Jeff Writes About: Basya Schechter

If there is any justice in the world, Basya Schechter’s new CD, Songs of Wonder, will be nominated and win a Grammy—it’s that good. After a decade on the road with Pharoah’s Daughter, her Mid-east-Klezmer-Euro-pop-fusion jam-band, Basya has found her true voice in (of all things) eighty year-old Yiddish poems about life and longing by Abraham Joshua Heschel.​

These poems were written when the legendary rabbi and teacher from Poland was in his twenties, studying in Germany, caught in the space between tradition and modernity. Escaping Hitler’s Europe, eventually settling in New York City, Heschel became an iconic Jewish figure who famously marched with Martin Luther King, whose lonely Jewish voice called for an end to the war in Vietnam, whose untamed hair rivaled Einstein’s, whose vision of a prophetic, neo-Hasidic spirituality fueled the American Jewish renaissance of the late 20th century.

It is said that Heschel loved to sing. He brought from Europe a storehouse of Hasidic melodies that he sang on Shabbat at his home with family and friends. Heschel would have loved this music, for the life, the humanity, it brings to his words.

Basya’s melodies are inventive and tuneful— while they can hardly be called Hasidic songs, every so often Basya breaks out into a nigun, a wordless tune, “ai ai ai…” and you hear the intimate voice she gives to Heschel’s yearning, a voice whose sweetness transcends the barriers and limitations of language.

What an amazing CD this is, what a wondrous song-cycle of words, melodies, voices and sounds, where mariachi horns run into gypsy violins, where accordion and electric guitar make their way together. Basya’s creative genius is in seamlessly melding musical influences from everywhere into a coherent and contemporary sound. With each album she records, Basya has traveled farther around the world and deeper into the past, as she searches for the ethnic touchstones that define Jewish musicality.

Whether Songs of Wonder wins a Grammy may not matter in the end, because these songs are destined to become classics, to be treasured and sung long into the future. Basya Schechter may quite possibly be North America's most creative and talented contemporary Jewish music artist. She is blazing a very personal trail across the wide expanse of time and place that is Jewish music, and we would do best to follow.

- Cantor Jeff Klepper
February 2012