In this new series, Jewcy will be asking artists --Jew and non-Jews alike-- to discuss in their own words, a specific influence Jewish culture has had on their work.  This week, Zach Lupetin, leader of California old-timey songsters, The Dustbowl Revival, discusses how the Middle Eastern sounds he heard on his trip to Israel helped broaden his world view of music. 


I was raised in a multi-denominational household, with a Jewish-born mother and a Roman-Catholic father. I have always valued both sides of my heritage and was happy to take part in the birthright trip to Israel while at college at the University of Michigan. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least, one that I wish everyone, regardless of faith, could take part in. Our mandolin player Daniel Mark is also Jewish and I've spent many hours with his family here in Los Angeles celebrating the holy days. One of my favorite parts of the synagogue and holiday services that I have taken part in over the years (mostly reform or liberal) are the songs. The chord structures are really cool, dark, moody and get my foot tapping. I was inspired, when in the Middle East, to learn more about Eastern music traditions and fuse those rhythms with blues, gypsy and jazz and tell secular stories with them. There's a reason these songs have endured this long - there's a power in the structure and like a great twelve-bar blues, it just feels good to play and to hear.

 The Dustbowl Revival

 

 

My name is Clare Burson.

I write songs, sing, and play the guitar and the violin.

I have independently released 2 full length albums of my own material and am preparing to release the third on Rounder Records sometime this spring. My music has been described as "world-weary like Lucinda Williams', expressive like Kathleen Edwards', mysterious like Jolie Holland's."

I grew up in Tennessee and currently live in Brooklyn, NY.

From March 2007 until March 2009 I was a Six Points Fellow.

 

I heard about the Six Points Fellowship from a college friend. Even before applying, I felt like I'd won the lottery - the fact that something like this existed just blew my mind. In years past, I had searched in vain for any sort of fellowship or grant that could fund a somewhat commercially-minded singer-songwriter like myself. Here it was - finally! If selected, I would be funded to make a new album, plus the Six Points community could provide me with a safe and stimulating space to bring my Jewishness into my creative work in a way that hopefully could expand my reach as an artist instead of limiting it.

You see, despite the fact that I was (and still am) a decidedly secular musician and songwriter, I had been toying with the idea of incorporating my Jewishness into my music for years. I didn't want to lose the universal tone of my earlier work, but I did want to create a cycle of songs that spoke to my experience as a Jewish woman from the American South with grandparents and great grandparents who had come to Memphis, TN (of all places), fleeing persecution in Central and Eastern Europe.

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1. “White Christmas” - While there are more than five Christmas carols written by Jewish songwriters, I thought I’d just cover my favorites, starting with not only the most famous Christmas song written in modern times, but according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the best-selling single of all-time. Written by: Irving Berlin in 1940

Actually written by: Israel Isidore Baline (Irving’s real name).

Written while: seated poolside at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa in Phoenix, Arizona (talk about your White Christmas).

Made famous by: Bing Crosby in the movie Holiday Inn.

Cool Irving Berlin fact: Refusing to make money off his deep-seated patriotism, Berlin donated all the royalties from “God Bless America” (just another little ditty he penned) to the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls.

 

2. “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”

Written by: Johnny Marks in 1949.

Based on: a poem/story penned by Marks’ brother-in-law, who invented Rudolph.

Made famous by: Gene Autry, whose recording sold over 2 million copies in the first year alone.

Famous Rudolph mondegreen: "Olive, the other reindeer" (see my mentalfloss post on mondegreens if you don’t know what they are).

Cool Johnny Marks fact: He is the great-uncle of economist Steven Levitt, co-author of one of my favorite books of all time, Freakonomics.

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Last weekend, Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory played all acoustic sets at the tiny, sold-out, Highline Ballroom in the New York Meatpacking distract. Dashboard Confessional is already mostly acoustic -- soft songs about breakups and heartache, but stripped-down NFG was practically a revelation. The pop-punkers are generally less snot-nosed versions of Blink 182, or Sum 41 -- songs about breakup delivered with good natured snark, tongues-in-cheek. But at Highline, tearing out all the poppy electric hooks revealed a beating emo heart. They were still goofy, no doubt. They wore painted-on lounge suits on their t-shirts and bantered between songs. But they also suggested after every song that this wasn't the occasion for moshpits, and prefacing their "My Friends Over You," a song about, essentially, the precept that "bros come before hos," they cautioned that it was one of the most serious songs they've ever written. The intention seemed ironic, but then they launched into the song and, yeah, it was pretty serious.

NFG lyricist Steve Klein is Jewish, as is bassist Ian Grushka. If you didn't know before the show, you knew when lead vocalist Jordan Pundik wished all the Jews in the audience a Happy Channukah during a holiday song and then indicated Klein + Grushka playing behind him. Of the three holiday wishes (a Merry Christmas, a Happy Channukah and a Happy Kwanza), the second got the biggest applause from the crowd. It probably helped that the show actually took place during Channukah, but also suggested that a lot of NFG fans, at least in NYC, are Jewish emo kids. With another Jewish artist, Max Bemis, releasing the two best emo albums of the year (the collaborative project Two Tongues + his own band's eponymous Say Anything), maybe it's time to ask (as though we haven't before), is there something Jewish about being emo?

Unlikely. Chris Carrabba (Dashboard Confessional) is, as Rolling Stone puts it, the "godfather" of emo music, and his former band, Further Seems Forever, is explicitly Christian. But there are certain emo tropes that suggest some Judaism slipping through. (Full disclosure: I love emo music, so I'm willing to stretch this connection for the sake of personal titillation.) For one, the anxiety-ridden lyrical tropes of the genre, weeping over girls, worrying whether girls like you, worrying about how to ask a girl out, seem like natural reflections of the anxious Jewish public culture archetype. It's probably not a coincidence that The OC's very Jewish Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) loved emo music (side note: he also invented Chrismukkah). Moreover, if you ignore that King David was generally singing about God, there's a lot of emo in Tehillim.

"They mounted up to the heaven, they went down to the deeps; their souls melted away because of trouble. They reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and all their wisdom was swallowed up. They cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and He brought them out of their distresses." (107)

Emo! I mean, it's a religion full of lamentations. Literally. In Lamentations, (attributed to Jeremiah), "She weeps sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. She has no one to comfort her among all her lovers. All her friends have dealt treacherously with her. They have become her enemies." Am I wrong in thinking that this could easily be dealing with a woman contending with frenemies, as it could be dealing with the nation Israel?

At some point, I held out hope for a real Jewish emo band. Ie: One where the songs were about being a young religious Jew. It was ripe for the writing -- tons of agony over being shomer negiah, over your Rabbis/Parents not understanding you, over how tough fast days are. Alas, as the decade comes to an end, and emo slips further and further into the passe regions of pop culture, it seems like that'll never come to pass. I'll assuage my own sorrow by listening to NFG + Say Anything and pretend they're really really Jewish, and not just incidentally Jewish. The closest we ever came was a Say Anything song, Alive with the Glory of Love. It's about falling in love in a Concentration Camp. It's bleak, but when is emo (or Judaism) not?

In "Stars of David," a book about Jews in rock music, Grushka says about New Found Glory's name sounding like a born-again Christian band, "Sometimes when people ask, I just say, 'Yeah, we're a Christian band.' They'll figure it out sooner or later." Maybe the secret Jewish message is in the weeping.

"I just wanna melt away in all Its grace, drift away to that sacred place where there's no more you and me, no more they and we, just unity." - From "Unity," written by Trevor Hall and Matisyahu

Does Matisyahu dislike Jewish musicians?  That was my suspicion recently when I saw an ad for the singer's Festival of Light performances in New York City, which started on December 10 and continue (with breaks for Shabbos) until December 20. Inventively, Matisyahu has a different opening act on each of the eight performances: Glitch Mob, John Brown's Body, Dub Trio, Brothers Past, Rana, Kid Koala, Travis McCoy, and Kevin Devine, a mixture of reggae bands, rappers, and earnest singer/songwriters.

All of these acts--with the exception of McCoy, who is the singer in Gym Class Heroes and also works with Fall Out Boy, Cobra Starship and Pink, and dated Katy Perry--are relative outsiders in the music business, lacking the headliner's major-label support or platinum sales. And also, none of these acts is Jewish, as far as can be easily ascertained.   Matisyahu is in a unique position: He's not the biggest Jewish musician in the world, but he is certainly the biggest Jewish-identified musician in the last 50 years. We might divine Jewish sentiments or perspectives in Paul Simon's music, or recognize the Jewish references in Leonard Cohen's songs, but those are only facets of the performers' fully-assimilated identities. Matisyahu's musical identity begins with his Jewishness: He performs using a Hebrew name (a variation on his birth name, Matthew Miller) and both lives and performs as a Hasid, wearing traditional garb and declining to perform on Friday nights, when many musicians can command their largest fees. Financially, being in a band and not performing on Friday nights is kind of like owning a bar and closing it on Friday nights.

As recently as ten years ago, "Jewish music" usually meant ancient prayers set to homespun melodies and sung earnestly, accompanied by finger-picked guitar. It was about as fun as Hebrew school. Then came our current Jewish Musical Renaissance, with bands mixing klezmer, rock, jazz, punk, and cabaret, and adding witty or provocative lyrics in the tongue of the diaspora. (Some of this music is recorded and released by JDub Records, the label that issued Matisyahu's first three albums; JDub also now owns Jewcy.) Anyone who has been paying attention could have recommended some of these bands to Matisyahu, who would have found excellent, well-suited opening acts among them.

Let's not forget the specific circumstances here: This is the most commercially preeminent Jewish artist of our era celebrating a Jewish holiday in the very-Jewish Manhattan and Brooklyn, without any Jewish opening acts. Maybe an analogy will help illustrate my dismay: It's as if Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye, at the height of black consciousness in, say, 1969, had gone on tour with Simon & Garfunkel opening the shows.

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It's unusually cold and wet for an October night in Atlanta, GA. The goths are out tonight for the Little Five Points Halloween festival and their cyber-punk hairstyles are coming apart like last week's sukkah decorations under the oppressive humidity. Cute bleach blonde account-executive-types from the rich side of town are slumming it in their not-too-naughty Halloween outfits, comprised of leopard print skirts, leather thigh high boots and Josie-and-the-Pussycats-style cat ear headbands.

 

Leave it to a group of Jewish educators, activists and entrepreneurs to skip all this fun, cutting through the crowd like knives through butter to make their way to the Variety Playhouse. Why? To witness the greatness that is JDub Sephardic rock stars DeLeon.

A quick jump through the will call line and we find ourselves in a near-empty auditorium, blue and white lights shining on stage as Dan Saks embraces his electric guitar and begins to channel the spirit of Jeff Buckley and Kabalistic philosopher Moses Deleon to belt out Spanish cantorial folk-rock spun elegantly with guitar virtuosity that the World Music hippies and 20-something Jews in the audience are clamoring for.

The audience is chill. The Variety Playhouse is a seated auditorium and from the looks of it, everyone is doing their I'm-stoned-on-a-Friday-night impression. At the end of their second song, Saks softly encourages the audience to get up and dance. "Oh, shit", I think to myself, "he just pulled a major faux pas in this city. You can't tell audiences to get out of their seats. They'll murder you."

Shockingly, they got up. And danced. It was glorious. New York beat Georgia, for just one moment.

A few songs through and I feel sucked into the world that is DeLeon. Mystical Judaism and old world yearnings pour over me and I feel like my spirit is being lifted. It takes a real music genius to know how to make each person in the audience feel like they are being sung to directly. And DeLeon pull it off, magically. And as I turned around to see how the rest of the audience was doing, I noticed that our crowd of thirty had grown to over one hundred. I smiled and said a prayer of thanks to HaShem that went something like, "Lord, I'm sorry I'm breaking Shabbat to go to a concert. I appreciate you not taking it out on the indie rock band".

The band is touring as a three piece, with members rotating between minimalist percussion, quirky melodica, xylophone, and the backing tracks of a laptop providing the groove. But at the center of it all is Dan Saks: his finger picking banjo and delicately crafting guitar melodies that make the otherwise jaded Atlanta audience swoon.

I was sad when the last song, "Yodukha Rayanai" (the first track on their self-titled album), was over. But I'm crafty. My date for the evening (the lovely Jennie Rivlin Roberts from ModernTribe) and I swam through the massive crowd behind us, sneaking out the door to find the band by the merch booth. We chatted about music, Atlanta, Os Mutantes (the band DeLeon is supporting) and my upcoming trip to New York. I have to say, the band members were very nice, grounded people. And they can hold a conversation, a skill most artistic people never master.

But it was somber. As the sound of Os Mutantes came through the venue doors, I felt this weird conflict. Was I supposed to go back in, I wondered. After what I just saw, could I honestly watch Os Mutantes?

I tried. And three songs in, I bailed. It just wasn't worth it. Sometimes in an evening, you peak. You hit that moment where there's nothing else that can move you any more than what you've experienced. And doing anything other than emotionally cuddling in the afterglow of electric prayers just seems like a lie. No offense to Os Mutantes--but it is what it is. I took my DeLeon t-shirt and signed album and went home.

So thank you, DeLeon, for giving me the best Shabbat I have had in months. And I will see you soon.

A few weeks ago my parents took a trip to Chicago and my father dragged my mother to check out the famed Spertus Museum, “Chicago’s Jewish Museum.” Somehow, they randomly chose 2 CDs to bring back for my brother and me: a Leonard Cohen Greatest Hits of sorts as well as an album called Abayudaya: Music From the Jewish People of Uganda.

Abayudaya: The Music of the Jews of Uganda is an amazing collection of African-Jewish music where the rhythms and harmonies of Africa blend with Jewish celebration and traditional Hebrew prayer. This group of songs is rooted in local Ugandan music and infused with rich choral singing, Afro-pop, and traditional drumming. The record includes lullabies, political and children’s song, religious rituals, hymns, and celebratory music, with sons in Hebrew, English, and several Ugandan languages. This singular community of African people living committed Jewish lives has survived persecution and isolation and asserts, “We have been saved by our music.” This last line is an excerpt from the album booklet, which was put out by the good people at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings aka the other non-profit record label.

 

 

The Abayudaya are a community of approximately 600 people living in villages surrounding Mbale in Eastern Uganda and are full on practicing Jews. Many members scrupulously follow Jewish ritual, observe the Sabbath, celebrate holiday, keep kosher and and pray in Hebrew.

They have developed their own style of music, borrowing from many influences over the years: Malakite music adopted by the community’s founder, Semei Kakungulu; liturgical selections learned from their early contacts with occasional Jewish visitors and the expatriate congregations in Nairobi; music of worship and celebration composed by local Youth in the 1980’s; and traditional and contemporary music learned by recent contact with Jews from North America and Israel.

Little did my parents know what kind of a cross cultural masterpiece they had purchased here. But the minute I threw this disc on i knew i found something special, the blending of cultures, religions and spirituality is effervescent on this disc.

 

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

 

Attention Hebrews and Shebrews, now is your chance to shine the light of the Menorah...with music!

Special Passenger Records of Jackson, Mississippi is now taking songs for its first ever Hanukkah album. All styles and genres, from death metal to cheese-pop, lesbian indie folk to Dave Matthews emulators, are encouraged to send in songs for this kick-ass compilation.

The deadline is November 1, with the release set for December 3 in Jackson, MS (including a killer CD release party featuring yours truly).

For more information, contact Amanda at akrainey@gmail.com.