Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 8:00 PM EDT

El Khat

El Khat is a homemade junkyard band led by multi-instrumentalist Eyal El Wahab. In 2018/19, El Khat began to hone their sound in garages and warehouses. Experimenting with DIY homemade instruments, as an expression of a minimalist life philosophy, led the three-piece to create a collection of Arabic tunes of Yemeni origin. While the detachment from any nation or any flag is a driving force behind the group, the heart of their music and heritage is rooted in the culture of Yemen. The constant divisions that have been created by wars and immigrations has pushed out a reassembled identity, something that is strongly felt in El Khat's music. Named for the plant used so widely chewed across the Arab Peninsula, The band brings original compositions inspired by the music of the golden age in Aden, Yemen.

El Wahab plays many instruments, like the dli and the Kearat that he constructed himself. It's something he started doing several years ago, using his skills to make music from the items people discard. A child of the Yemeni diaspora who's grown up in Tel Aviv Jaffa - Israel, it's a practice that harks back to the family homeland, where even rubbish can have become an instrument.

El Wahab has always been a man of invention. He talked his way into the Jerusalem East-West Orchestra as a cellist, self-taught from busking and unable to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along, and picking up music theory. It gave him a strong foundation, but his world changed when he was given 'Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen' an LP of Yemeni traditional music from the 1960s. It came as an epiphany. He quit the orchestra, began building instruments and put together El Khat.

MUTE, El Khat’s 3rd album, released in September 2024 on the German record label, Glitterbeat Records. Mute is an album that explores distance, speech – and the lack of it. It’s a series of musings on people, places – and leaving. The record began life with the core of El Khat – multi-instrumentalist el Wahab, percussionist Lotan Yaish and organist Yefet Hasan – recording in an isolated village underground shelter. “My state of mind at the time affected the compositions even before I wrote the music,” el Wahab notes, “and the isolated location gave us a chance to make sense of that.”

Following those sessions, in the summer of 2023 the group emigrated to Berlin; a far cry from Jaffa, where they’d largely grown up. The move was an expression of the nomadic urge that has been a constant in el Wahab’s life, one that flows directly into his work.

Albat Alawi Op.99, El Khat’s 2nd album, released on March 2022 via Glitterbeat Records, celebrates an homage to Faisal Alawi, a popular Yemeni singer who died in 2010, along with an alba, a small tin box that can contain many treasures, while the Op.99 is intended to give the compositions “the same respect as Western classical music.”

Saadia Jefferson, El Khat’s debut album, released in November 2019 in the UK label - Batov Records. The album brings a funky, psychedelic re-imagination to t he traditional Yemeni songs that electrified him when he first heard them, this is an album almost entirely filled with his own compositions, something close and personal that constantly looks back to his family’s homeland in Yemen.

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