Jews and Blacks Join in This 'Yizkor'

By Nat Hentoff

Years ago, the bassist-composer Charles Mingus and I were talking  about the first time music penetrated so deeply into us that we knew we could never be without it. "As a child," Mingus told me, "my stepmother would take me to a Holiness Church. The blues were in the Holiness churches -- moaning and riffs between the audience and the preacher. People went into trances."  I told him about sitting next to my father in an Orthodox synagogue when I was a child as the hazzan, or cantor, in his black robes and high black skullcap took over the service. As I wrote in my memoir, "Boston Boy" (Knopf/Paul Dry Books paperback): "What he sings is partly written, largely improvised. He is a master of melisma -- for each sacred syllable, there are three, four, six notes that climb and dramatically entwine with the cry, the krechts (a catch in the voice)" that I was later to hear in black blues singers. There were moments when I wanted to rise and shout, but I did not want to embarrass my father.

There is now a recording, "Yizkor: Music of Memory" by David Chevan and the Afro-Semitic Experience -- original, resonantly melodic jazz settings of Jewish prayers and psalms -- that Mingus and I, if he were still here, could rise and share. The hazzan here, often improvising with the soul-stretching intensity of John Coltrane, is the internationally renowned Alberto Mizrahi, described by the BBC as "riding the notes [like] the Jewish Pavarotti."

Now in its 11th year, the Afro-Semitic Experience was formed by composer and bassist David Chevan, a practicing scholar of jazz and Jewish music. The group has performed around this country, largely at colleges, synagogues and churches, and in Europe.

Its players, transcending categories, are Mr. Chevan (a bassist who holds a doctorate in musicology); Baba David Coleman (an African drummer and drum builder, and a Yoruban priest); Will Bartlett (woodwinds, conductor of jazz saxophone and klezmer workshops); Babafemi Alvin Carter (Afro-Cuban and West African percussion and Klezmer drummer); Warren Byrd (pianist, composer and teacher of gospel arranging); and Stacy Phillips (steel guitarist, violinist and author of the first book to accurately transcribe early klezmer music).

With Hazzan Mizrahi, they bring us into the twilight world of "Yizkor," the Jewish equivalent of a requiem Mass -- psalms and prayers, says Mr. Chevan, "that have been recited since the time of the Crusades." The Yizkor service is observed at Yom Kippur (the holiest day of the Jewish year) and at three other times.

The accompanying booklet contains the original texts and translations, beginning with "Adonai, Mah Adam" ("My God, what is man that you recognize him?"--which brought to mind Duke Ellington's teleological question, "What Am I Here For?") The deeply searching melodies and the heart-beating rhythms made me remember the title of Elie Wiesel's book on Hasidic Masters, "Souls on Fire" (Random House). I've been in Hasidic synagogues where prayers are continually lifted by music, but never before have I heard this lyrically powerful a fusion of Jewish and jazz souls on fire. And, as Mr. Chevan recalls, "The band has had so much experience working with cantors that we had little trouble figuring out our parts behind Hazzan Mizrahi" and then became part of his improvisations. Hazzan Mizrahi's style, not often heard today, except in traditional synagogues, is Hazzanut, which startled me with its "cry" of the life force -- and its vulnerability -- when I was a child. Mr. Chevan calls it "a mixture of out-of-time recitative, some improvisation, and distinctive tunes." By "out-of-time," he means that "when the cantor moves from singing a tune to focus on individual words, those amazing improvised . . . highly ornamental melismas emerge. In some ways this is similar to what a gospel singer does; it is just that gospel more often stays in time." And what I heard, back in my boyhood traditional shul (synagogue), is what Mr. Chevan calls an "earthy quality that connected to the ancient times" as the hazzan got so personally and sometimes agonizedly into the prayer that, as a kid, I sometimes thought he was arguing with God. I so wished I could understand the words.

The stunning impact of the Hazzanut way of singing is also shown by Ben Ratliff in his new book, "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music" (Times Books). Ornette Coleman, the beyond-modern-jazz icon, told of the first time he was given a 1916 recording by Cantor Josef Rosenblatt (whose 78 rpm discs I began collecting when I was 13). "I started crying like a baby," Coleman said. "The record was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. I said, 'Wait a minute. You can't find those "notes." They don't exist.'" “The record was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other.” Ornette Coleman

But the hazzans who could sing those notes believed that on the other side of this imperative dialogue was the force that created those notes. In his book, "Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate" (University of Illinois Press), Mark Slobin quotes Zwavel Kwartin, a cantor who grew up in a Ukraine ghetto and found in a Galician town "what a hazzan can be among Jews. Burdened Jews, who fight tooth and nail all week for a little living, collect in the shuls on Sabbaths and holidays, and the hazzan helps them unburden themselves of all their weekly cares. . . . They see the hazzan as a true spokesman for their burdened feelings, who evokes with his prayers their longing for a better future."

Long ago, when I recorded deep blues singer and pianist Otis Spann for the Candid label, I asked him what the listeners at the black blues clubs in Chicago came to hear. "They wanted," he said, "to hear stories about their own lives, and hopes."

In that context, Mr. Chevan says: "One of the most important Afro-Semitic Experience concerts we have ever given was at a Saturday night concert at St. Philips Moravian Church in Old Salem, N.C. This was a former slave church and many of its worshipers were buried beneath the floor of the church in order to avoid their graves being desecrated. It was a standing-room-only audience that was on its feet almost the entire night as we played for the ancestors beneath our feet." Mr. Chevan also tells me: "We just got a grant from Chamber Music America to create a new full-length work, 'The Road That Heals the Splintered Soul.' We will be using traditional Jewish and African-American spiritual songs that deal with healing as inspiration for new compositions." And as inspiration for their musically mixed audiences.