Noa

Noa stands among Israel's most widely celebrated singer/songwriters thanks to a sound that readily spans multiple idioms. Rising in the first half of the 1990s, she built her reputation in tandem with guitarist and longtime associate Gil Dor. The pair earned recognition through such projects as the 1994 Pat Metheny-produced Noa and the 2000 release Blue Touches Blue, both of which wove '60s folk currents together with jazz, classical, pop, and Noa's Yemenite roots. An artist of genuinely global reach, she has sung in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Spanish, and Italian; the last of these languages receives dedicated treatment on the 2006 album Noapolis: Noa Sings Napoli. Maintaining that international presence, she regularly fuses elements from disparate traditions, as heard on 2015's Love Medicine—which includes a Hebrew rendering of Brazilian singer/songwriter Gilberto Gil's "Peace"—and on 2019's Letters to Bach, where she supplies English and Hebrew lyrics to instrumental pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Born Achinoam Nini in Tel-Aviv in 1969 to parents of Yemeni descent, she spent her childhood in New York from the age of two until she turned seventeen, at which time she moved back to Israel. Following completion of the required two-year military service, she enrolled at the Rimon School of music and there met multi-instrumentalist Gil Dor—whose skills encompass guitar, piano, percussion, and more—who became her enduring creative partner. Drawing inspiration from singer/songwriters such as Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, Noa joined Dor on her first two recordings, Achinoam Nini/Gil Dor Live (1991) and Achinoam Nini/Gil Dor (1993).

Her third album, Noa (1994), marked her initial worldwide release. Issued by Geffen Records and recorded in New York under the supervision of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny—an acquaintance of Dor—the set is sung largely in English and features Pat Metheny Group members Steve Rodby on acoustic bass and Lyle Mays on piano. The follow-up, Calling (1996), again produced by Rupert Hine and issued internationally by Geffen, likewise favors English vocals yet stands apart as a forthrightly political statement born of the grief Noa experienced after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination on 4 November 1995 at a large peace demonstration in Tel-Aviv where she and Dor had appeared. In 1997 she issued Achinoam Nini, her debut collection of original Hebrew songs, and a year later she released the live recording Achinoam Nini & the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

For the next international outing—the 2000 album Blue Touches Blue, which she herself has called her masterpiece—she enlisted producer Mike Hedges, known for prior work with U2, Manic Street Preachers, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Lush. The more personal 2002 release, written during her first pregnancy, was produced by Dor and Yoad Nevo. Two subsequent projects with Naples's Solis String Quartet—Noa Live (2005) and Napoli-Tel Aviv (2006)—preceded Genes & Jeans (2008), another collaboration with Dor that drew on the Yemeni songs of her childhood.

In 2009 Noa and Arab-Israeli singer Mira Awad issued the single "There Must Be Another Way," Israel's entry for that year's Eurovision Song Contest, which placed sixteenth. The two artists developed a close friendship and later that year completed the full-length album of the same name. Noa remained active, issuing two albums in 2011: Noapolis: Noa Sings Napoli, which further explored her ties to Italy through a set of Neapolitan songs, and Eretz Shir: The Israeli Songbook, a survey of classic Hebrew material recorded with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Love Medicine, steeped in Brazilian influences, appeared in 2015, while the Quincy Jones-produced Letters to Bach followed in 2019.