Ever wondered what Judaism would be like if Bob Marley had been Jewish? Dreadlocks would come into fashion as payes went out of vogue. Shul-goers might say they were “jammin in the name of the Lord.” The liturgy might include such lines as “give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright.” And services might sound something like Adonai and I, the self-titled debut album by a band that, as the album cover says, creates “roots reggae interpretations of traditional hebrew prayers, melodies, and psalms.”
Adonai and I is the brainchild of David Gould, the 32-year-old bass player for the Ithaca-based reggae band John Brown’s Body. As a musically inclined child brought up in a Conservative Jewish household on Long Island, Gould was struck particularly by the melodies he learned in Hebrew school. “Music always hit me in a very deep way,” he says.
In 1994, Gould says he “got into reggae” after hearing a Bob Marley song blasted over speakers at a Grateful Dead concert. “[Marley’s music] hit me in some kind of way that [reggae] hadn’t before,” says Gould. He became immersed in reggae culture and soon realized the “correlation between melodies of the [reggae] songs and the melodies of [Jewish] prayer.” “When I hear reggae music, it sounds to me like the narrative to the Old Testament,” Gould says. “A lot of the lyrics are about stories of the Bible.”
Adonai and I consists of 12 tracks–all innovative, but some clearly more sophisticated than others. The album’s best songs are “Veshamru” and “V’nemar.” “Veshamru”–the lyrics concern the commandment to keep the Sabbath, and are taken from the Biblical passage that is recited over Kiddush on Saturday afternoons–features lead vocalist Craig Akira Fujita lending Marleyesque inflections and tone to the traditional lyrics and melody. The song is also the best example of Jewish-reggae fusion that the album has to offer. The clearly discernable Jewish melody is set well to the song’s prominent reggae component rather than hanging dissonantly above it, as is the case on some of the album’s other tracks.
“V’nemar,” on the other hand, does not sound at all reggae-like. But the song’s strikingly delicate tone and a cappella style make “V’nemar” a fitting piece for the album’s finale. Against a faint background of chirping crickets, vocalist Amy Glicklich sings a powerful rendition of the last line of the Aleinu prayer in Hebrew.
Gould describes his reaction to reggae music as “a feeling of unity within myself as well as unity with God.” The music, he says, “allows for transcendence.” To him, Judaism too should be a force for unity with people of all faiths. This ethos is manifested in Adonai and I’s cast of musical characters, who are a diverse bunch with eclectic backgrounds. Jewish or not, “everyone playing this music loves it,” Gould says. “You don’t need to be Jewish to like this music; the music is timeless.”
