The Afro-Semitic Experience:

Pianist/Composer Warren Byrd is a Hartford, Connecticut native with an international touring schedule after many fruitful years playing Jazz throughout Southern New England and New York. Born in 1965 the youngest in a family of sixteen, he grew up in a musically fecund world. His experiences with performing began with singing in the church choir with his older siblings and lead to rich performing adventures in during his teen years, exposing him also to the vast treasures past and present of musical ideas. By the time he’d been awarded a full scholarship for Classical Vocal Studies at Hartt College of Music, he’d decided he wanted to be a Jazz artist. Through the listening, absorbing, practicing, and synthesizing of legacies of not only Jazz, but also Classical, Folk, and Popular music past and present, he formulated his approach to improvisation. In the last, twenty years, he has lended his musicianship to many groups and performers in Jazz, R&B, World, Latin, Pop, etc., as well as Dance and Theatre. A short list of performers would include Archie Shepp, Eddie Henderson, Saskia Laroo, Steve Davis, David Chevan, Mixashawn, Kenny Hamber, Alvin Carter, Nita Zarif, and many more. Along with David Chevan, in 1999 they founded as an expansion of their duo project the celebrated group the Afro-Semitic Experience, with whom they have recorded several albums.

Bassist and composer, David Chevan was born in Philadelphia in 1960, and grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts.  His early passion for music has led him to explore a wide range of musical realms from singing in synagogue, to playing in Gospel groups, Polka bands, Klezmer bands, and Italian wedding bands, and finally to Jazz and contemporary composition and improvisation.  He has composed music for a wide range of artists and ensembles, including several collaborations with dance and film.  His most recent compositions have focused on melding jazz improvisational practice with Jewish liturgy.  In addition to performing regularly in a duo with pianist Warren Byrd and leading their group, The Afro-Semitic Experience, Chevan is an active participant in the Radical Jewish Culture movement. He has recorded and performed with Frank London and plays, composes and writes arrangements for the Ayn Sof Arkestra and bigger band. He has had the opportunity to perform and record with, Joe Beck, Harold Danko, Mat Darriau, Jason Kao Hwang, Laura Wetzler, Giacomo Gates, Herb Robertson, and Cookie Segelstein. He is a Professor of Music at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven and is proud to be a member of the board of trustees of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. 

Will Bartlett has over twenty-five years experience as a professional musician and music educator. He studied with Jimmy Heath and Lew Tabackin and performed with Frank Foster, Lee Konitz, Slide Hampton and Roswell Rudd among many others. He leads his own group, Joy Spring as well as the Will Bartlett Ensemble.  His family belongs to and are actively involved in the Lebanese-American Christian community of Connecticut.

Alvin Benjamin Carter, Jr. (Babafemi) is a multi-percussionist who had his musical beginnings on congas and later added drum set and many other types of percussion to his list. He currently focuses on afrikan-american improvisational music but has been active in many different musical styles for many years. Alvin leads his own groups LEGACY: The Keepers of Tradition and The Alvin Carter Project. He also performs with Rafiki, which is led by Alvin Carter, Sr.

Baba David Coleman is an African drumming Master and a Yoruba priest. He was born in New York and has spent the better part of his adult life traveling and performing. He is a leading figure in the greater metropolitan New York African drum world and is frequently called upon to lead events and ceremonies. He has studied with Baba Femi and continues to be a disciple of the late, legendary Chief Bey.

Saskia Laroo, hailed by American public and press at large as "Lady Miles of Europe", is one of the few women trumpet stylists, blowing for more than three decades. Born in Amsterdam, she began on trumpet at age 8, never dreaming of becoming a professional musician. That all changed when Saskia, turned 18, after briefly majoring in Mathematics at University of Amsterdam switched her focus to a career in music. Saskia Laroo combines today's music by uncontrived romps into new styles, eagerly limned as "nu jazz" or "swingin' body-music"--a vivacious blend of hip-hop, jazz, salsa, funk reggae, and world, that many other artists dare not venture. Her artistry and her groove ring vibrantly and free on her five albums journeying us through the music she has absorbed and plays from heart and soul. 

Trumpet master Frank London is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Klezmatics.  Frank's Klezmer Brass Allstars' CD Carnival Conspiracy just got awarded the German Grammy and is “Top of the World” in Songlines; on Hazonos he explores cantorial music with Cantor Jacob Mendelson; he has completed two commissions for Carnegie Hall, an artist-in-residency in Krems, Austria, a new work for David Dorfman Dance at the Joyce Theater; and is in the middle of four theater works, including “Once There Was A Village” for Lincoln Center and LaMama.


Featured Cantors:

Cantor Lisa Shapanka Arbisser is the cantor of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.  A 2009 graduate of the School of Sacred Music at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Cantor Arbisser won various awards and honors, including the Rabbi Edwin N. Soslow Memorial Prize in Jewish History and the Cantor Israel Goldstein Prize for Excellence in Hazzanut. She served as a student cantor at Temple Sinai of Long Island in Lawrence, New York, and Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she further developed the qualities that make her a friendly, engaging, and inspiring clerical presence.

In addition to nusach and traditional hazzanut, Cantor Arbisser loves and is proficient in a variety of synagogue, world, and American music, including Israeli, Chassidic, and American folk, jazz, and rock. Her thesis and senior recital at HUC-JIR were both entitled “Mizug: A Fusion of Jazz and Synagogue Music,” and explored how certain American Jewish musicians are contributing to the sacred and secular American Jewish musical milieu and Minhag America.  Cantor Arbisser is also a talented pianist and guitarist.

Cantor Erik Contzius, baritone, has performed as a soloist around the world, most recently in Mozart's Requiem in Israel (Summer, 2010). He appeared with New York's Westchester Chorale as the soloist for Darius Milhaud's Service Sacré. He has performed Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service (Avodat HaKodesh) in the 2008 Songs of Life festival in Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria and Petah Tikva and Jerusalem, Israel under the baton of Dian Tchobanev as well as with the Menno Singers in Kitchener, Ontario. He has performed with the Westchester Chorale with Maestro Daniel Paget in Handel’s Israel in Egypt. Previous performances include appearing in Münich, Germany in the concert, "Vergessene Musik—The Forgotten Music of the German Jewish Reform Movement." He also has performed at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City two years consecutively in their Jewish Vienna and Germany concerts. Cantor Contzius appeared on the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. as a soloist in a special concert titled Let Freedom Sing. In 1998, he performed at the International Organ Festival of Göteborg, Sweden, where he led services at the Great Synagogue of Göteborg.

Cantor Jacob Ben-Zion Mendelson has been at Temple Israel Center for over 20 years. He is the subject of the documentary film,   “A Cantor's Tale”, directed by Erik Greenberg Anjou, currently playing in film festivals throughout the world.  In reviewing the film, The New York Times called him “a voice that heralds a culture…. a documentary filmmaker's dream”.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he witnessed the dwindling days of the Golden Age of Hazzanut.  Now, as both an international performer, and one of the leading cantorial masters of today, he is passing on his art to a new generation of Cantors.  For twenty-five years he has taught at the Hebrew Union College, School of Sacred Music and the H.L. Miller Cantorial School at the  Jewish Theological Seminary.  Cantor Mendelson has the unique honor of receiving honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College.

Jacob Mendelson is a graduate of the Hebrew Union College, School of Sacred Music and the American Opera Center at the Juilliard School.  Mendelson is the composer of “Weekday Mincha and Maariv” and “Improvisations on Shabbat Shacharit”  published by the Cantors Assembly, the organization in which he served as president in 2003 and 2004.  Recently he created the role of Shabtai Tz'vi in the world premiere of Richard Teitelbaum's “Scenes From Tz'vi” held at both Bard College and “La Biennale” in Venice.

Cantor Mendelson's discography includes “Cantorial Recitatives by Legendary Masters”, “The Birthday of the World” Part I and Part II, “Jewish Music and More”, recorded with his wife Cantor Fredda Mendelson, and most recently “Hazonos”, called “…jazz album of the year” by Wired Magazine, and recorded with Frank London, David Chevan, and his son, Daniel Mendelson.

Daniel Mendelson, tenor, is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he earned a BFA in Film/Video Directing.  His short film Rehearsing was nominated for Best Film and Best Director at the 2006 Dusty Awards, held at the prestigious Directors Guild Theater.  It has since screened at Makor and at the Max Ophuls Preis Film Festival in Saarbrucken Germany.  Mr. Mendelson has sung in concerts all over the United States and in Europe.  He is featured in the movie A Cantor's Tale and the CD's Birthday of the World Part I with Leonard Nimoy narrating, as well as the recent Hazzonos with Frank London.