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

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The Afro-Semitic Experience is an ensemble dedicated to preserving, promoting and expanding the rich cultural and musical heritage of the Jewish and African diaspora. Imagine a band that understands and can present interpretations of music from the rich traditions of Gospel, Klezmer, Yoruban drumming, Nigunim, Synagogue chant, Spirituals, Funk, and Swing and you have the Afro-Semitic Experience. A group that is as comfortable playing a freylakh as they are swinging a blues, that knows how to play either a bulgar or some funk. Multi-cultural soul.

"the Afro-Semitic Experience evokes the sound of cultural shift, of a melting pot, of spirituality and devotion and ceremony, of partying and praying and jamming. . . .A danceable, trance-causing flurry of notes with godly underpinnings. Underneath all the oomph you feel the warmth, wealth fury and pain of whole nations, repressed cultures, challenged beliefs. This band is the sound of the past, the present and the great beyond all at once." Christopher Arnott, The New Haven Advocate

Product Description
Bassist and composer David Chevan's first solo album is a a collection of instrumental interpretations of traditional music for the Jewish Holy Days of Selichot, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. The centerpiece of the album are six original arrangements of transcriptions from the recorded High Holy Day cantorial repertoire of the legendary Yoselle Rosenblatt. This album is a groundbreaking work if only because it is the first time that a jazz musician (or any instrumental musician) has ever made a recording solely devoted to the music of the Jewish High Holy Days.

Accompanying Chevan on much of the album is his working group, The Afro-Semitic Experience including Alvin Benjamin Carter, Jr. on drum set and hand drums, Baba David Coleman on hand drums, Mixashawn.com on tenor sax, Will Bartlett on tenor sax and clarinet, Stacy Phillips on lap steel guitar, acoustic resonator guitar and violin, and Chevan’s long time partner and collaborator Warren Byrd on piano. On the remainder of the album Chevan has put together a trio featuring himself along with trumpeter Frank London, a founding member of the legendary Klezmatics, and Afro-Semitic member and Grammy award winning dobro master Stacy Phillips.

Most important to this album is the instrumental interpretation of the ancient Jewish traditional of cantorial singing known as Hazzanut. Hazzanut or Chazzones as it is also known is a singing tradition that is at the root of most Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jewish music. The Jewish cantors chanting in the synagogues of Europe were influenced by a distinct mixture of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Eastern European scales and melodic figures. The cantors, known as Hazzanim, would use these figures and scales to improvise spontaeous original melodies in prayer to God. They often used krechts, or sobbing sounds and other distinctive vocal techniques in their hazzanut to bring the prayers to extraordinary vocal heights. This music, in turn, influenced later more secular Jewish musical traditions that have become better known to the American mainstream as Yiddish song and Klezmer. Every track on this recording is informed by and contains contemporary interpretations of! hazzanut.

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