I've been delinquent in my coverage of local shows lately, but no more! No more I tell you. The North Coast (aka Michigan) is no barren wasteland. We may not be New York or San Francisco, but we there is no shortage of Jewish music happening locally. Here are two upcoming shows to check out. I plan on being at both. If you see me, say hi.
August 15 - The Red Sea Pedestrians, at Rhythms in Riley Square in Farmington, Michigan. The Peds are a 'neo-klezmer' folk band described as a "one-of-a-kind, full-blown, instrument-swapping fusion between tradition and the here-and-now." This is a free show on the Farmington a town square. http://www.myspace.com/redseapedestrians
Over the last couple of week I've come across a variety of Jewish musical perspectives on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. (See my posts on Ari Ben Yam's "Oslo Train,"Sheva's Salaam, and Herman and Brody's "Sweet Home Jerusalem"). Here's one more, and this one comes from an unexpected source...Shimon Peres, nobel prizewinner and president of Israel. The Associated Press reported last week that "There's a new songwriter in cyberspace: Israeli President Shimon Peres. And composers from countries including Iran are writing music for the lyrics to his song, 'Ray of Hope.'" Peres posted the lyrics (see below) to the website Songweavers, looking to see if any musicians would compose music for and record the song. He wasn't disappointed. When I checked this afternoon there were over 50 recordings up on the site. The musicians responses are pretty varied. To hear some representative examples, here are versions by Sharon Ben Shem, Mr. Llime, Omri Lahav, and Shirley Highton.
Peres is a prominent peace activist and his lyrics reflect it. Here's verse two...
And bless streams with love's sway Provide my foe and friend a bloodless day Invite boys and girls for peace to pray, O ... Ye... Then send a ray of hope - for a new way
That's a lot closer to Sheva's "Peace will come upon us" than Ben Yam's "Face the guards in black attire with your teeth and fingernails." Like Sheva it speaks to a vision of music and the love of peace as unifying forces in a land with little unity. Invite the boys and girls. They need an invitation because there have been too few bloodless days lately.
Hat tip to the folks on the Klezmershack mailing list for letting me know about "Ray of Hope."
Hi folks. Shabbat shalom. I'm not sure why but it's been a long week and I'm particularly looking forward to Shabbat.
To help get in the mood, here's Cantor Rowna Sutin singing composer Ben Steinberg's lovely Esa Enai. Rowna is a cantor and professional singer in the Pittsburgh PA area and has stockpiled a lovely collection of her performances on YouTube. She also thoughtfully provided the lyrics to what she was singing. If you're in the Pittsburgh area, you should know that she's available to sing at special events. Her contact info is on her YouTube page.
"sa enai el heharim, me'ayin yavoh ezri?"
"I will lift up my eyes to the mountains: what is the source of my help? My help will come from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot to slip; your guardian will not slumber. Behold, the keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.
The Eternal is your Keeper, the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will guard you from all evil, He will protect your being. The Lord will guard you, coming and going, from this time forth for ever."
Ben Steinberg is a Canadian composer with a large body of Jewish works. The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada has a nice Steinberg biography, and the Jewish Music Webcenter has a list of his work and information on his publishers
I'm having an ambivalent day. I'm leading four projects at work, three of which are in planning stages at the moment. sigh. Lots of work, lots of confusion, very little feeling of progress. Ah well. that's part of the game too.
I was going to show a Klezmer video today but, since it's an ambivalent Thursday, I couldn't decide which one. So you get four. Enjoy...
Java Jews
"The Java Jews, originators of the highly caffeinated klezmer music, play at Java Joes in Des Moines, Iowa"
Golem at FloydFest 7, 2008
"Golem is a unique sounding Klezmer band that rocked the Dreaming Creek main stage at FloydFest on Friday, July 25. One of the highlights of the festival."
"Lebdika Fraylach" Atelier Klezmer -- Stage Juillet 2008
"Lebdika Fraylach" par l'Atelier Klezmer (Camille, Julia et Wilfrid pour les solos) -- Stage Juillet 2008 organisé par le Trio KAVA-BAR Klezmer... 20 musiciens pour 2 jours de stage et Concert au Festival de Nizas (34). Jascha Lieberman at Ariel Café, Krakow.
There is room for every woman, man and child of Jewish blood But the doors are barred and bolted, and the hatches welded shut" (from Ari Ben-Yam's "Oslo Train")
Ok. This is my third in a series of posts about different Jewish musical voices in debate about how to resolve the Israeli / Palestinian issue. The song is "Oslo Train" by Israeli singer-songwriter Ari Ben Yam. Ben Yam is a Russian-born Israeli Jew who "writes and sings poignant songs in Hebrew and English dealing with the corruption and loss of values that plague Israel and the Jewish people." Oslo Train expresses a palpable fear of the Oslo peace process and the loss of self-determination that came with it. It's hard to miss the Holocaust references in the image of Jews on a train with welded doors. It's a visceral image of powerlessness.
Some will say it lost its airbrakes, or the engineer's gone mad, But this train was right on schedule every run it ever had.
Far from Sheva's hopeful Salaam, Ben-Yam pointed asks his listeners what they will do to resist the "long black train." In doing so, "Oslo Train" draws on a long line of American folk protest songs and reminds me a lot Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. That said, I can't honestly think of a song where either encouraged their listeners to "Face the guards in black attire with your teeth and fingernails." That's a level of active rebellion that is a bit violent for the mid-century American folkies, but absolutely part of the English and American folk tradition (to hear some examples grab a copy of the wonderful Chumbawamba recording "English Rebel Songs 1381-1984" which includes "Cutty Wren").
"Will you dare to wreck the engine, throw your body on the rails, Face the guards in black attire with your teeth and fingernails? Or perhaps you'll shrug your shoulders and just do the things you do, Keep on livin' and believin' that the train won't come for YOU?"
Here's a quick shout out to Dan Carkner of the Learning Tsymbaly blog. As his blog name suggests he's been hard at work learning to play the tsymbaly and recently posted a video of himself playing a fine version of Der Gasn Nign (the Street Tune), a klezmer standard.
It's 10:00, the kid's and wife are sacked out and I'm relaxing to the rhythms of the Afro-Semitic Experience bumping through my computer speakers (sorry it's not more hi-fi guys) and enjoying the DJ introducing the tracks in Quebeqois French*. Listening to a stack of tracks from my favorite Jewish Jazz group from my home state of Connecticut is strangely heightened by the unexpected context. Not that I understand a word of the patter, but sometimes it's better that way, letting the DJs voice be a warm human music all it's own.
I'm listening to an archive recording of the program "Les faces cachées de la musique juive" on CRJS 1650 AM, Radio Shalom, Montreal Canada. Radio-Shalom describes itself as "Canada’s first multilingual Jewish radio station and will broadcast 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Programming is broadcasted in English, French and Hebrew....the only station in North America which offers our listeners music from Israel, Yiddish, Ladino, Mizrahi, hassidic and klezmer as well as world music in a multitude of languages." While Radio-Shalom is certainly not the only Jewish radio station out there, it does have the widest range of programming I've seen. With shows ranging from "The Cantors' Corner" to Chassidic Heavy Metal Rocker David Lazzar's"Rockin' Rabbi Show" it's a pretty amazing lineup.
And they stream live and host an archive of past shows. What more could we ask for (besides instantaneous French-to-English translation)? For more information, see their schedule or the individual show pages for times and archive programs. For the record, not all shows are in French but don't let the ones that are slow you down. It's the music that matter's, right?
---- * ok. So I have to tell this story. My lovely and clever wife and I were up in Quebec last summer. I don't speak a word of French. My wife, though, is quite fluent in Spanish and does passable French and Italian. So we're sitting in a charming little bistro in Quebec's Old City. She's ordering and I'm half listening, half daydreaming. All of a sudden the waitress, way over estimating my wife's French, launches into a long explanation of some fine point of the menu and concluding with a complicated question. My wife, going from savy traveler to befuddled rube in one shot, looks at me and says (and I quote) "huh?" My quick witted response was (and I quote) "what?" The waitress looked at the two of us idiots and walked away with our order. By the time she hit the kitchen, we'd begun to recover enough to laugh about it. Sprechen sie Gringo anyone?
Last week I posted the video for "Sweet Home, Jerusalem" and talked about how it expresses a particular Jewish view of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Here's another musical voice in that debate. The song is Salaam (Od Yavo Shalom Alienu), performed and made into an Israeli hit a couple of years ago by the Israeli band Sheva. Sheva has been around since the late 1990's combining Jewish and Muslim musicians, Biblical lyrics, and a focus on promoting peace. I don't know Sheva's opinion about dividing Jerusalem, so I don't want to say they're on the opposite side of any debate with "Sweet Home, Jerusalem's" Menachem Herman and Rabbi Lazer Brody. Like "Sweet Home Jerusalem," though, "Salaam" wants to define a vision of the world and help bring that vision to life. Is it a better vision? Or even a complementary vision? I don't know, but seeing them up against each other helps remind me that life and politics in Israel is complicated and if there were any easy answers they'd have been found a long time again.
Here are the lyrics to Salaam, taken from Wikipedia
Shabbat Shalom everyone. To help us get in the mood, here's Sam Glaser's Adon Olam. Sam's been hard at work lately. Right now he's working organizing the "CAJE Rising Star, a fun-filled American Idol type singing competition" that will take place at the Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education in a couple of weeks. Another event I'd love to attend. There's usually a flurry of CAJE videos hitting the web a couple of weeks after the event, so I'll keep my eyes open and pass them along.
Music has always been about identify. We sing about what we care about, adopting and adapting musical forms that identify us as part of a group. While I don't tend to explicitly focus on the specific agenda's of the music I write about, the fact that I'm even writing about specific music is an exercise in culture. What is being Jewish about?...here, listen to my answer.
I ran across a video this morning that was a fascinating exercise in cultural identity and political propaganda. In the video, Israeli guitarist Menachem Herman rock's his way through a cover of the American classic rock song Sweet Home, Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd retitled "Sweet Home, Jerusalem." The video is a cut & paste job filled with idyllic images of Jewish Jerusalem.
Like the original lyrics, the song lyrics, written by Rabbi Lazer Brody, are classic cultural chauvinism prompted by an external slur. The original song was Lynyrd Skynyrd's defensive response to folk-rock guitarist Neil Young's song Southern Man which painted the American South (of the time) as racist. Skynyrd's response
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her Well, I heard ole Neil put her down. Well, I hope Neil Young will remember a southern man don't need him around anyhow.
Herman and Brody's version appears a defensive response to recent political suggestions by the UN (and Barak Obama?) that Jerusalem be divided.
"Well I heard the UN talk about her But a Jewish boy won't drink this brew Uncle Sam please remember, that Jerusalem won't be split in two!"
So why am I calling attention to this? Songs like this are both essential and dangerous. They're essential as rallying cries and cultural banners for any group under seige, as clearly the religious Zionists feel they are. Sweet Home, Jerusalem gives a way for members of the group to identify each other (hey, he's singing SHJ too!) and share their experience. Music has always made great rallying cries.
Songs like this are dangerous though, too. Lynyrd Skynard claims they wrote Sweet Home, Alabama because, while Neil Young's comments about a racist South may be partly true, the song was "Neil ... shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two." (citation) The problem is that SHA saves all ducks and makes no apology for the racism. Sweet Home Jerusalem makes no apology for any of Israel's role in the current Israeli / Palestinian problem and offers no constructive response to the idea of Jerusalem's division (which is popular in Israel as well as the west) other than the anthem "Jerusalem won't be split in two."
Personally, I struggle with conflicting ideas and emotions about Israel and Jerusalem and am not at all condemning Herman and Brody for their feelings. (In fact, I'm pretty sympathetic.) But waving a musical banner like this has its risks. Mostly, I wanted to call attention to it as a interesting and topical case of Jewish music being used as weapon in a culture war. That's something I haven't written about much and should be more attentive to.
Sweet Home, Jerusalem
(By the way, I'm an honest guy so I'll fess up. I've don't like most classic rock, partially because of the chauvinisms that underly much of it and I've never liked Sweet Home, Alabama.)
Hat tip to Lazer Beams for posting the video (and writing the words) and BlogInDm for linking to it.
I'm a Conservative Jew living in a Christian farm town in Michigan, USA. For me, Jewish music used to be Adon Olam, Hava Nagila, and Fiddler on the Roof. I started getting a clue a few years ago. Jewish music is Klezmer dances, Sephardic ballads and Chassidic niggun. It's thousand year old hymns, three hundred year old Shabbat table songs and 60 year old partisan resistance songs. It's contemporary hip-hop, punk rock, electronica, jazz, and chamber music. In addition to loving its musical and spiritual qualities, Jewish music helps me connect my family with a much broader and diverse Jewish culture than is available locally. The Teruah blog helps me document my exploration and share it with others. Why the name Teruah? Teruah is a call on the shofar on Rosh Hashanna.
Hear me interviewed on the Israel National Radio show "The Beat with Ben Bresky" Please email me about your band, event, album, blog, podcast, research or favorite Jewish music obsession. I'd love to hear it or about it.
August 15 - The Red Sea Pedestrians, at Rhythms in Riley Square in Farmington, Michigan.
September 3 - The Shondes, at TC's Speakeasy in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
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