Play it again, Schmuel!

As Hanukkah winds down, I make good on my promise of last week and recommend some of the best new releases from the loose-knit movement known as Radical Jewish Culture.  (See the earlier article here.  And for the Christmas fans among you, don’t worry: there’s another Advent-oriented jazz playlist coming your way next week, in case the two previous ones proved insufficient.) 

Meanwhile, RJC continues to flourish, mostly through the efforts of the Tzadik label.  To remind you, the RJC movement encompasses a dizzying variety of projects that draw on klezmer, Jewish liturgical melodies, and secular Yiddish tunes, as well as African and Latin-American rhythms, far-flung folk traditions, electronica, and anything else that contemporary Jewish musicians choose in reinterpreting their heritage.  A longer take on RJC music will appear under my name in the winter issue of JAZZIZ magazine, on sale toward the end of this month.

(Before the best of the latest Radical Jewish Culture discs, however, let me mention a jazz album that should always get an aliyah around Hanukkah – even though it’s not a Hanukkah album at all.  Ben Sidran’s wonderful Life’s A Lesson, originally issued in 1994, is an exception that tests the rule of traditional Jewish music – namely, that it makes lousy jazz.  Using traditional liturgical melodies as the basis for improvisation, Sidran parlayed his natural hipness to spin jazz into gelt, alloyed with contributions by noted Jewish jazzers – among them saxists Josh Redman and Dave Liebman, clarinetist Eddie Daniels, trumpeter Randy Brecker, and Chicago’s harmonica wizard Howard Levy – with lyrics in either English or Hebrew.  Neither radical nor truly traditional, Life’s A Lesson offers surprises with each new listening, even 15 years after it first appeared.)
 

David Gould's latest album

Last week I gave you “the Torah” – five volumes of Radical Jewish Culture fundaments.  Consider these “The Talmud”-- newish Jewish jazz that builds on what came before.  

Ben Goldberg, Speech Communication (Tzadik):  A young star in the RJC firmament, clarinetist Goldberg finds himself in great demand, playing regularly in nearly a half-dozen New York groups.  He’s assisted here by two longtime compatriots – bassist Greg Cohen (of the original Masada) and drummer Kenny Wollesen (best known for his work with Bill Frisell).   Rather than hammer home the Jewish connection, Goldberg drops subtle allusions to klezmer melodies into his measured, thoughtful solos.  In addition to soprano clarinet (the precise name for the familiar instrument championed by Swing Era artists like Benny Goodman) Goldberg also plays the extremely rare contra-alto clarinet.  Pitched below the more common bass clarinet, it growls and stomps, turning simple melodies into grim Semitic fairy tales.

David Gould, Feast Of The Passover (Tzadik): Seder in Kingston, anyone?  Former bassist with the reggae band John Brown’s Body, David (“Solid”) Gould calls his band The Temple Rockers, and takes as his starting point the spiritual connection between reggae and Jews – a connection based in the original Rastafarians’ belief that they are in fact a lost tribe of Israel.  You might call the resultant music “klezmer dub.”  And this really is a musical seder.  It traces the Passover story with reggae-beat renditions of several songs found in the annual Passover service – such as “HaLaila HaZeh” (renamed “Divine Order”) and “Had Gadya” (here called “Goat’s Milk”) – as well as several new compositions.  The reggae-beat arrangements include white-hot guitar and cool baritone sax; the presence of legendary reggae vocalist Leonard “Sparrow” Dillon doesn’t hurt.  Trust me, the Four Questions never rocked quite so hard.

Koby Israelite, Is He Listening? (Tzadik): Koby Israelite really is one – an Israeli, to use more modern parlance – and he’s also really eclectic, playing everything from woodwinds to bouzouki (and including keyboards, guitar, and accordion).  His band adds duduk and dumbek, horns and oud, in a delicious mélange – which, as you might expect, also pushes the envelope on “eclectic,” referencing Martin Denny’s lounge music, Frank Zappa’s manic virtuosity, and plenty of hearty Jewish scales and modes.  Add in the chunky rock guitar, space synths, some truly wizardly accordion work, and some highly unorthodox Sinai soul, and you’ve got an album of continuing intrigue.  If “He” isn’t listening, then God Is in fact Deaf.
 

Kat Parra's captivating new album will arrive in a few weeks.

Eyal Maoz’s Edom, Hope And Destruction  (Tzadik): Guitarist Maoz doesn’t even hint at the stereotypical klezmer sound in this hornless quartet.  He does, however, capture the essence of traditional Jewish melodies and pour it into radically unexpected new vessels – like heavy-metal, power pop, and surf rock.  Jethro Tull meets Rabbi Hillel?  Yeah, that would be the first track (“Somewhere”).  Yiddish melodies done up like “Miserlou”?  Try “Messenger” – before it turns all techno-thrash.  And I doubt it’s an accident that a tune titled “Slight Sun” sounds like Sun Ra himself found his way to the Temple of Solomon.  

Kat Parra, Dos Amantes (JazzMe Records): OK, OK – it doesn’t really fit under the heading Radical Jewish Culture.  But vocalist Kat Parra shares at least some characteristics with the RJC crowd, by virtue of her penchant for fusing jazz vocals, Jewish and Hebrew melodies, and a treasure-chest of Afro-Latin genres.  She calls her band The Sephardic Music Experience, in reference to the Iberian Jews who fled Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century.  (In fact, “Sephardic” derives from the Hebrew term for Spain, sepharad.)  The intrepid Parra would be a surefooted vocalist in any jazz sub-genre, but she has found her true niche by combining Judaism and Latin jazz, her two loves – dos amantes, as the title of this disc proclaims.  (The album will be released in mid-January.)