Queer Jewish Weddings Concert
Rhythm & Jews
Post-klezmer music hitches a ride to everywhere
By Alexandra J. Wall
Duke Ellington's nephew Michael James, himself a jazz afficionado, once asked jazz pianist Anthony Coleman why he never played music from his own culture--Jewish music. "I don't have any culture," said Coleman, who recently played a memorial tribute in honor of Ellington's one hundredth birthday. "What do you mean?" James demanded. "Your people slaved down on Bullshit Street !"--referring to the impoverished Jewish merchants and peddlers on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Coleman describes that conversation as the moment that sparked his newfound interest in a culture he had thought dormant--his own.
He now plays in an ensemble called Sephardic Tinge that explores eastern Jewish music, and in an anti-klezmer spoof called the Self-Hater's Orchestra. And he recently produced a CD of songs used in services at Manhattan Congregation B'nai Jeshurun. As Coleman puts it, Jewish music was like "a tumbleweed that passed me and got stuck in my hair."
The burgeoning Jewish music scene is filled with musicians just like Coleman, who sound as if they've been standing in the Arizona desert in a windstorm. The movement, loosely thought of as "alternative" Jewish music, defies easy characterization. The musicians borrow strands from across a variety of genres, including jazz, rock, and, of course, klezmer, with the unifying thread being Jewish identity. "These are all people who are intensely self-identified as Jews, and they're all musicians," says George Robinson, chief music critic for the New York Jewish Week and the Detroit Jewish New s. "Beyond that, it's hard to see a lot of common ground."
The scene's creative center is Lower Manhattan, but two new record labels hawking exclusively Jewish releases--as well as a Web site that sells the CDs--are introducing the riffs to an even wider audience. They are a far cry from the Hebrew melodies belted out by cantors with acoustic guitars in synagogues and social halls. And while it's tough to quantify sales, anecdotal evidence suggests Jewish music is spreading: Once the province of Judaica shops, it's no longer uncommon to find alternative Jewish titles on the racks of major distributors such as Tower Records. "The Jewish music scene is so much more vibrant than it's been in 80 or 90 years," says Frank London, a trumpet player in the Frank London Allstars and several other ensembles. "It's just really, really cooking."
But it has also barely cracked the mainstream or, for that matter, even the Jewish mainstream--a realm still dominated by a handful of singers such as Debbie Friedman, the best-selling Jewish musician of all time. Friedman, a folk singer who has produced 17 albums and sold 200,000 since 1972, regularly plays to audiences of several thousand at conventions, community centers, and retreats, and has her own line of Hallmark cards coming out for the High Holidays this year.
The hub for alternative Jewish music, meanwhile, is the Knitting Factory, a three-stage venue in Lower Manhattan where acts on the JAM (Jewish Alternative Music) label get the chance to perform. But a recent JAM record release party gives a sense that while the movement may be spreading, it still has room to grow. The party, celebrating the release of several new titles, drew only about 30 people to the spacious main hall of the club.
Additionally, the alternative movement has its critics. Some say the artists are perverting Jewish music to such an extent that it's barely recognizable as Jewish. Others suggest the artists tapping into their Jewish roots are doing it without any conviction. Mayer Pasternak, an Orthodox rabbi and the vice president of marketing and sales for Tara (the "Amazon.com" for Jewish music on the Web at www.tara.com ), is among those who question the musicians' authenticity. "They're looking for something that expresses themselves as Jews, and they're expressing it within the genres and culture they're comfortable with," says Pasternak, who gets most of his business from selling Judaica-type tracks. "The only thing that makes them a movement is that there is a large number of them, displaced from normal Jewish modes of expressing themselves, and they all gather under the umbrella of the Knitting Factory to express their Jewish identity." While Pasternak does offer Knitting Factory CDs, they aren't big sellers. And he says that rather than focusing on whether such music is growing in popularity, the focus should be on how to get the musicians and their growing fan base connected to Judaism.
The artists themselves say the link with their Jewish identity is real enough. "You have these professional musicians that are really good on their instruments, and all of a sudden they get a spark of Jewishness," says Yosi Piamenta, an Israeli-born rock guitarist. "Once it hits them, it doesn't leave. Then they get more and more involved [in Judaism] doing this music." Take Wally Brill, one of the musicians whose work has been criticized for being inauthentic. He says the music helped change his soul. Brill, whose CD Covenant sets classic cantorial recordings from the '20s and '30s to electronic music, says Jewish music used to remind him of "dancing with the fat aunties at a bar mitzvah in Queens." In fact, he has been heavily influenced by performers from cultures other than his own--including Pakistani Sufi vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and West African Islamic singer Salif Keita. It was his fiance's father--a rabbi--who introduced him to the cantorial recordings that inspired Covenant. Brill says the release of the CD turned him from a "self-loathing Jew ... who ran away and hung out with shiksa girls" to someone who recognizes the beauty and poignancy of his own religion. "I was so welcomed by this music and so at home in the sound of these singers," he says, "I didn't realize I [had been] away."
When the Knitting Factory--known simply as "the Knit"--launched the JAM record label in April 1998, it was hardly the milestone in Jewish music that outsiders might have perceived it to be. The introduction of the new label was only one event in a long series of happenings--including Jewish music festivals and concerts--that helped propel the alternative scene into a full-fledged movement.
But the seeds for the current Jewish identity revival were planted at least two decades ago, in the '70s, with groups and musicians like the Klezmer Conservatory Band (which Frank London helped found), Andy Statman, The Klezmorim, Giora Feidman, and Kapelye. These group kicked off a renewed interest in klezmer, the folk music of Eastern European Jews who wandered from village to village, playing before prayer. "[Klezmer] reflected the patchwork quilt of national cultures in which Jewish life was lived," wrote Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish . "These Jews rarely knew how to read music and passed their skill down from father to son. They earned very little and had to keep moving, seeking out country fairs, weddings, synagogue dedications, Purim festivities, etc." Jewish jazz musicians began rediscovering klezmer and reinventing it, taking it out of the wedding halls. As klezmer grew more popular, more jazz musicians like London began to give it their own improvisational spin.
Many musicians say 1992 was the year that Jewish music branched out. That's when John Zorn, a jazz composer and saxophonist who has a Jewish record label called Tzadik, organized the Radical Jewish Culture Festival in Munich. "It was a touchstone because it was not a klezmer festival," says Coleman. "To say that all Jewish music equals klezmer is ridiculous; it's as if you said that every black musician had to include a reggae tune in a concert so you'd think you had heard black music." At the 1992 festival, musicians who had already established themselves in their respective genres came together with their various interpretations of Jewish music. "It was a powerful experience," says Coleman. "Some people really investigated it as a genre or heritage; some did what was appropriate for them, taking a rebel position; some just played music they would normally play. And if you were going to be sympathetic, you'd have to figure out, 'How is this Jewish?' It made you ask a lot of questions which, of course, is very Jewish."
What began at that festival continued at the Knitting Factory in later years, when even non-Jewish artists began exploring Jewish culture. Michael Dorf, CEO of Knit Media and owner of the Knitting Factory, believes the genre reached a milestone when renowned African American clarinetist Don Byron played the music of klezmer musician Mickey Katz at the Knit. "A serious African American jazz player doing Jewish music was a real anomaly, so the press picked it up," says Dorf. "[Byron] opened a lot of people's eyes. Musicians here began seeing you don't have to be Jewish to get into it, or you don't have to be religious--that this taps into your cultural roots. So then the whole mishpocheh of downtown players all seemed to have this similar urge."
The Knit began hosting regular Jewish music festivals, including Jewsapalooza, named after the popular alternative rock festival Lollapalooza. The Knit has also hosted three Passover seders, with performances by figures such as Zorn and Lou Reed, the former lead singer of the Velvet Underground. By 1998, the third year of the seder, it had become so popular that it had to be held in Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall. Some 700 people attended, and another 6,000 participated on-line. This fall, the Knit will oversee the launch of a new Internet search engine called "Oyhoo!" (www.oyhoo.com), which will seek out specifically Jewish cultural events like the one at Avery Fisher Hall. "Oyhoo! is going to be filled with nothing but non-tsuris ," Dorf quipped.
The JAM label, with eight titles released in 1998 and another eight planned for release this year, has firmly established the Knit as the home of the Jewish alternative movement. But where the Knit used to be the primary address of alternative Jewish music, other venues are starting to crowd the field. Tonic, a newer space housed in an old Kedem wine factory in Lower Manhattan, offers klezmer brunches every Sunday and features alternative musicians. And even Jewish community centers are becoming a part of the scene. The Sol Goldman Y in the East Village, for instance, recently held a Kosovo benefit concert for Albanian refugees that featured Hasidic New Wave and Craig Taubman. A week later, the community center hosted a concert with Zorn's band Masada.
Avraham Rosenblum, founder of the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, is one artist who believes the current movement's beginnings go back even farther than the klezmer revival--to the '60s. Rosenblum grew up in a Yiddish-speaking but nonobservant home and was a rock musician by age 20, playing in a band that opened for such '60s acts as Jefferson Airplane. Feeling spiritually empty, Rosenblum decided to take some time away from his musician's life and head to Israel. Once there, he found himself at the Diaspora Yeshiva on Jerusalem's Mt. Zion--a haven for, as he put it, "American hippies who had found God." Rosenblum found it so fulfilling he stayed 12 years. But while he found himself getting deeper into religion, eventually becoming a ba'al teshuvah (returnee to the faith), he couldn't forget rock and roll.
Rosenblum founded his band in the late '60s with a few other yeshiva students. He says his music echoed the hippie music then emanating from the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. "It was a revolutionary thing happening in Judaism, bringing in contemporary music and using it as a vehicle to promote this new thing happening for all of us." What made that scene so exciting, Rosenblum says, was its authenticity. "We didn't grow up frum (religious) and discover rock later and try to force one ... into [the] other," he said. "It wasn't just giving Jewish music a rock and roll veneer. Our synthesis was much deeper than that."
Another '60s-influenced secular-turned-frum musician is Yosi Piamenta, a popular New York act. Dubbed the "Hasidic Hendrix" a few years ago by the Village Voice , the Israeli-born Piamenta is known for his blistering electric guitar. Piamenta says his music--which has Jewish and Middle Eastern roots--is completely different from that of guitar great Jimi Hendrix. (Piamenta also says he's not worthy of the comparison.) Piamenta started out as a secular Israeli rocker. He eventually moved to the United States, became religious, and began earning a living by playing Jewish weddings. But he missed rock and went back to it in 1994. Today, he says, all the musicians he knows are hopping the Jewish identity train. The ba'al teshuvah says it's evidence of a small--but not negligible--return to Judaism. And Brill says the music that results from that connection is powerful. "I spend my life recording vocalists who only care about making money and getting a lot of drugs and sex. That's the goal of most rock musicians, and there's not a lot of spirituality in that," he says. "When you hear someone who is singing to God ... they're infused with power. Aretha Franklin does it every time she opens her mouth."
What's become clear is that since the rediscovery of klezmer, the Jewish music genre--if it can be thought of as such--has branched out in many different directions. "Nothing could have prepared me for the wild variety out there," says Robinson, the music critic. "The sheer range is thrilling. It's a living, breathing music. These are not museum pieces. These people are trying to expand horizons." Rosenblum agrees. "Jewish music is going everywhere," he says. "It's going anywhere the creative mind is willing to take it."
Take, for example, the music of Uri Caine and Aaron Bensoussan. Caine, a jazz pianist, grew up speaking Hebrew in a secular Jewish home. He recently teamed up with Bensoussan, a Moroccan-born cantor who was ordained at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, to record a CD based on the Zohar (one of the books of the Kabbalah). The ensemble creates music by blending improvisational jazz, Middle Eastern rhythms, and a DJ who "scratches" records. At the Knit performance celebrating the release of the JAM titles, Bensoussan--accompanied by Caine on piano--sang in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Ladino. The cantor played the oud (a musical instrument of the lute family from northern Africa) and very nearly gyrated on stage--not exactly bimah etiquette.
Bensoussan says his collaboration with Caine, with its elements of jazz and African sounds, is like "all these spices coming together, hopefully making harmony."
Another musician who takes the "a little bit of this and a little bit of that" approach to music is London, the trumpeter. He says his band Hasidic New Wave stretches Jewish music in many ways--combining Hasidic music with jazz, rock, and African American influences. All of the band's CDs feature niggunim (wordless Hasidic melodies). But consider the range of his Jewish musical impulses. London also has what he calls a "freaky hard-core rock and roll" project called Psychadelicatessen--featuring members of the now defunct '80s pop band the Psychedelic Furs--that sets Franz Kafka's diaries to music. London is also collaborating on a full-length operetta based on a play by the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
The range and creativity inherent in the movement become apparent almost everywhere you look. Take Pharaoh's Daughter--a new staple in the New York scene.
Their CD Daddy's Pockets has a foldout lyric jacket like most mainstream pop recordings. Yet a quick look at the words shows a difference. The first song, "Niggun," consists entirely of the lyric "Aydidy aydidyaydidy ah da da da da da." Reading further, we find the title track is an excerpt from a Jewish children's song about God's omniscience. Another track is cowritten by 7-year-old Juan Carlos (as part of a creative writing assignment): "you sleep in the sunny/you sleep in the muddy/you sleep like a fox/you sleep in a box." Another song, "Everything," has the lyric "Here's my body, cradled in yours/and all our stories, opening doors/I'll give you everything and I won't be holding back ... Here are our barriers/they're breaking down/to all that raw skin/we'll be running around in." Basya Schechter, the band's founder and lead vocalist, grew up in ultra-Orthodox Boro Park, New York. For a long time, she says, she played in clubs for mainstream audiences that didn't understand her music. "It was like I was trying to prove something that no one was getting," she says. "Clubs and bookers never got me." Her music was deeply influenced by the Hasidic melodies of her childhood as well as the harmonies of Turkey, Greece, Morocco, and South Africa, where she spent time with local musicians.
Los Angeles-based musician Bruce Berger, otherwise known as RebbeSoul, says his music is not only infused with Jewish themes, it contains a message. "If I have any kind of mission, it's to bring people together," he said. "As entertainers, there's a certain degree of responsibility we have. We can influence people in a way any politician would give his right arm for. We can really bring about change in a very positive way. Music is a way of accessing the heart."
Berger started out as a studio musician, but unsatisfied with playing other people's music, he went on a quest to discover his own sound--which he says he has found in Jewish music. His CDs are a mix of original compositions and well-known Jewish favorites. The first Jewish song he recorded was a guitar version of, "Avinu Malkeinu" from the High Holidays service. What surprised him, he said, was that when he played the tape for non-Jews, they thought it had a great sound. It was the Jewish musicians who initially asked, "Why do you want to play that?"
While Berger is perhaps closer to mainstream Jewish music than most of the other alternative players, the Californian says that what is happening in New York is "pushing the boundaries a little bit, which is what music needs to do." He says musicians of other ethnic groups have never been afraid to try new things, to challenge the norm--and now Jews are doing it too. The result, he says, is nothing short of a "metamorphosis."
So how are the fans responding to this Kafkaesque change? Those who have embraced the music say there is nothing else quite like it. At a recent John Zorn show at the Sol Goldman Y, Zachary Thacher's reverence shines through as he describes the musician's music. The Zorn fan describes the hybrid music as a "religious experience," comparable to davening. "It's got a haimish spiritual quality to it," he says.
But so far, at least, the core audience is predominantly Jewish. Dorf, owner of the Knit, estimates that about 75 percent of those who attend the Jewish music festivals are Jews. And even among Jews, alternative music is still second fiddle--as the Friedman dynamic indicates. Pasternak says Knitting Factory music is still "inaccessible" to many Jews, particularly the Orthodox, who still prefer the Judaica shop medleys.
Yet there's been some indication in the last few years that even mainstream artists are starting to feel the Jewish beat. Jewish comedian Adam Sandler, for instance, has written a wildly popular song about Hanukkah that is among the top requests in the country every holiday season. Perhaps more indicative of the trend is Phish (the 1990s version of the Grateful Dead), a half Jewish band that sings "Yerushalayim shel Zahav" and "Avinu Malkeinu" to packed stadiums nationwide. Even the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan recently released an unlikely song about the Holocaust entitled "Never Again."
Still, Jewish identity in music remains--at least for now--a distinctly alternative trend. Robinson says he's still waiting for a Jewish artist to have a major breakthrough on the mainstream pop charts with a Jewish song. "The new Jewish music hasn't produced a crossover superstar like a Bob Marley, who breaks out of ... traditional popular music and takes it to the next level," he says, referring to the Jamaican reggae icon. "We haven't gotten that far with Jewish music. That's the next hurdle."
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