Customer Reviews

The Days of Awe: Meditations for Selichot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur

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David Chevan and the Afro-Semetic Experience is doing what few artists can do well: fuse Jewish sacred music with a popular idiom. Very often, I feel that other people's attempts at doing this fall short of both the Jewish and the popular, but you can hear from this recording that Chevan and his group are deeply spiritual, and they preserve the spirit of Yossele Rosenblatt on this recording in a new and refreshing way. His virtuoso bass along with Warren Byrd on the keys (SUCH a natural, this man!), Stacy Keach on Dobro (what SOUL!), and the rest of the ensemble make you long for the original recordings of Rosenblatt. I never thought that Jazz was an appropriate genre to be introduced into Jewish spirituality... Chevan has changed my mind forever!

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there are more things under heaven and earth than any of us have dreamt of. And here's one of them, a brand new interpretation of historic Jewish prayer music, jazzed up in the best sense of that word. Chevan, Byrd, and the gang are master musicians and adept at the delicate welding operation required to fuse these two musical traditions into sound that is a rare pleasure to listen to. Meditative, uplifting, surprising, and never ordinary.