John Zorn’s Tzadik record label compiles the radical work of the 1980s New York jazz group Hasidic New Wave
By Jake Marmer for Tablet Magazine
When
we speak about the transmission of Yiddishkeit, one of the most
fascinating cultural phenomena of the late 20th century was New York’s
downtown music scene. A number of tremendously talented young Jewish
musicians aligned their musical identities with traditional Jewish
music, re-interpreting it a new, radical way. Hasidic New Wave, one of
the experimental groups to emerge from the downtown music ferment, will
go down in history for their treatment of traditional Hasidic
chants—niggunim—which the band’s leaders Frank London and Greg Wall,
fellow graduates of the New England Conservatory, learned when playing
Hasidic weddings to support themselves. The band’s entire output, as
well as a CD of new, previously unreleased material, has now been
collected and is being republished by John Zorn’s Tzadik Records as a
box set. On Dec. 12, the release will get a celebration from friends and
special guests at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. I had the honor of
writing liner notes for the HNW boxset. When I asked Wall if he had any
thoughts about the writing, he said: “Write it in a way that’s most
exciting for you.” When I asked London he said: “Make it a poem.”***
1. At a tish, before getting the song rolling, you tell a story. Here’s one about how the first Hasidic tune—a niggun—came to be. A rebbe, before he was known as such, was abducted by a group of hoodlums. Whether they expected a ransom or did this simply out of spite wasn’t clear. He sat tied up, on the side, as they gathered, and drank, and burst into song—because that’s what everyone did, forlorn hoodlums too; everyone always sang. A Ukrainian song with Ukrainian words, which a rebbe, who wasn’t then a rebbe, could not understand. But he joined in, more bleating goat than songbird, blurring the lyrics, washing over them in a language that was not Slavic, and neither was it Hebrew or Yiddish. If you ever read a laundered page of poetry you’ll have a sense of what he sounded like. A desperate bid, inspired by fear rather than revelation? Either way, what followed neither he, nor the robbers could have predicted; he became the root to their tree, root-radical note underneath their melody. What prompted the turn-around, what the newly appointed rebbe and his newly appointed Hasids suddenly stumbled upon, was the sense that everything in the world has a metaphysical twin—likely a triplet. What they stumbled upon was the fact that the true the counterpoint of tradition and its interpretation is neither in collaboration nor the escape—but a single conflicted, entranced, festive, and entirely unexpected, world.
Listen to “Vesamachta Dub”:
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