As the name indicates, the musical and geographical origins of this style of music go back to the land of Al-Andalus, a land which once covered a large part of the Iberian peninsula, and nurtured the blossoming and culmination of the civilization known as the Golden Age (of Arabs, Jews, and Christians), which flourished from the Middle Ages to the fall of Granada in 1492.
Arab-Andalusian music, which is of Arab origin and began to develop in the ninth century, draws its inspiration from both East and West.
Transmitted orally, it crossed to North Africa, where it was adopted by the major urban centers of the Maghreb. It became an integral part of the local heritage - the offshoot of a prestigious civilization with a tradition of tolerance and a wealth of culture.
As early as the ninth century, this music already had its own rules, groundwork, and repertoire. Most of the musical tradition of North African Jewry (from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) is rooted in Andalusian music.
This body of music reached Israel when Sephardi Jewry immigrated at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s.
In Israel's early years, there was only minor and marginal interest in this music.
Efforts to integrate newcomers in Israeli society were focused on the newly developing Israeli culture. Not until the end of the 1970s and the 1980s did there develop a movement which strove for social and cultural awakening. It would promote a musical renaissance within those Jewish communities in Israel with a North African background.
Paradoxically, the political realities of the time speeded up the process in which there developed an attachment to the Sephardi cultural heritage in Israel.
The massive immigration of Russian Jews, including large numbers of musicians, and in particular violinists, facilitated the establishment of a Western string section which adapted, integrated, and blended with those who played authentic ethnic instruments from Morocco. This music, once dismissed, rejected, and forgotten in Israel's lightning-fast history, now became a creative instrument in the integration of Ashkenazi (Western) Jews, the country's latest immigrants.
Things have come full circle, and the CD's of the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra are now part and parcel of Israel's musical heritage. They shape and enrich an important part of the country's cultural fabric.
The result is powerful, harmonious, deeply felt, and mesmerizing.