Byaaronhoward.com,
Album Mention
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For a dying language, Yiddish is certainly alive and dancing. Two recent music releases push Yiddish forward albeit in different directions.
Imagine a Yiddish CD in a vein similar to the French chanson tradition: a taste of political commitment, lyrics that celebrate love, the flavor of poetry, sweetened with a Jewish sense of humor. That’s Adrienne Cooper’s “Enchanted” (Golden Horn). Cooper has been a featured vocal soloist with many of the top Jewish bands (Klezmatics, Kapelye, Alicia Svigals and Mikveh, Frank London’s Brass All-Stars). On this CD, Cooper called in the chits, bringing in a collection of great studio musicians including Marilyn Lerner (piano), Benjy Fox-Rosen (bass), Avi Fox-Rosen (guitar), Patrick Farrell (accordion), Kenny Wolleson (drums), Jon Singer (marimba) and Frank London (trumpet) under the direction of Mike Vinograd.
Much of the credit for the unique sound (or more accurately, collection of sounds) must go to Vinograd who served as the album’s producer/arranger. He gives us a guitar-heavy stadium anthem sound to “Peace In the Streets”, a sensual bluesy muted sound to “In the Darkness”, a bittersweet, reflective piano-inflected sound to “My Unrest”, the drunken klezmer feel of “Gefilte Fish” and so on. Outside of a few exceptions like the Klezmatics, we’re not used to hearing such a combination of bittersweet, playful, passionate and freewheeling moods on one Yiddish musical release.
Then there are the songs. About half of the 13 tracks are new compositions. Some come from songwriters writing new works in Yiddish like Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman and Adrienne Cooper. Other lyrics come from modernist Yiddish poets like Zishe Landau and Moshe Leyb Halpern. There’s also the paradoxical Adrienne Cooper song “Mother Love”, a newly-penned song for the Yiddish play “Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln”, created to reflect an old mother-daughter folksong.
One of the CD’s highlights is the sound collage “A Song Book”. The track was made by layering a wax disc recording from Cooper’s grandfather with a Avi Fox-Rosen guitar sound loop and Cooper’s studio vocals. When we think of preserving memories, we usually think of text or visuals. We seldom consider how sounds can evoke emotionally charged memories.
The CD closes with Cooper’s adaptation of the Chassidic folksong “A Gute Vokh”, the same song that closes the Frank London/Lorin Sklamberg “Zmiros Project” album. This zemer, originally discovered on a field recording made by the YIVO Institute, serves as an excellent example of how, with the rise of Chasidus, Yiddish became a vehicle for the composition of religious songs.
And it’s from that tradition we get the repertoire that make up the songs on “The Nign of Reb Mendel” (Traditional Crossroads). This CD combines the talents of one of the leading klezmer musicians, clarinetist Joel Rubin with Rabbi Eli Silberstein, the leader of the Chabad Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In essence, this CD follows a path opened by Andy Statman—klemer as religious or Jewish soul music. By combining authentic Chassidic paraliturgical texts and niggunim (folk melodies) with the sound of traditional klezmer music—and more specifically, by integrating a Hassidic singer as a member of the klezmer ensemble, Joel Rubin has created something rather unique in the world of Jewish music.
Joel Rubin has always strived to create a traditional Yiddish music, rooted in pre-American reconstructed (and well-researched) European arrangements. On his ensemble’s last CD, “Midnight Prayer”, Rubin reached the intersection of klezmer and Chassidic music. Now he’s taken the step of adding a vocalist. However, Rabbi Eli Silberstein is not a vocalist in the sense that Adrienne Cooper is. Cooper’s performance style is interpretive; that is, it follows the goal of putting one’s own stamp on a song through arrangement, mood and voice. Rabbi Silberstein’s performance style comes out of a Lubavicher musical aesthetic. The Lubavicher goal is to work strictly inside a given musical structure so as to allow the singer to be a channel to the past. The ideal performance would be one that everyone recognized as associated with past generations and past performances. It’s an aesthetic that Joel Rubin, though not a Chassid, has always seemed to aim towards and has now achieved on this CD.
Because Rabbi Silberstein’s performance style is the antithesis of pop reliance on vocal pyrotechnics, some listeners might initially be put off. Don’t listen to this CD as one would listen to “American Idol”. This is not vocal or musical showboating on any level. “The Nign of Reb Mendel” is an outstanding recorded example of musical tikkun; that is, opening up the outer shell of the song through music in order to release the holy spark of the music.
Obviously Reb Silberstein inhabits Yiddish music differently than does Adrienne Cooper. And obviously the two could never meet on the same stage. But the two CDs sit next to each on my “frequent play” stack of Jewish music. Once upon a time, there was enough space in the Jewish community for both musical cultures. 05/01/08
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