Jewish Folk Songs, Set to Fela’s Afrobeat
As Jon Madof worked at his computer one Friday in
2011, doing the graphic-design job that supported his life as a guitarist, he
listened to the Afrobeat music of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Then, with the Sabbath
sundown nearing, he shut down his home office and began humming one of the
Jewish religious songs made famous by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
The mental mash-up of Fela and Carlebach continued
through the next day, as Mr. Madof found himself weirdly hearing the rabbi’s
version of “Ein Keloheinu” with the Nigerian musician’s polyrhythmic beats.
When the Sabbath ended and Mr. Madof, an Orthodox Jew, could use electricity
again, he went online with one question about the unlikely hybrid: “Did anyone
ever do this before?”
Satisfied that nobody had, Mr. Madof set about
filling a musical vacuum only he seemed to recognize. Now, two years later, his
13-piece band, Zion80,
named in homage to Fela’s ensembles Afrika 70 and Egypt 80, has released its
first, eponymous CD and will be performing on Thursday at Joe’s Pub before
doing summer shows in Poland and Austria.
These events come after a year of gigs at the Stone,
City Winery and Le Poisson Rouge, with the band drawing curious though admiring
coverage on public radio and in the Jewish media.
“On the surface, this hardly seems like a recipe for
great success,” Alexander Gelfand, a critic and musicologist, wrote last year
in The Jewish Daily Forward.
“But as it turns out, anything sounds good recast as Afrobeat, especially when
played by a band assembled from the Downtown and Jewish elite.”
The combination may not be quite as peculiar as it
seems. Musically, Fela and Carlebach arose from entirely different streams.
Fela, who died in 1997 at 58, cross-pollinated jazz horns, Yoruba drumming and
James Brown funk. Carlebach (1925-94) reinterpreted Jewish liturgical music and
Hasidic melodies through the prism of Dylan-style folk singing.
Temperamentally, though, the men shared a visionary
desire for social change. Fela was the leading dissident against Nigeria’s
military governments of the 1970s and ’80s, and for periods of time lived in a
commune he called the Kalakuta Republic. Carlebach’s composition “Am Yisroel
Chai” (“The People of Israel Live”) served as the anthem of the cold war
movement to liberate Soviet Jewry. For more than a decade beginning in the
hippie era, Carlebach presided over a synagogue-cum-commune in Haight-Ashbury
called the House of Love and Prayer.
“Shlomo and Fela were coming from a similar
approach,” Mr. Madof said. “They each saw particularism as a path to utopian
idealism. Not opposed to each other, but on a path to each other. And that
attitude spoke to me.”
Mr. Madof had grown up in Philadelphia as a secular
Jew listening to his parents’ folk music, then rock, then punk. He majored in
Japanese studies at Oberlin and hung around the college’s jazz classes. So he
was as startled to discover Carlebach’s music as he was Fela’s.
As Mr. Madof turned to Orthodox Judaism in the early
2000s, he also became part of the community of young Jewish musicians, many of
them religiously observant, who gathered around the saxophonist John Zorn and
recorded on his Tzadik label.
Mr. Madof’s process of developing Zion80 — both the
band and the CD — started with assiduous listening to Fela’s music,
particularly a series of 1970s albums rereleased by the Knitting Factory. With
the help of a drummer from Antibalas, an Afrobeat group based in Brooklyn, Mr.
Madof started to script out rhythm patterns.
He arranged several Carlebach songs for his trio and
immediately realized he needed horns. Among the players he attracted were two
mainstays from the Tzadik scene, the trumpeter Frank London and the saxophonist
Greg Wall, who is also a rabbi.
With Mr. Zorn’s patronage, the nascent Zion80
received a residency at the Stone, allowing it to rehearse and perform every
Monday night for three months last summer. Out of those sessions came most of
the charts for the nine cuts on the album. So did a truly soulful experience.
“My Jewish tradition teaches me that I must
constantly reinvent myself as a spiritual being,” Mr. Wall wrote in an e-mail,
“and that the powerful words of our liturgy must be experienced as a ‘Shir
Chadash,’ a new song. How does one fulfill this mandate while seemingly
repeating the same words day in, day out?”
“Well,” he went on, using the Judaic words for prayer
and worship quorum, “davening in a minyan like Zion80 sure helps.”
In some respects, the commingling of black, white,
Jewish, Yoruba, jazz, folk, funk and sundry other identities is in the
tradition of Fela and Carlebach. Since his death, Fela’s music has inspired a
hit Broadway musical. Carlebach’s daughter, Neshama, has recorded and performed
his music with a black gospel choir from Green Pastures Baptist Church in the
Bronx.
But as Mr. Madof recognized, questions of cultural
appropriation are almost bound to arise, much as they did in the mid-2000s when
the Hasidic singer Matisyahu took up reggae. (Matisyahu, whose given name is
Matthew Miller, has since left the Hasidic movement.)
“There’s appropriation and there’s being honest to
the music,” Mr. Madof said. “On some level, as the band has gotten started, my
question was: ‘Do we have the skills to play that? I’ve got to have that music
in my fingers and in my ears.’
“The thing about appropriation for a musician is that
it’s from a love of the music. Appropriation is out of reverence.”
Tracklist
| 1 | Ein K'elokeinu | |
| 2 | Tov L'hodot | |
| 3 | Asher Bara | |
| 4 | Holy Brother | |
| 5 | Yehi Shalom | |
| 6 | Pischu Li | |
| 7 | Nygun | |
| 8 | Dovid Melech | |
| 9 | Nygun (Reprise) | |
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