Playlouder - Music is the Network

‘Hear O Israel’ is, or was, the brainchild of Jonathan Klein, a then 17-year-old composer from New York who was encouraged by his local Rabbi to reinterpret the Friday night orthodox prayers through the very sacred medium of modern modal jazz.

This was some forty years ago, and despite the massive leaps and bounds we’ve made as a race in collating and passing on our universal knowledge, I still had very little idea of what any of that first paragraph meant when I read the (unusually informative and well-written) press release.

This album would inevitably have me reaching for Wikipedia with monotonous regularity, if not the skip button on my stereo’s remote control; I didn’t know what a Jew was until I was thirteen and I didn’t know what jazz was until I was twenty three – it was just something to avoid: like polio, men with beards and komodo dragons.  

Fortunately, as it turns out, one doesn’t have to be knowledgeable in the ways of Judaism to appreciate Jewish prayers put to music, and whether or not it’s heretical for me to do so, it makes me feel far less guilty than the quite definite heresy I feel I’m committing against myself for enjoying jazz music for, well, the first time ever, (outside of smoky European bars).

Perhaps I had a bad experience with a saxophone as a youngster? Who knows? But these swirling, hypnotic piano-driven reveries are a storm of goodwill and more trance-inducing than any white gospel or… erm… George Harrison albums.

The performance, recorded live all those years ago, was led by Herbie Hancock on piano, and he was accompanied by numerous well-respected contemporaries on flute, sax, horns, bass and drums. We have “esoteric jazz collector” John Cooper (and the wonder of serendipity) to thank for the survival of these recordings, and a Mr. Jonny Trunk and his record company to thank for the release.

And God, obviously.

Smashing stuff, and as Mr. Trunk points out, “You don’t have to be Jewish to discover just how beautiful this album is.”