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| Monday, September 3, 2007 |
Musical Notes: Sharon Bernstein and others
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
Jew to be proud of: Sharon Bernstein
She may lead High Holiday services, sing in Yiddish, and compose music that sounds more like Shlomo Carlebach than System of a Down, but Sharon Bernstein is not your grandparent's cantor. For one, there's nothing traditional about Bernstein's services, which draw from varied, and undeniably eclectic sources. Bernstein, who studied liturgy at the Jewish Theological Seminary and did her thesis on Italian cantillation, includes everything from folk-pop, neo-Chassidic tunes, and Iraqi melodies to Moroccan liturgy and Afghani music in her services. "I see as my mission to bring a spectrum of colors into our synagogue," she says.
Not to mention original compositions. Bernstein, who is leading the High Holiday services at the Montebello Jewish Center in New York this season, plans to include some original songs -- like her beautiful children's repentance song, "Put Back the Pebbles."
As far as Yiddish music, Bernstein is clear that her interest is not gimmicky. "A Yiddish song is just a song in Yiddish," she explains. It's the content that interests her, and when Bernstein participated in both "Yung Yiddish" and the Jewish National & University Library in Jerusalem, she ran themed workshops: Yiddish songs about prostitutes, thieves, and the Warsaw underworld.
Bernstein doesn't know if being a woman in a historically male profession has any connection to her eclecticism, but she sees them both tied to a new kind of aesthetic permeating the synagogue. "I think a lot of things started happening at the same time. The kind of openness that allowed women to be cantors, allowed openness in other ways," she says. Either way, she's a new type of cantor -- the 21st century postmodern chazzanit.
Bernstein & Poland: When NYU cultural professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett embarked on a project, connecting her elderly father's paintings of his childhood in Apt, Poland, with his memories of the same, Bernstein was recruited to find Yiddish songs that matched. The result? A multimedia potpourri exhibit starting this month at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in California that combines the Yiddish songs, paintings, and language of pre-war Poland.
Bernstein & Italy: For her thesis on Italian cantillation, Bernstein and her husband, an Italian scholar of musicology, went to Italy to see it first hand. There, she met with different readers, keepers of the Italian tradition, and transcribed their readings. To make sure she was getting the real deal, she used a colleague of her husband. The colleague's name is Franco Segre, and he's the official cantor of the Turin Synagogue and an expert in Italian Jewish music.
***MORDY'S CD REVIEWS***
Beastie Boys: The Mix Up
Every Modern Orthodox high school has some urban legend about the Beastie Boys having attended there. It's juicy to believe that the boys that rapped "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" once struggled over Talmudic tracts. And their deft wordplay didn't disappoint, either. Three hyper-articulate Jewish boys make good, becoming hip-hop superstars? It's a Yeshiva Cinderella story. Which makes the new album, all instrumental tracks, disappointing. Without their distinctive flows, The Mix Up could have been produced by anyone. It makes the album title prescient -- they got turned around on this one and phoned it in.
Balkan Beat Box: Nu Med
Balkan Beat Box's latest album is a club med for the apocalyptic dancing hipster -- the kind that turns its dancers into sweaty pulps of flesh by track five, "Digital Monkey." On the last album, the influences of ex-Gogol Bordello member Ori Kaplan had left their imprints all over BBB. Now, though, despite Eastern European interludes ("Hermetico") the band seems far more enamored with electronica and a New York club scene. Nu Med is a fervent dance reminiscent of a masquerade to hold off some unnamed Red Death. But somewhere in the process, the soul got lost.
DJ Balagan: Funny Accent
The first thing to realize about Funny Accent is that it's only an album in the most superficial sense. Yes, it has a number of tracks (though where they begin and end is mostly arbitrary). And yes, it has music. But when you listen to it as DJ Balagan's, also known as Sam Hopkins, unique curation of Judaism, it becomes far more enticing. Samples, beats, and spoken word are layered over each other like a ghetto mix tape. Israeli soul singers bop next door to a linguistic lesson transposed over a Middle Eastern beat. It's the authentic multiple personality disorder 21st century document, and if it disappoints, it's only because of how exhausting it is to listen to. DJ Balagan is the ADD librarian -- desperate to show off his wares.
Infected Mushroom: Vicious Delicious
Infected Mushroom, a psychedelic trance Israeli duo from the 90s, has been consistently, and quietly, releasing albums for the last decade. And while the international trance scene has respect for the duo, it hasn't been until the track "Artillery," featuring Canadian hip-hoppers Swollen Member, that Infected Mushroom finally sounds painfully contemporary. The track is foreboding and combines vague antiwar phrases with dark psychedelia. "It half-cracked with cold shards of glass / Ritualistic annihilators that murder your cast." It's ironic that Infected Mushroom had to collaborate with a Canadian hip-hop group to make the menacing psychedelic music for which they deserve to earn acclaim.
Keren Ann: Keren Ann
Thirty-three year old, French-Israeli chanteuse Keren Ann sings with an angelic voice and plays lullaby-soft rock on her guitar. Her words seem to swirl into one another, an efflux of tender haze. When she sings "We sail the harder ships of the world / And we get closer to nowhere" on "The Harder Ships of the World" she sounds like a Diaspora Cat Powers or Beth Orton. The longing for home in her voice is tangible, melancholic, and pained.
Paul Brody: For the Moment
Berlin-based Paul Brody and his band, Sadawi, play the sound you expect when you think of John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture label. It's a combination of modern European jazz, klezmer, and avant-noise. The song "Too Low" interrupts a jazz-klezmer track to drop Kraftwerk inspired blips and beeps, the sort that evokes robots and spaceships, only to return to the blinding klezmer beat. The title track uses simchah music to achieve an explosive sense of joy, accompanied by guest John Zorn's scratchy, excitable alto sax playing. Frank London also joins on the track, with his horns, making the song a potpourri of contemporary klezmer interpretation.
-- Text by Mordechai Shinefield / Photo by Albane Navizet.
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
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