Danny Sanderson

Kibbutz, Manhattan, Nahal band

Danny Sanderson was born on 30 November 1950 in Israel to American parents who had immigrated in 1948. In 1960 the family moved to New York, where his father ran El Al's North American operation, and Sanderson spent his adolescence at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, forming his first group at fifteen. The eight years in New York matter musically: he came back fluent in American rock and blues at a point when Hebrew popular song was still dominated by troupe arrangements and European melody.

He returned to Israel in 1968 and was drafted into the Nahal entertainment troupe, serving as guitarist until his discharge in 1971. That posting supplied the address book for everything that followed — the drummer Meir Fenigstein and the bassist Alon Oleartchik both passed through it. In the gap year after the army he played with the Schnitzelim and recorded alongside the Egyptian musician Zouzou Moussa, work that has stayed a footnote next to what came next.

Kaveret: three albums, three years

Kaveret — Hebrew for beehive, and nicknamed Poogy after Fenigstein — came together in Tel Aviv in 1973 with the backing of the impresario Avraham Deshe. Seven men, four of them singing: Sanderson on guitar and vocals, Gidi Gov, Efraim Shamir, Oleartchik, Yitzhak Klepter, Yoni Rechter on keyboards and Fenigstein on drums. Sanderson was the principal writer. His method was to hang fast, harmonically busy rock songs on Hebrew wordplay and reworked proverbs, then let loneliness and alienation surface underneath the jokes.

The debut, Sipurei Poogy, arrived in 1973 with an absurdist stage show attached and became a bestseller; the single known in English as Baruch's Boots topped the 1973 charts. Poogy BePita followed in 1974 and Tzafuf BaOzen in 1975. In March 1974 the band represented Israel at Eurovision with Natati La Khayay, singing sixth on the night and finishing seventh with eleven points. They were voted band of the year in Israel in consecutive years and split in 1976 over differences of direction, having released three studio albums in total.

The afterlife has been larger than the career. Kaveret reunited in 1984 for a run that drew a Yarkon Park crowd put at 400,000 to 500,000, again in 1990, in 1998, and for a last time in 2013; the final concert, on 9 August 2013, was documented as The Final Act. Sanderson has since closed the door on the idea. Speaking in December 2025 he ruled out reuniting any of his bands: there is a time for everything, he said, and that is over.

Gazoz, Doda and a solo run on wordplay

Gazoz, founded with Gidi Gov and running from 1978 to 1979, was a nine-piece that produced two successful albums and a string of radio hits. Doda, at the turn of the 1980s, went harder and shorter-lived, leaving one album and little commercial trace.

The solo catalogue is where Sanderson stopped being a band writer. It begins with Godel Tiv'i in 1982 and runs through roughly ten albums, among them Halo Noda, held by Hebrew critics to be his strongest work, Congo Blue in 2005, Lo Yafrid Davar in 2009 and Mikan Haderech in 2017. The pattern has been commercial success when the comic register is foregrounded and cooler reception when it is not: the more musically ambitious Kofetz Leshni'ya sold badly, and Mikan Haderech, arriving after a seven-year silence, was markedly more personal and less funny than the records that made his name.

Recognition has been steady rather than sudden. A lifetime achievement award from ACUM in 2005, a further lifetime achievement prize in 2021, and an honorary doctorate from the Weizmann Institute in 2024. A lockdown song about a small country under curfew circulated widely during the pandemic, which is roughly the extent of his output in the second half of the 2010s.

Seventy-five, and back in the studio

Sanderson turned 75 on 30 November 2025. Weeks later, in an interview published on 26 December 2025, he confirmed the first new recording in about ten years: a single translated as If I Had Something to Say, a song he had written at twenty and left unfinished, cut live with his touring band rather than assembled in the studio. He described the material he was digging out of the early 1970s as considerably more complex than what he writes now, and said there are far more constraints on writing today than there were then.

The same interview put him at fourteen shows in the month ahead, including Kibbutz Kfar Blum and Sde Boker — a workload closer to a working club act than to a heritage name doing occasional theatres. His self-deprecation is intact: booked to play a neurology conference, he opened by noting that he was finally performing in front of a medical body he did not need.

The 2022 project Gluyim veNistarim sits behind the current run. Built as a concert of the lesser-known songs from his own albums and his bands' albums, it sold well enough that the show was turned into a live album of the same name — a signal that the audience will follow him past the twelve songs everybody knows.

The 2026 diary

The autumn is booked across formats: Kfar Saba's cultural hall on 15 October 2026, the Gray club in Yehud on 24 October, Zedekiah's Cave in Jerusalem on 29 October, Gray in Modi'in on 14 November and Zappa Jerusalem on 24 November, with Kiryat Motzkin's theatre hall on 14 January 2027 already listed. Theatre dates start at 20:30; the Gray shows are late, doors at 20:00 and the band on around 22:00.

Alongside the standard band show he has been running a guest format, billed as hosting the new Gazoz — a trio of Guri Alfi, Tali Oren and Roi Bar-Natan — including sunset shows at the Amphi Shuni in Binyamina, with his own site listing an Amphi Shuni date on 23 October. There is no support act on the club bills; the guest trio is the variation, folded into his set rather than played before it.