Ein Prat Fountainheads Alumni Form New Band Called Tandu in Jerusalem

One of our favorite singing groups has been The Fountainheads, an ensemble of young Israeli dancers, singers, actors and artists, all graduates and students of the Ein Prat Academy for Leadership, who have have joined forces to create new Jewish artistic content for today's Jewish World. 

Since 2011, we haveposted 12 of their videos to great acclaim from Jewish Humor Central readers. But time passes, and groups drift apart. But the four seasoned original members of The Fountainheads stayed together in friendship, forming a new group called Tandu, performing Israeli classics and new compositions in different styles including folk, soul, and jazz.

As Orri J. Avraham wrote in The Jerusalem Post,

When the homegrown Jerusalem acoustic ensemble known as Tandu began performing in 2014, its subtle style and artistic identity had already come to maturity as a result of many months of playing together as a tight-knit group. Sisters Shani and Yahala Lachmish had met their future musical companions, Jeff Petroff and Ofri Tube, years before at the Ein Prat Midrasha, where the seeds of a lifelong friendship were sown amid a shared study of Jewish thought over the summer. Inevitably, this intensive intellectual encounter soon uncovered yet another shared passion: a common love of singing.

A few lively musical endeavors at Ein Prat and a firestorm of new ideas gave birth to the Fountainheads, from whose waters sprang a series of music videos centering mostly on the Jewish holidays. Conceived as elaborate spin-offs of American pop culture songs, and choreographed with the help of dozens of enthusiastic Ein Prat graduates, these hilarious and surprisingly catchy carols quickly became viral hits on social media, outrageously popular in Jewish communities around the world. The band soon found itself touring around North and South America to perform in dozens of synagogues, where its widespread reputation certainly preceded it.

The very name Tandu – Aramaic for “together” – alludes to their penchant to combine ostensibly incompatible melodies and genres into entirely new concepts.

“We are trying to conceive of music that is unbounded by any single form. Superimposing separate styles that may seem to be at odds can actually come out as something totally unexpected and moving,” Petroff explains. His own original meshing of the Jewish Wayfarer’s Prayer into a beautiful soft-rock segment perhaps best demonstrates this notion.

“We still struggle with our identity as a band,” Shani elaborates. “We are often asked to define our brand of music, but find it very difficult to do so without doing it an injustice. We just tell them: Come to our shows and see for yourself.”

Here is a video of Tandu performing the song Mila Tova, which includes a taste of Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You.

Enjoy!