For his Yizkor project, bassist David Chevan, with the Afro-Semitic Experience, wanted to right two wrongs: a decline of traditional cantorial music in synagogue and a de-emphasis on the spiritual elements of jazz.
by George Robinson Special To The Jewish Week
David Chevan admits, a little sheepishly, that it sounds like a Woody Allen line, but there it is: “I was thinking a lot about death,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about the world that I see disappearing, about the world losing things that I consider to be of value.” That line of thought, it turned out, served as the inspiration for the acclaimed jazz bassist’s to compose some new music. The result is the first CD by his band, the Afro-Semitic Experience, in three years. It is an ambitious and moving Yizkor service written by Chevan (with an assist on three tunes from pianist and co-leader Warren Byrd) and sung by Alberto Mizrahi. “I began thinking about [death] when my grandmother was
dying,” Chevan says. “I realized that her sister was the last member of that generation in my family. After her all of that would be gone — not only the family history, but the values they held dear that would no longer be present.” As he explains in the liner notes to the CD, “Yizkor: Music of Memory,” his circle of friends was shaken by a death and a couple of near-misses, and he felt a need to address his own mortality in the way he knows best. But, he adds, he was also influenced by two explicitly musical factors. First, he notes, there has been a decline in the use of traditional hazanut (cantorial music) in synagogue services and although “sometimes I’m glad to sing,” he adds, “sometimes I get blown away by the power of the cantorial voice.” And in his own musical discipline, there has been a de-emphasis on the spiritual elements in jazz that had risen to dominance in the 1960s. “There’s this conservative movement in jazz that has codified and institutionalized jazz practice, and they’ve gotten rid of a lot of the spiritual music ... of the late 1960s and ’70s.” Chevan wanted to write a piece of music that would speak to those three interlocking themes. “I thought about a requiem mass, then I realized we have a requiem mass [in Judaism]. It’s Yizkor,” he says. “I started doing a lot of research into the Yizkor service, studied a lot of other people’s settings and discovered that nobody has ever composed a complete Yizkor service.” The result was a learning experience for Chevan and the entire band. The writing process was informed by constant reshaping of the music, with band members dropping in on Chevan at his home to try out the material in informal sessions and to rewrite. “It’s a good thing we have a living room and a piano,” he says with a chuckle. “A lot of revision went on while we were working on the piece.” But the key element in Chevan’s vision of the Yizkor service fell into place later, when renowned Cantor Alberto Mizrahi agreed to perform on the recording. Chevan confesses that several years ago, after hearing Mizrahi’s excellent 1995 set “Chants Mystiques,” on his car stereo, the bassist said to himself, “If this is Jewish music, where do I sign up?” The idea of playing behind Mizrahi “became an obsession.” That obsession carried over to the Yizkor project. “When I was working on this, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to get Alberto to sing on this album,” Chevan says. “Nobody was more surprised than I was when he said ‘Sure.’” Did working with a vocalist — and a non-jazz vocalist at that — present problems for the band? “We work with singers all the time,” Chevan observes.“We’ve just never recorded with one. But there are certain moments when Alberto’s voice is climbing over the band ... I’m thinking, ‘I could do this every night, work with a voice like that and be happy.’” Of course, there is that constant tension in jazz between the written and the improvised, and working with a non-jazz singer, even one as gifted as Mizrahi, imposes a certain set of constraints on a band. Chevan explains, “At an earlier stage, [the material] was more jazz-oriented, but I reined that in. There’s a dramatic flow [to the service] that you have to respect. There are places where we could have opened it up, but we decided to limit ourselves to one place, Psalm 23. Everybody in the band [understood] that. There will be other albums and other opportunities, but Yizkor is about the sublimation of the ego, and the prayers themselves really speak to that.” Undoubtedly, as he continues to grow older, Chevan’s attitude towards death will undergo still more shifts and changes. But for now, he has made a musical peace with mortality, and the result is there for anyone willing to listen. n The Afro-Semitic Experience will be performing on Wednesday, Aug. 20 at 7 p.m. at the Museum at Eldridge Street (12 Eldridge St.); for information, call (212) 219-0888 or go to www.eldridgestreet.org. “Yizkor: Music of Memory,” the band’s new album, is available from www.cdbaby.com.
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