Customer Reviews

Midnight Minyan

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This record is blow-away fantastic!!!!
Paul has fused together very specific Ethnic music in such a hep way that it transmorgs into a kind of killing avant-ethni-jazz. Mr. Shapiro's arrangements really are miraculous especially considering the material. This is very,very serious jazz from note one. It also has a very unique retro vibe to it. All of the players are INCREDIBLE. On first listen I thought "man this record is sick" and then I saw them live!
Forget it. They were so [great] it was ridiculous.
Needless to say I am a HUGE fan. Hear why for yourself.

This cd has immensely satisfying musicianship and get-up-and-dance energy. But what really makes it shine for me is the whole new view it gave me on the liturgical music at its core.

Music of all kinds (jazz, rock, classical, etc.) has always had a strong spiritual element for me, but I am amazed at how well these melodies--melodies I grew up singing in a synagogue--could fit in a jazz context.

I have heard other attempts to "spice up" liturgical music or bridge the gap between modern/secular and traditional/sacred music. Some feel like a Jewish melody was awkwardly shoehorned into a secular genre. Others simply scream "gimmick." I still enjoy those recordings for what they are, but they would not get 5 stars from me.

These arrangements, on the other hand, are more artful than most other Jewish-secular hybrids I've heard, and more meaningful than other artful incorporations of non-jazz melodies into jazz (see, e.g., Herbie Hancock's "A New Standard" and Jason Moran's "Joga"). Paul Shapiro and friends have managed to make real jazz that I think I would enjoy even if I didn't know the underlying melodies. But then the subtle familiarity of the music evokes a sort of spiritual deja vu, and my appreciation for this CD rises to a whole other level.

Paul Shapiro and company are a very versatile bunch, and have created a jazz album of Jewish music (or is it a Jewish album of jazz music?) that will appeal to jazzheads, traditionalists, and hipsters alike. This is one of the few interpretations of traditional Jewish music that I've ever really dug. Everyone I play it for is completely blown away. Go Paul!!!

I went and bought a CD on a lark. I had been a fan of Paul Shapiro's music 30 years ago and I saw his disk *Midnight Minyan* so I impulsively bought it for some vocal-free music to grade by. I figured "updated devotional music? WHY NOT?"

Instead of something to drown out the noise of my kids as I correct papers I got a mind-blowing tour of the "familiar foreign." Not only are the melodies strangely familiar to this unschooled New Yorker, but the styles and arrangements also touch my soul in a compelling way. I cannot tell you exactly what it is about Mr. Shapiro's playful reflections of these songs that so intoxicates me, but I'll try.

The playful style of jazz that I'd thought had gone extinct roars back on these melodies that I was unfamiliar with. It is like the band, made up of old souls revived from 78 records got together with a post-modern sensibility and swung-out some tunes from the childhoods of Post-60s kids raised in the "diaspora of Hip."

Whether it is the tonal music of the middle east, the rumbas and tangos of 60s jazz, or the klezmer revivals of the 90s all of the sounds are familiar and wonderfully out of place. These are familiar because I've been waiting to hear these styles in New Music for years fruitlessly. And they are "out of place" because the melodies and styles seem never to have been in the same room or mind before this CD. Who'd have thought prayer music could become the material for a swinging CD?

I just love it and I'll have to look Paul up and tell him.