Rabbi gives tradition a jazz spin
Sunday, January 28, 2007
By JIM BECKERMAN
RECORD COLUMNIST
Greg Wall is an explorer.
His compass: the Talmud. His map: 3,500 years of Jewish music.
His tool for hacking his way through the wilderness: a saxophone.
Well, they don't call it an ax for nothing.
"I'm a jazz rabbi," says the Livingston resident, who also plays the clarinet. "In fact, I think I'm the only one in the world."
Wall, an Orthodox rabbi and a professional musician, is in the midst of a 15-year musical journey through uncharted country.
In bands with names like Hasidic New Wave and Greg Wall's Later Prophets, he is taking musical traditions that go back in some cases to the time of Jacob and Joseph and refracting them through a prism of jazz, funk, fusion, punk, rap, trance and rock-and-roll. "Sun Ra meets Jimi Hendrix at a Jewish wedding," one wag called it.
"As I look at it, we're New York musicians of the 21st century, and we have access to more sounds than anybody in the history of the world," says Wall, who lives with his wife, Rona, and three children when he's not out on the road.
"The information age has come to music," he says. "This is jazz for the information age."
Emerging from the chrysalis of the 1990s downtown scene centered on the Knitting Factory, Wall and his various aggregations of musicians have toured all over the world, released at least a dozen albums and played major jazz festivals like Texaco/New York Jazz Festival, the North Sea Festival in Holland and Jazz à Vienne in Paris.
He's been heard on NPR's "All Things Considered," seen on "BET on Jazz" -- and heard but not seen in a 2002 movie, "On the QT," with James Earl Jones.
"He played a saxophonist in the movie," Wall says. "Whenever you heard him, you heard me."
More recently, Wall got kudos for an unlikely project in collaboration with Yakar Rhythms, a Senegalese drum ensemble. Their 2002 album, "From the Belly of Abraham," is subtitled "A Judeo-Muslim Celebration," and why not?
"They're Muslims, but Muslims and Jews both come from the prophet Abraham," Wall says.
That intersection of the musical, cultural and spiritual is typical of Wall. It's what made him decide to become, in 2006, a rabbi. "My music has been reflecting my Jewish explorations for the last 15 years," he says.
He didn't do much exploring in his youth in Boston, where he was raised in a Reform household. "Judaism was for kids," he recalls. "You went to Hebrew school and you had a bar mitzvah. Well, I pretty much turned left [from that] and never turned back."
After attending the New England Conservatory, where he picked up jazz and classical chops to augment his already considerable knowledge of rock-and-roll, he found himself in New York in the early 1990s in the midst of a renaissance.
Jewish music, nearly frozen in time since the Holocaust, started to evolve in the hands of some of New York's most creative musicians, who rediscovered the cantorial melodies of the synagogue and the klezmer tunes that had been played at their grandmothers' weddings. And club owners like Michael Dorf of the ultra-hip Knitting Factory were giving them a home. Wall, with his various groups, made it home base.
"[Dorf] was very proud of his own Jewish roots, and he was very excited with young Jewish artists who were taking the music and developing it," Wall says.
Meanwhile, Wall was doing some exploring of his own.
Chance hooked him up with Yosi Piamenta, a guitarist who has been dubbed "the Hasidic Jimi Hendrix." They began playing at Hasidic weddings and social functions in places like Williamsburg and Borough Park, where people listened to a very different kind of Jewish music. Not old-fashioned klezmer, with its 1930s, Lower East Side quaintness, but rock-and-roll. "Today, Jewish Orthodox music is rock," he says.
He learned something else at these Orthodox functions. There was an intensity he loved -- both in the music and the response to it. It's what he's tried to get in his playing ever since.
"One time I was playing with a Hasidic band, and we played once for 90 minutes," he says. "I thought my lips were going to fall off. We stopped playing, but the Hasidim were still dancing. They weren't even listening to us. They were in another world. I wanted to have that effect in my music."
As a result, Wall has introduced into some of his more adventurous music a polyrhythmic, trancy jam band quality that might remind listeners more of String Cheese Incident than a traditional Jewish hora or turkisher.
Fine for the young folks. But can you dance to it?
"People who are Hasidim and are familiar with jazz love the music," he says. "But you wouldn't play this at a Jewish wedding. They would throw things at the band."
Greg Wall's Later Prophets will appear at 8:30 p.m. March 10 at Cafe 18, Florham Park. (973) 360-0251.
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