ofra Haza

Ofra Haza, born in Tel Aviv on 19 November 1957 into a family of Yemenite-Mizrahi descent, sang the songs of her heritage as if they had always belonged on the dance floor. She sang with the Nachal Troupe, played piano as well as singing, and had a warm mezzo-soprano that could float or cut as the song demanded. Her music mixed traditional Middle Eastern singing with commercial pop, set old Mizrahi and Jewish folk tales and poems to Eastern and Western instruments, and drove the whole thing with a dance beat.

Yemenite Songs, in 1984, holds "Im Nin'Alu", a spellbinding, ancient-sounding melody lifted by her soaring voice, and by the late '80s she was a star across Europe and the Americas, turning up regularly on MTV and packing the clubs. In the West she was often called the Madonna of the East.

The '90s brought soundtrack work on Dick Tracy and The Prince of Egypt, hip-hop producers sampling her voice, and a Grammy nomination in 1993. She died on 23 February 2000 of an AIDS-related illness, a loss that shook Israel, where she remains one of the great cultural figures and the singer who helped bring Mizrahi culture to a far wider audience.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.