Kanye Violinist Debuts

At seventeen, Ben-Ari won a scholarship to study music at a program in Boston, where she was exposed to jazz for the first time. After hearing a Charlie Parker CD, she knew where her future lay. "I had to study whatever it was that Parker was doing," she says. "I had to be able to improvise like he did. I had to learn that language!"

Following obligatory service in the Israeli army, Ben-Ari packed her bags and left to study jazz at Mannes College of Music in New York, much to the chagrin of her parents. "They didn't get what I was doing," she says. "I said I was going to study jazz. My dad said, 'You'll have no future.' I was in tears."

Ben-Ari was kicked out of Mannes just one year later for poor attendance -- but she says that was because she had to hustle gigs to pay the rent. "If I walked into a club and there was a stage," she says, "I'd pull out my violin and play. If there was no stage, I'd still play. At first I'd get my ass kicked. But you go home, practice all day and go out and get your ass kicked again."

Her persistence paid off when she was invited to peform at New York's Museum of Modern Art alongside a bandmate of Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis was in the audience and later came onstage for a solo. As he tuned his instrument, Ben-Ari hammered out her own improv performance. "I was playing my ass off!" she says. "He raised his eyebrow. He was like, 'Damn, this chick is taking over my solo!' But he liked it. He thought I was gutsy."