicians who come to visit, and there's jazz festivals...there's jazz series that host Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Joanne Brackeen and McCoy Tyner and a huge array of jazz musicians...there's jazz programs on the radio regularly."

Of course, contemporary music at Rimon isn't just American jazz. Each student brings with him or her indigenous styles, and in a country as diverse as Israel, that means lots of sounds.

"It's very much an immigrant country," Sela says. "It's very much a melting pot, and people bring with them their music styles...students come from all over the country and the West Bank, too. There are students who come from Israeli Arab villages, there are students who immigrate from Ethiopia, from South America, from the States."

But Sela says there's one thing all Israelis have in common: energy.

"Israel is not a place for sleepy people," she says. "It's something very dynamic. People go to sleep very late. It's not a laid-back sort of place."

And neither is Rimon. With its recent introduction of a combined Composition, Performance, and Production major for advanced students, its developing partnership with a dance academy near Jerusalem, and its ambition to launch a record label to produce artistic recordings by Israeli musicians, Rimon isn't about to slow down. Considering what the school's founders started with, that's an impressive accomplishment.

Or, as Sela puts it, "All in all, it's a miracle. It's definitely a miracle."

Jason Roeder is Berklee's Communications Editor/Writer.