"Truth be told, few records in my collection sound like Esther Ofarim’s Complicated Ladies. Well, truth be told, few albums will ever sound like it either…in anyone’s collection. A mixture of Israeli melismatic jazz with German liedermacher wouldn’t sound too out of the ordinary (at least in some circles). However, let’s say someone decided to mix all of that with Kraut minimalism and overtly experimental contemporary classical music, well that’s something that’s bound to sound unlike anything else. However, to do all of that, and exist in a collection of music that actually sounds captivating, well here exists that some kind of wonderful flash in a pan.

My apologies to my Israeli friends but outside of Germany and the Middle East, many of us in the west have been entirely lost to the world of Esther Ofarim. Born, in 1941, in then, British Palestine, to a Syrian Jewish family, Esther Zaied began her long journey to this point in which we caught up to her in 1958, when she met a young musician and dancer from Galilee, Abi Ofarim, and decided to take her youthful love of Hebrew folk singing out of the streets of Haifa and into the nascent Israeli Pop music world."

https://www.fondsound.com/esther-ofarim-eberhard-schoener-wolf-wondratschek-ulf-miehe-complicated-ladies-1982/