Desert Wind

Many years ago, I found a tape in the discount bin by the artist Ofra Haza. It was Desert Wind. I had never heard of her but I was intrigued by the cover and frankly, the price. I bought it hoping that it would atleast be interesting and new. I was not disappointed. Ofra's voice blew me away. I had never heard anything like it before and have not since. Desert Wind is still, for me, her best album. Her voice soars in I Want To Fly and is haunting in Kaddish. She was really my first encounter with Middle Eastern music and I have never forgotten how utterly moved I was by her beautiful voice.

This CD is a wonderful mixture of middle eastern rhythm's
and mainstream pop. The music on this cd is both interesting and
exciting. Ofra Haza's singing is consistently superior in every respect to most other female pop vocalists. Her technical excellence, clarity of tone and pureness of pitch are at least equal to the best efforts of the best: Celine Dion, Sarah Brightman, Barbra Streisand. Ofra Haza poured
great depths of emotion into all her singing. With the majority
of her songs it is easy to discern that her soul is on full display, that she put her heart into her singing, and that the feelings expressed are genuine. She wrote much of her own music and most of her own lyrics. In "Desert Wind" the booklet provides a brief explanation of what each song is about. For example, the song "Fatamorgana" (Mirage), one of the best on this CD, tells the story of Ofra's mother traveling on foot through the desert to escape oppression in her native country. The CD provides a well balanced mix of fast paced and slower songs. The two standout fast paced songs are "Wish Me Luck," and "Middle East." Ofra typically put one or two very good songs at the end of her albums, and in this CD it is the excellent,relective "Kaddish." Overall, this is a very satisfying CD, and like almost all Ofra Haza's music, it
is worthy of many multiple listenings.

Having bought Shaday and Kirya by miss Haza, i bought Desert Wind with the notion that it would be as fantastic as the aforementioned. Boy was i wrong. Gone are the heavy Yemenite/Israeli beats and flavor, as is Haza singing in Hebrew. Instead, I found her beautiful voice swallowed up by abhorrent 80's synth-pop cheese and benal lyrical content, with Hebrew only in the chorus at most. There is not a single song, with the exception of "Slave Dream" that I could bear to listen to all the way through, and most of the songs are laughably bad. So, fans of Haza's other works, do yourself a favor and save your [money] and buy Shaday or Kirya. Unless you want a good laugh, then by all means, purchase away!

I'll never forget the day I first heard this on cassette. My wife came home from shopping and put it on. I said "WOW, who is this??" And she said "I don't know who she is, they were playing her at the music store and I asked who it was and bought it. I think she's Arab." Then I saw Ofra Haza's picture on the cover and had to say "WOW" again. As we soon learned, she was a Yemenite Israeli, already world-famous (except in America) back then in 1990. We saw her in concert later that year and of course learned much more about her and her earlier music, particularly her groundbreaking "Fifty Gates of Wisdom (Yemenite Songs)".

Following "Fifty Gates" in 1987, Ofra Haza turned to a dance beat in "Shadday" (1988), an album, in my opinion, of derivative western dance-track sounds and only two stand-out songs. Then, a year later, she turns out "Desert Wind", this stunning, hook-laden, beat-driven, authentically Middle-Eastern album of passionate, meaningful songs, juxtaposing Hebrew and English verses, almost all written or co-written by her. Best are the danceable "Ya Ba Ye", "Middle East", "I Want to Fly" and "Taw Shi", and the gorgeous "Fatamorgana", "Da'asa" and "Kaddish". That's a lot of favorites for one album, but that's the kind of album this is. "Slave Dream" and "In Ta" take some getting used to, but even they turn into winners once you've managed to absorb them. "Kaddish" left hardly a dry eye in the house when she performed this in concert. "Middle East" has ironically the least middle-eastern melody of the dance tunes (i.e. it's in a major key), and it is a rousing song of hope for peace - even a love offering to the Palestinians. Ofra seems to put one such song on every album. Tragically, Ofra is gone, and we're all still waiting to hear popular songs of peace from the Palestinian side. Ofra would probably say keep hoping.

Ofra's Haza's singing on this album is stunning, where we can hear her above the loud accompanyment. I just hope that with modern recording technology they will reissue her work with the background toned down so that we can enjoy the beautiful soaring voice. There was none like her. Whenever I hear Ofra's voice on a sound track I recognize it instantly. for my taste, it is the "dance club" rhythmic beat that it too loud. I prefer Kaddish and Slave Dream where the background music stays in the background.