One of the musicians told me Divine Sparks didn’t have as much rehearsal time as they thought they needed. From the second balcony of the Berklee performance center, the sound mixing seemed uneven, the guitar close to inaudible. Despite these kinks, this was one of the more interesting concerts I’ve gone to, to say the least.
Quick background: Divine Sparks was the brainchild of Frank London, best known as the trumpet player from the Klezmatics. It was a one-off show, with a band composed of double bass (bowed), drums, percussion, guitar, organ, piano, and trumpet. They played backing to five chazzanot, trained singers of Jewish religious music. The material was all religious, in Hebrew. The singers were smooth, mostly singing in that sweet, reedy register typical of Jewish religious singers. And the band was surprisingly loud.
For the first ten minutes, they played an instrumental version of “Ono HaShem”, slow, dominated by London’s trumpet. Comparisons to Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain”occurred to me. Then the drums dropped, and the concert got loud. They played 16 songs over more than two hours, switching singers on every track. It was really a different sound, too focused on vocals to be jazz, too improvised for opera. Listen to this and imagine a cantor over it. Unique. I wish there was a video.
I wasn’t familiar with the material, to say the least, but Aaron Bensoussan’s performance of L’cha Dodi, where he accompanied himself on oud, stuck in my head. I got the chance to talk to him after the show.
“I learned to play oud when I was very young, in morocco, I was taught by a master of players.” he told me. “I was 13. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time, but I learned more in new york. A lot of what I play I just feel, I’m not a technical player, I mix Ashkenazic, and blues, and African music, I’m not tied to the structure.” Where had I heard that before?
Frank London was surrounded by friends congratulating him after the show, but I got a chance to talk to him.
Max Elstein Keisler: There was a lot of improvisation here, did you work from entirely from a setlist?
Frank London: With this it was way too complicated to be spontaneous. With five different singers, we had to know what were doing. For me the with whole intention of this concert, there were a number of important goals that I think we came really close to doing, and the setlist was one of the crucial things. I wanted the concert to have a spiritual connectedness and a spiritual flow. Heschel has an an expression, a service has an emotional high point, and radical amazement, I waned the concert to have a flow and reach an epiphany, and it really did.
MEK: Yeah, you could feel the structure. Like L’cha Dodi at the halfway point.
FL: Yeah, with L’cha Dodi for example. The next level, because it can always get better, what I didn’t pay attention to and I apologize, is making sure the texts followed a connectedness and a relatedness. So the next level would be to have the same thing. Even though this isn’t a service, its not Shabbat, its not shavrot, we’re not doing a service, there sill would be a way for the texts to inform each other, that would be the next level, to have the texts inform each other
MEK: So do you have plans to continue with this project?
FL: V’s HaShem, that’s the short answer. The long answer, the real answer, is that this project is one step in a journey that’s been going on for about ten years of trying to learn this music, trying to play it, and finding ways to present it, so this was a big step for me on this way, on this journey. If we never do this exact concert again, I hope to do more concerts like this
MEK: This being chassidic music?
FL: This being a concentration on chazzanot, and the focusing of strictly Jewish spiritual music, with a highly refined sense of aesthetics but in a way that is geared to a mystical, spiritual experience.
I’ll say this, it was definitely a new sound. Big ups to London for getting this together. It’s impressive to have a crowd with a mix of secular and Chassidic Jews, and it’s a good look to explore the mystical traditions of Judaism, which have been partly lost since the Haskalah. Bensoussan put it poetically.
“Working with the other musicians, thank god, this is what makes our spiritual life. We get the message out, we connect with the creator.”
(Divine Sparks performed at the Berklee Performance Center on March 12)
