Monday, April 28, 2014

Reviving the Downtown Sound

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

Reviving the Downtown SoundWhen 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.”

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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”:

Monday, April 21, 2014

Sweet New Sounds from the Ancient City of Jaffa

Luna Abu Nassarby  Leah Falk for Jewniverse

 On Luna Abu Nassar's Bandcamp-released debut album, Asaper Lakh ("I'll tell you") your ears may deceive you. The 24-year-old Palestinian-Israeli singer's light, flexible voice hits first, and is momentarily mistakable for that of any twenty-something girl with a guitar. But then a hint of scraped harp strings, a little reverb, and the force of Abu Nassar's lyrics—effortless in both Hebrew and Arabic—makes the album decidedly more earth than sylph.

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Monday, April 14, 2014

Politics, Protest, and Klezmer in Ukraine's Freedom Square

by Sarah Zarrow for Jewniverse

 What does Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti, also known as Freedom Square, sound like? There's of course plenty of chanting, talking, and arguing. And thanks Kiev's Pushkin Klezmer Band, there's also traditional Jewish music.

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Monday, April 7, 2014

Passover Seder Music

Seder SongsLeading a seder for the first time? Not sure of some Passover tunes? Want to spice up your seder with some new songs? Several synagogues, some of them our clients, include music links on their websites. Visit them and listen:

Temple Israel of Natick

Congregation Rodfei Tzedek in Chicago includes this link

Beth Am Shalom Synagogue in White Plains

aish.com, an Orthodox organization based in Israel, also has some traditional melodies -- note: they are sung in Ashkenazic Hebrew

And let's not leave out the musical maven, Paul Zim with his Passover Sing-A-Long

Do you have music on your site and you're not on our list? Let us know about it, post it on our FB page or Tweet it.
For more Passover news, check out our    page.