High Holy Revival: The Afro-Semitic Experience Gets Age-Old Prayers Dancing in the Aisles on Further Definitions of the Days of Awe

For The Afro-Semitic Experience, there is dancing before the temple of sound. The kings and queens of the Cotton Club trade eights with the rock stars of cantorial music s golden age. Booker T and the MGs and Astor Piazolla inspire new visions of High Holy Day chants.

Joined by the last of the old-school cantors, Jack Mendelson, the group lays down Further Definitions of the Days of Awe, live explorations of cantorial music, jazz, Latin vibes, Afrobeat and soul. Innovative technique and rock-solid roots get feet tapping and spirits soaring. Just in time for the High Holy Days, the (Jewish) New Year and Yom Kippur, the album presents a positive, cross-cultural reimagination of repentance and catharsis.

Creating new settings for the midnight prayers of Selichot, the service that marks the beginning of the most holy time of the Jewish liturgical year, The Afro-Semitic Experience returns worship to its creative, vigorous roots. It celebrates the intersection of gospel spirit and the passion of hazzanut (an ancient Jewish style of cantorial singing). It finds powerful new points of contact with the divine.

Prayer and study are a major tenet of all three Abrahamic faiths. That s great, but to get there, worshippers often got rid of cathartic experience, reflects group founder, bassist and composer David Chevan. But we need the dancing at the temple, those ecstatic moments. That s really where we re coming from.

The Afro-Semitic Experience has already received universal critical praise for its wide ranging explorations and interpretations of the diasporic music that comes out of the Jewish-American and African-American traditions. On this, their debut album, they perform a program of twelve pieces that encompass a wide range of sounds and styles--original compositions along with their distinctive arrangements of synagogue songs, gospel songs, hymns, West African, Cuban and Puerto Rican drum beats, jazz songs and cantorial music. This is a band that is proud of its religious and political message. Plea for Peace is a politically charged and spiritually centered cry for peace, world wide spiritual unity and communication. The title track, Plea for Peace, was composed by band co-founder Warren Byrd and is an expression of his sincere desire for the world to find a way to work things out. In fact, the composition is more of a prayer than a plea. Other pieces on the album include an arrangement by Will Bartlett of Almighty God, a composition from Duke Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert, and a group arrangement--Descarga Ocho Kandelikas, an Afro-Cuban jam on the classic Hannukah song. The group merges West African drumming and gospel on their interpretation of Dottie People’s On Time God and they add just a touch of Puerto Rican Bomba to David Chevan’s arrangement of A Song for When the Temple is Rebuilt–an updated version of Yisroel Schorr’s cantorial composition, Sheh Yiboneh Beis Hamikdash.