The meeting point of Oriental roots and Rock | Yossi Sassi | TEDxJaffa

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Familiar internationally to music fans by his unique signature sound, Yossi Sassi merges his roots with contemporary music, taking Oriental Rock to levels unheard before.

(Guitar music)

(Applause)

When your roots
are aligned with your passion,

the sky's the limit.

Life is filled with endless dualism.

Change versus stability,
your brain versus your heart.

It seems like everywhere you look in life,
there's some sort of dualism

to challenge you
to balance in between them.

And these two elements
can work one against the other,

but they can also feed one another.

And I believe that when your roots
are aligned with your passion,

this can lead not to frustration
or misconceptions

- as sometimes happens
with dualism in life -

but to innovation and empowerment.

As for my roots, my father, David Sassi,

is the forth out
of ten brothers and sisters.

My roots come from Iraq,
from North Africa,

and also from Thessaloniki, Greece.

My grandfather, Yossef Sassi,

- I'm his namesake,
may his soul rest in peace -

had two elements that challenged him
throughout all his life.

They were his big loves, and he had
to juggle between both of them.

One was his passion for religion,
and for God essentially,

because he was a rabbi
and he was a man of spirit;

and the second was his love,
his endless love for music.

He played the lute
and he also researched and learned,

and was also teaching
the Arabic musical scales,

the "maqāmāt", and Oriental scales.

And this was the heritage
that he left to his children.

The music from Turkey, Greece, Egypt, etc.

I have clear visions of my father,
when I was two years old or so,

standing in the living room
in his underwear

singing in Arabic, singing in Italian,

in a lot of multicultural plethora
that I was exposed to,

during my upbringing.

This is a picture of me, by the way.

(Laughter)

Around that age,

probably looking at my father
wearing his underwear

(Laughter)

just feeling happy
and feeling privileged

to be exposed to this kind
of rich multicultural experience.

And truly as I grew up, I found out
that I love other types of music as well.

In my early teenage years, I was exposed
to rock and roll and heavy metal.

You know stuff like--

(Guitar music)

So this was a different kind of music.

(Applause)

But the most interesting thing
happened to me was around age 14,

when I first touched a guitar,

and two things happened:

one was that I knew I was meant for that,
I knew I found my match.

This is what I wanted
to do in life: to play the guitar.

As simple and as innocent as that:
just to play the guitar.

And the other were the sounds
that came out of hands, my fingers,

were sounds of--

(Guitar music)

They were kind of Middle Eastern;

they had all kinds
of Arabic musical scales in them.

So, essentially my upbringing, my roots,
merged into the music that I loved,

that was my passion.

This is why I believe that who we are
is essentially a delicate balance

between where we come from
along with the way that our heart beats.

And this has been proven to me

throughout all my years
and also in my activities.

I toured the world.

I had the chance to play music

that bridged and united people
together through music

and brought fans from Iran,
Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,

from India to South America.

I've been able to make people happy
throughout the power of music.

Enemies were dancing together.

Throughout this musical journey of mine,

I encountered a sincere genuine problem.

Actually a challenge.

I play 19 different guitar types,
string instruments:

bouzouki, saz, oud, cümbüş,
ukulele, charango;

from Armenia to Bolivia,
if you have strings, I will find you

(Laughter)

and I will use you
in ways I hope you'll like.

(Laughter)

This has challenges of its own, right?

You know, to hold 40+ instruments,

all the types, variations
of those instruments.

I have a room at my place,
a room at my parents' place.

People come to our living room,
they sit on a guitar accidentally.

(Laughter)

But what I do in my live shows

is focusing and playing with essentially
two, three, four types of guitars.

Sometimes I have to move
in between them in the same song even.

One of them is the electric guitar,
as you've seen--

(Guitar music)

OK.

And the other is the bouzouki,
you know, the Greek mandolin.

(Bouzouki music)

And the third was the acoustic guitar,
or the nylon string guitar.

(Acoustic guitar music)

I looked for ways that I can combine them,
all of them in one instrument.

And then I thought, "What will I do?"

I've started to find
all kinds of solutions.

They were all cumbersome
and really not efficient.

So I thought like a child. I said,
"What would my children do?"

When they want something,
for example, one of them wants a cookie.

They don't think twice
or how it cannot be done, they just do it.

They never stop, they keep going.

They'll take a table, they'll put a chair,

they'll put another chair on top of it,
and eventually they'll reach the cookie,

because almost everything they do,
they do for the first time

and almost everything they do,
they want to do out of passion

because they really need it; they have
a genuine need to get to those cookies.

And for me, this guitar was my big cookie.

So I went to a guitar maker
with a lot of experience,

and I told him, "I want to built
this guitar, take me to the Moon."

And he said

- and he came highly recommended
because of his vast experience -

it cannot be done.

Actually he said, they will compete
on shared resources in such a way

that the instrument will never sound good

and it will be for sure cumbersome
and have tilt issues etc.

So as he was speaking,
I was thinking to myself,

"I have cars at home,
I came to a car manufacturer.

Well, actually I want to go to the Moon;
I need a rocket engineer."

So I looked for my rocket engineer
and when I thought about it, I said,

"The piano is a string
instrument, essentially."

So I went to a guy
that had experience in piano building.

Actually his name is
Benjamin Miller, guitar maker.

Today he builds guitars.

Also at the time
he was building some guitars,

but most of his experience to date
back then was in renovating pianos.

So I figured: this guy
knows about acoustics,

this guy knows about musical instruments,
about wood choices, etc.

Carpeting.

So I told him, "Let's go
to the Moon. If you will."

We came out to this quest,
to this journey,

and we made all the designs,
and after more than a dozen meetings

and a process
that spanned almost half a year,

we eventually came up with a prototype.

And this failed!

(Laughter)

It didn't work.

It didn't work.

And I was sitting there
holding this corpse of a vision.

And you know what was
the saddest thing about it?

That each and every word
the guitar maker said,

happened.

It was cumbersome, it had
tilt issues, it didn't sound good.

Everything, word by word,
all his words were written in stone.

But few minutes after that,
when I came back to my senses,

I picked up that prototype
and I said, "OK, let's see.

Here, this choice of woods here
was probably wrong.

And the angle of the necks,
the ergonomics here.

The weights of the tuning forks."

So we made a lot of modifications,
maybe close to 100 of them.

And this is how this guitar
was brought into this world,

out of holding your failure in your hands;

because sometimes when people tell you,
you're going to fail,

and you don't go to the quest,
that's one thing;

when you go to the guest
and you fail miserably, shame thee.

That's a whole different thing.

I want to show you
a quick tour of the guitar.

You already heard
some of the sounds that it produces.

So as you've seen, this guitar is
an embodiment of my musical journey.

It's the East and the West.
It's acoustic and electric.

It's the roots combined with the passion
for modern music and contemporary music.

So I can play anything from, you know,
stuff that is a bit more contemporary--

(Guitar music)

And I can play, you know,
all kinds of rock and roll stuff.

I can also--

The guitar is a fascinating instrument,
because you can play so many--

(Guitar music)

So many variations and with so many
accessories and peripherals.

And essentially, of course,
there is the bouzouki.

(Bouzouki music)

But something happened one day,

when I accidentally plugged
the wrong cable

to the wrong jack here in the guitar.

And...

I heard something something like that--

(Guitar music)

This is how a guitar sounds
through a bouzouki.

A sound that was never
there before in the world.

It wasn't possible
acoustically to produce,

because these two souls,
these two different cultures

now share one body as we all do.

We are all connected;
we know that, we feel that.

So now one can resonate through the other

and produce sounds
that were not possible before.

I want to ask you a question.

Are there butterflies in the desert?

Well, I introduced this question
to a lot of people,

actually hundreds of people
on the Internet,

and I asked this to them.

I'll tell you the statistics.

Most of you think
"there are no butterflies in the desert."

Some of you think, "Maybe, why not?"

Some say, a minority says,
"Yes. Why not? Why wouldn't there be?"

So I studied it and I researched it a bit.

And not only do butterflies
exist in deserts,

there are butterflies actually in each
and every desert on our planet.

And furthermore, butterflies are one
of the most diverse creatures

that there are in deserts
all around the planet.

And you'd think,

what would a beautiful colorful creature
representing freedom do in a wasteland,

in a place that has maybe no life in it
or has very little life in it?

And this is exactly the dualism
we're facing each and every day.

These are the misconceptions

that we are living about ourselves,
about everything that we do in life.

We think, we cannot be butterflies
in the desert, but there are actually.

Let me take you
to another desert: the Moon.

Did you know that when you leave
your footsteps on the Moon,

they are most likely
to last there forever?

Because essentially
there is no wind on the Moon,

so there's nothing
to wipe it off the surface.

Except a meteoric collision, of course...

but still, that would probably stay.

But I think we don't have
to go to the Moon

in order for our footsteps to resonate
here and to the next generations,

because I believe our foundations,
our roots, resonate in everything we do.

I know, my family, my father
and my grandfather's do,

in everything that I do

and I'm hoping that my foundations,
when the day comes,

will resonate, too, through everything
that my daughters, my children, will do.

So I believe that foundations
aligned with your passion

can essentially lead
to innovation and empowerment.

So I encourage you to go out there

and be the butterfly
you can be in your own desert.

Thank you.

(Applause)