Bassist David Chevan laid out the beat and the melody. He turned it over to pianist Warren Byrd, who changed a minor chord to a major seventh to match a lyric about man “blossoming” in the “morning.” Thus was born a new take on an ancient seasonal meditation about death and life, just in time for the Days of Awe.
Chevan has enlisted Byrd and other bandmates from the local group Afro-Semitic Experience, plus a traditional cantor, to produce a recording called Yizkor. It’s an ambitious reimagining of the Jewish prayer service by the same name.
Jews recite or chant the series of psalms and prayers in Yizkor four times a year on holy days to remember the dead and try to make some sense of human mortality.
One of those times is coming up: The “Days of Awe,” which begin Monday night with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. The fast of Yom Kippur follows the next week; that day’s services include Yizkor.
Chevan, 48, (at left in photo) and Byrd, 43, (at right) have released the Yizkor CD in time for the holidays. It’s the sixth CD they’ve produced since joining forces a decade ago and melding jazz improvisation with traditional Jewish and African-American spiritual compositions, incorporating klezmer, African, Dobro and other musical streams. (Chevan is Jewish, Byrd, African-American.) Their efforts have produced transcendent music while offering a vision of cross-cultural hope. (Click here for a story about a 2006 interfaith concert for Middle East peace that Chevan helped organize at Battell Chapel.)
With “Yizkor,” Chevan reached back centuries for his inspiration. Click on the play arrow to watch how the music came together in a recording session, as captured by local filmmaker Jay Miles.
Chevan became interested in the Yizkor service after a great aunt died. “She was the last person in her generation still alive [in the family]. A bunch of little old ladies would always sit around the living room singing, ‘Yi de di di….’ Now there weren’t there anymore. I had all those [musical] lines in my head.” A friend died, too; two others came close to death. Chevan was off on a search, set to a soundtrack as usual, for his faith’s wrestling with the meaning of mortality.
The search led him to the Yizkor service, at which congregants recite the Kaddish prayer for dead relatives as well as psalms and other prayers touching on mortality. Chevan pored through prayer books (he’s a collector) from different ages and various streams of Jewish practice. He found that, unlike with other Jewish prayer services, Yizkor’s order varies widely, even within Judaism’s movements. Psalms are recited in different orders in different places.
He also scoured through written music used by Jewish cantors in services from 50 to 100 years ago, when the almost operatic-style of prayer-leading, especially during the Days of Awe, was more common. Chevan felt that a valuable tradition was being lost. He wanted to preserve it. It served as an inspiration as he crafted new melodies for Yizkor’s psalms.
Finally Chevan lined up a cantor, Hazzan Alberto Mizrahi, to sing the Hebrew psalms and prayers to the new music he was putting together.
While this was Chevan’s personal search, the music ended up a collaboration that drew from from different experiences. Take the shift from minor to major chord in “Adonai, Mah Adam.”
Before he even got to the chords, Chevan (pictured on his scooter outside Educational Center for the Arts, which two of his children have attended) had to figure out where to put the “Adonai, Mah Adam” prayer in the order of his new piece. He had to figure out how to think about the prayer itself.
The prayer reads, in English translation:
My God, what is man that you recognize him?
The son of a mortal that you calculate him?
Man is like a passing breath, his days are like a passing shadow.
In the morning it blossoms and is rejuvenated.
By evening it is cast down and dried up.
According to the count of our days, so may you teach us.
Then we shall acquire a heart of wisdom.
Guard the simple and watch the upright.
Because the end for that man is peace.”
The first insight came in a conversation with a rabbi. The rabbi noted that whatever order the Yizkor service takes, it leads up to one main prayer: “El Malei Rachamim.” Other prayers, such as “Adonai, Mah Adam,” set the stage. They’re warm-ups. Not the crescendo.
So, Chevan decided, “I wanted it to be have a feeling of beginning, of entry into the process. I wanted it to be open. It couldn’t be heavy.”
He launched it with a trademark Chevan bass line, popping out gently, with silences connecting the notes.
It was into those silences that Warren Byrd entered when he sat down at the piano to add his part.
First he had to get this whole “Yizkor” idea straight.
“It took me a while,” he said. “David explained and he explained and he explained. I was like, ‘Why do we need to deal with dead folks? Why do we have to memorialize?’”
Around the time he viewed a BBC documentary on the Aztecs preparing their people for sacrifices to the gods. He reflected on the death of his brother. He thought about the role of Yizkor in a synagogue service, then wondered about his own spiritual roots.
“How do we go about doing that where I come from?” he asked himself.
“We have been confronting death every day. Look at the history of being black in this country. How many people passed away in the Middle Passage? How many souls had to die for me to get here? That’s what helped me understand what’s at stake in Yizkor.”
He studied the words of “Mah Adam” as they corresponded to Chevan’s melody. “There were a couple of place where the text actually changed.” Such as the “In the morning it blossoms” line.
He inserted the minor to major-seventh chord shift there. “When you go from minor to major,” Byrd said, “it changes the color from a little dark to light.”
“We wanted,” Chevan added, “that sense of new life.”
From there, the rest of the Afro-Semitic Experience crew added their distinctive touches. Members include two fixtures of New Haven’s music scene, percussionist Baba David Coleman and Grammy-winning Dobro player Stacy Phillips. From its opening strains, the video near the top of this story demonstrates Phillips’ masterful touch in bending the Dobro’s string-sliding form, most commonly associated with Nashville country and bluegrass tunes, to new forms — in this case, Jewish liturgical music.
To listen to the final product, click onto this page, then click on the link to “Adonai, Mah Adam” in the far left-hand column. Hear what it contributes to a season of introspection and seeking forgiveness.
(You can order the CD here.)