- artist:The Klezmatics
- featured artist:Joshua Nelson & Kathryn Farmer
- release year:2005
- style(s):Gospel, Klezmer
- country:Germany
- formats:CD (Compact Disc)
- record posted by:Tractor-Beam
- label:Piranha
Links
Artist: The Klezmatics
Title: Brother Moses Smote The Water
Release Date: March 8, 2005
Label: Piranha Musik/Hamonia Mundi
Black Jewish Kosher Gospel Klezmer Jubilee: The
Klezmatics Smite Again!
Only in America could Jewish slaves in Egypt inspire
White Southern Christians who in turn stirred Black
Christians to sing about emancipation who in turn
inspired an African-American Jewish gospel singer
named Joshua Nelson.
The Klezmatics—known for their unique blend of
melodic mysticism and improvisational activism—
have once again turned their music inside out,
exposing the complexity of Jewish identity, Black
identity, human identity.
Brother Moses Smote the Water—their March 8,
2005 release on Piranha Musik (distributed by
Harmonia Mundi)—teams them with Nelson and
jazz singer/organist Kathryn Farmer. This first live
Klezmatics recording alternates between age-old
Hebrew Passover songs, Nelson’s own brand of
“kosher gospel,” and traditional Yiddish Klezmatic
anthems. The Brother Moses Smote the Water tour
will be presented in select major cities in March and
April 2005.
Nelson descends from a long line of Black Jews,
their very existence calling into question the
dichotomous black/white thinking typically placed
on religion, race, and culture in America. He posits
that his Jewish heritage may go as far back as the
ancient Second Temple of Jerusalem. “My great,
great grandmother practiced a very primitive
Judaism similar to the Jewish Ethiopians and the
Lembas of Southern Africa,” Nelson explains. “For
example, to this day we celebrate the New Year
during Passover in the spring as the Torah says.
Whereas most Western Jews celebrate the New Year
during Rosh Hashanah in the fall as the later
Rabbinic teachings say. Somehow the line of
Judaism I come from didn’t follow Rabbinic
Judaism. Regardless, there have been Black Jews for
centuries.”
But Nelson’s gospel singing only goes as far back
as his grandmother’s Mahalia Jackson record, which
he listened to at age eight. “I make Jewish music
and give it a soul sound,” he says. “They call it the
gospel sound. But technically it is soul Jewish
music. If you can be Black and put soul in Christian
music, you can be Black and put soul in Jewish
music!”
“Soul comes out of a bad experience and being able
to sing about it,” Nelson continues. “You can hear
soul in Jewish cantorial chanting; the wailing you
hear in a synagogue. That is also identified as soul,
because it’s what one moans and groans about a
horrible experience. Black people and European
Jews have both gone through hell in the last two
centuries.”
For nearly twenty years, The Klezmatics have been
the standard bearers of politically and socially
conscious party music for the head, heart, and
tuchis. The New York band has been constantly
reinventing and stretching the boundaries of the
genre while staying rooted to the source. The band
recently toured their Holy Ground concert program
of Woody Guthrie’s Jewish music with Arlo Guthrie,
selling out New York's Carnegie Hall and Los
Angeles’ Disney Hall.
“We have a reputation as ‘the klezmer band that
sings,’” explains Klezmatics singer Lorin
Sklamberg. “With Brother Moses we were able to
join with additional voices which really gave us an
opportunity to do a lot of wonderful singing
together. Another exciting thing for me was getting
to sing songs I have loved for many years, but
never had the chance to sing. The title track was
inspired by a version by the Golden Gate Quartet—
an African American group that started singing
spirituals in the 1920s and is still singing to this
day. I knew it from my mom’s record collection
when I was a kid. “The Brother Moses CD was
recorded at a festival in Berlin, but the concept
came from an evening of Freedom Songs that took
place at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The concert united songs from Jewish and African-
American traditions that spoke to social justice,
becoming a multi-cultural soundtrack to Passover’s
themes of freedom from bondage. “A lot of people
sing ‘Let My People Go’ during Passover,” says
Sklamberg. “This project came out of that. We were
looking for the Old Testament intersection of these
two musical traditions: Jewish music and Black
spirituals. Gospel and spirituals are two different
things, but musically this just evolved to have more
gospel.”
“The liberation from slavery into freedom in Egypt
is the root mythical psychic event that defines
Jewish people,” says Klezmatics trumpeter Frank
London. Nelson adds, “Blacks have always
paralleled our struggles in America with the time
when Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. And in the ’60s
Blacks and European Jews marched together in
Washington. A lot of this project has that context.
These are two communities that have been divided
by certain political leaders. From that standpoint,
this is really, really great. For both communities to
come together.”
“When we did this program in Berlin and began to
restructure the set-list,” continues London, “we
realized that we had the Passover seder
encapsulated in our concert, we just needed to re-
order the songs! Starting with ‘Go Down, Moses’
through the songs of liberation and welcoming the
messiah, and ending with ‘Ki Loy Nue,’ which is at
the end of the seder. It’s kind of ironic because the
word seder means sequence; it's a ritual set-list.
Beside the cross-cultural interaction and the
Passover-freedom theme, both Nelson and The
Klezmatics were struck by the compatibility of what
London calls their “architecture of building energy.”
“We get along so well because we all really deal with
music from the aspect of energy,” says London.
“That is such a part of gospel: how you build up the
energy in a concert or service until you get to the
ecstatic point. I love that this is implicit in Joshua’s
approach to music and in ours.”
“The Klezmatics are very flexible on stage,” adds
Nelson. “They can arrange something right in the
moment. And that allowed me to add to the fire of
creating things.”
“This project really points to what we love about
New York and kind of proves a lot of my points in
life,” London says. “Everyone says these essentialist
things about identity, and it’s not that clear. You
can’t point to one thing of who you are. Each
individual, everything in the world is a complex
mix.”
This final point was really driven home when gospel
singer/organist Amina Claudine Myers, who
performed at the New York premiere, could not
make it to the Berlin shows and recommended her
friend Kathryn Farmer, who grew up around her
father’s jazz bar. “My dad liked the really soul part
of jazz; the one-foot-in-the-gutter kind of music,”
Farmer explains. “That’s what I was raised on.”
During rehearsals with The Klezmatics, it came to
light that she had been adopted and her birth
mother was Jewish. Though she was not raised
Jewish (her parents were African-American
Methodists), in recent years she has studied the
Torah with other Jewish musicians and artists. “It’s
funny. We hired an African-American gospel singer
and we found even she has a Jewish connection that
she’s still exploring,” concludes London.