Notable Jewish music acts

DAVE GORDON

When the Lithuanian Empire's CD plays, it will be hard not to clap, dance the hora and make believe you're at a simchah.

The klezmer disc is filled with exhilarating traditional melodies some may have heard, and some may have thought they had heard – definitely familiar in style and sound. Some tunes, however, are new – "Sushi for Shabbes" and "Cherry Blossom Hora," for example – songs that prove this band wants you to have fun listening, and doesn't take themselves too seriously.

Called the Lithuanian Empire because, when stuck for a name, they overheard someone talking about European history and the two words sounded quirky enough to fit, their CD caught the attention of radio stations across Canada. Since then, the Empire's name has spread throughout the United States and Europe. The eight-person band will soon be touring Quebec, Toronto and Halifax.

Empire drummer Lorie Wolf has become a fixture on the club and festival circuit, soon to include performances at the Lincoln Centre and the Kennedy Centre, in Washington, D.C. In her native Toronto, Wolf has performed in many popular venues, including the Rex and Gladstone hotels, the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts, the Toronto Jazz Festival and the Toronto Roots Festival. Wolf's current projects include Sheynville, an all-female Yiddish swing band, and the CD Taibele and Her Demon, a musical adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, which will be released this June, her first solo effort.

Hear that song inside

Yael Naim and David Donatien's self-titled album was released by Atlantic Records and includes the hit song "New Soul," as heard in the MacBook Air television ad (yes, you'll know it), also a top hit with YouTube viewers. The 13-track disc of Hebrew tunes includes five English songs, one of which is a cover of Britney Spears' "Toxic," done with a Bjork-ian flair.

"It was just a game in the beginning. It was fun to take something in an extreme musical world that has nothing to do with us, and take it far," Naim said about the Spears tune. "You just take something that has some packaging, then you take the packaging away, and you discover what's inside. And we discovered that song inside."

In 2000, Naim, a 29-year-old French-Israeli singer and songwriter, was invited to a charity concert in Paris, where she was "discovered" by record producers. In no time, she was signed with EMI. Many have compared this chanteuse to other young, spritely female solo artists like Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.

The playfulness with which Naim and Donatien combine acoustic guitars, bar-room piano, school-band brass and resonant percussion give the CD a rich, layered essence – it's the kind of sound that is both stylistically unique and entrancing.

Little specks of dirt

Recently, Josh Gabriel released Beyond the Stars, a 14-track recording, four years in the making. The 28-year-old Torontonian said that the CD's music and lyrics were inspired by autobiographical grief: the cheating girlfriend, living in a cramped basement apartment and raucous bandmates. "Messy lives tend to make for great writing," Gabriel told the Independent.

Beyond the Stars is a rollicking blend of folk rock mixed with blues twang, all laid out on a shifting rhythmic bed of "gee-tar" grooves. The tales are sometimes reflective, sometimes hopeful, but always endearing. It's being well received among critics and fans alike.

Gabriel's new CD was released independently, which has allowed him to assert his own creative freedoms: the disc was created to mimic vinyl, like an old 45-revolutions-per-minute record, with the indented black grooves and paper label.

Though he admits to being influenced by the likes of Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle and Pearl Jam, his new CD contains aural flavors akin to Blues Traveller, Dave Matthews Band, Neil Young and Maroon Five. The language Gabriel weaves around this musical journey is a poetic invocation of emotional earthquakes and subconscious rainstorms.

His first CD, Sunday Night and Monday Morn (2003), included 11 original songs recorded in a small bedroom. The title track was inspired by a poem written by his father, when Gabriel and his brother were in foster care. Gabriel's upcoming tour includes dates in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario.

The cover of Beyond the Stars shows a silhouette of Gabriel's head against a backdrop of outer space. For him, the imagery is a metaphor for humility.

"As for Beyond the Stars," he said, "as the world is as vast as it is, and as many people as we fill it with, we are still a little speck of dirt."

Dave Gordon is a freelance writer. His website is DaveGordonWrites.com.

^TOP