In short, my expectation was that Hanoch and his longtime producers, Louis Lahav and Moshe Levy, would tailor the songs and the album to Hanoch’s current voice and capabilities. Moreover, Hanoch’s new songs were undoubtedly written with an awareness of the limitations of his aging voice (he’s 68), in contrast to the now-classic songs that were written for a young man with fresh cords and smoking mileage that, while long, was not yet endless. An album is far more amenable to control: you can record and re-record until you get a result that satisfies you. Still, another part of me fully – and hopefully – acknowledged that an album is a very different thing from a live show. Given my still-lingering memory of that performance, I have to admit that I listened to Hanoch’s new album, “The Occurrence and the Mistake” with high, perhaps exaggerated sensitivity to the vocal aspect. As those songs are engraved on my heart, it was a very sad event for me, and I decided that it would be best simply to avoid Hanoch’s shows in the future. Whatever the style was, he absolutely butchered his marvelous songs, sending them crashing down from sublime melodic heights to second-rate, sodden depths. I say “performed” rather than “sang,” because he didn’t sing. He performed many of the great songs that had won him his status. Befitting his lofty status, Hanoch came on late at night, the last item of the festival. I reached that decision after seeing him perform at an open-air festival near Binyamina. Three years ago, I decided to keep my distance from concerts of Shalom Hanoch, the iconic singer-songwriter, and especially from mass shows in which he sings with his band.
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