It is […] my inability to be a “peaceful” Jew, one at ease, anchored in his certainties, that has made me the Jew I believe myself to be. This may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely in this rupture — in this non-belonging in search of its belonging — that I am no doubt most Jewish.
Edmond Jabès, Du désert au livre : entretiens avec Marcel Cohen (From the Desert to the Book: Conversations with Marcel Cohen), Paris, Belfond, 1980, quoted by John Zorn in the booklet of his album Kristallnacht, TZ 7301, 1995.
The reflections that follow preceded and accompanied the development of the exhibition Radical Jewish Culture, Scène Musicale New York (Radical Jewish Culture, New York Music Scene), presented at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in the spring of 2010. This long-haul adventure, carried out over four years, was for the team of exhibition curators an occasion to reflect, by grappling with it directly, on American Jewish culture. Obviously, a door was cut into it; Radical Jewish Culture is altogether particular and could in no way represent a universe whose signature is an incredible diversity. The projects that compose it inscribe themselves within it subtly, weaving a network of references, quotations, and knowing nods, each one espousing in its own way the contours of a complex and varied landscape.
A musical community
In the early 1990s, in New York and in Eastern Europe, music festivals were mounted under a startling banner: Radical New Jewish Culture. The artists who took part in these events drew as much on improvisation from jazz as on the raw energy mined from blues, rock, punk, funk, or the traditional musics of Eastern Europe. The unprecedented character of their message, however, escaped no one: these artists now wanted to be heard as Jews. The New York composer and saxophonist John Zorn (born in New York in 1953) was the initiator of these festivals, organized after impassioned debates with the key players of this scene. These musicians attach themselves, closely or loosely, to the downtown scene.1 This term has designated, since the 1960s, the artistic bohemia that experiments, in the clubs of southern Manhattan, with new forms marked by a profound eclecticism, at the margins of commercial musics as much as of academic music.
The title “Radical Jewish Culture” was adopted in two stages. In 1992, the German producer Franz Abraham organized in Munich a vast cultural event consisting of a series of cartes blanches offered to major figures of the contemporary American music scene, to which, besides John Zorn, were invited Ornette Coleman, Steve Reich, Philip Glass… John Zorn chose to title his carte blanche “Festival for Radical New Jewish Culture.” For the occasion he surrounded himself with musicians, some of them celebrated icons of the New York alternative-music scene and others artists then in full ascent: Lou Reed, John Lurie, Tim Berne, but also Marc Ribot, Frank London, David Krakauer, Roy Nathanson, Elliott Sharp, or again Shelley Hirsch. It was on the occasion of this festival that John Zorn and Marc Ribot published a manifesto in which they declared themselves to be seeking a “hidden tradition” and attempting to reconstruct the genesis of their music through specifically Jewish sources:
If these shared values, cultural and musical, exist, how did they appear in the music of 1980s New York? How do the “rules” in pieces such as John Zorn’s Cobra (or, for that matter, in the dodecaphonic music of Arnold Schoenberg) reflect a Talmudic desire for codification? (…) Does Anthony Coleman’s longstanding fascination with the music of Eastern Europe partake of a search for continuity with a destroyed past? (…) And those whose work lays claim to punk or hardcore — does their rage against bourgeois complacency correspond to Jewish prophetic anger within a history made of exile and aggression?2
Following the success of the event, John Zorn created within his label Tzadik (founded in 1995) a collection that he titled “Radical Jewish Culture” in order to release the works: while the musicians neither constitute themselves nor define themselves as a movement named as such, they nevertheless rally to the idea that they are inaugurating a new and radical Jewish music, itself claimed as the heir of a secular Jewish culture whose intellectual breeding ground is New York. The notion of radicality proves vast enough to be able to host within itself varied definitions and approaches; it also inscribes them within a tradition of contestation and a will to modernity that are extremely rich in Jewish history. Being thus irreducible to any single dogma, voice, or position, it presents itself as a formidable sounding board for the possibilities opened by a play of attraction and repulsion among the notions it brings to the fore.
A banner: “radical Jewish culture”
According to the American musicologist Tamar Barzel,3 Radical Jewish Culture is a concept tied to several phenomena: secular Jewish culture, the involvement of Jews in political radicalism and social activism in the United States, the interest shown in the Jewish religion and more generally in ethical traditions, the sense of Judaism perceived all at once as a minority in diaspora, a religious group, and a nation.
History occupies an essential place in the musical, literary, and visual imaginary of Radical Jewish Culture. This “desire for history” is made visible from the very thresholds that frame the recordings released in the “Radical Jewish Culture” collection of the Tzadik label. Each album is systematically accompanied by quotations or literary references drawn from the texts of the Jewish tradition as well as from other literary sources, also including personal testimonies that are at times poignant.4 Moreover, the New Radical Jewish Music festivals, held mainly at the Knitting Factory club in New York in the 1990s, were accompanied by booklets presenting declarations, interviews, polemics even. It is by way of this textual and visual material that we worked our way back through the disparate sources of Radical Jewish Culture. We thus sought to inscribe the music within its context, reflecting more broadly on the historical conditions that presided over the advent of this music scene in New York.
In order to illustrate our approach, it seemed apposite to return here to two of the notions that we largely exploited in producing the exhibition presented at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. Radical Jewish Culture appears as a banner, a title whose three words collide. The musicians inscribe themselves, across their compositions, within Radical Jewish Culture while at the same time redefining it in a singular way:
It’s important to remember that Radical Jewish Culture could mean lots of different things… For me it was a matter of community. For Marc, it was political, polemical. For Anthony, it was an aesthetic of identity. For some, first of all music… For many, it was just a paycheck!5
In the first place, the question of reactualization. For certain musicians, it is a matter of drawing on the protean heritage of New York Judaism as it has been woven from the massive arrival of the first immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe down to themselves. This heritage is, in the musicians’ perception, very regularly associated with a delimited space: the Lower East Side. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Lower East Side was one of the principal immigration neighborhoods of Manhattan, the “gateway to America” for populations from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, among them substantial Ashkenazi Jewish populations. In the 1950s, like the neighboring Greenwich Village and SoHo, this neighborhood — which then encompassed the East Village — became the refuge of aesthetic avant-gardes, from the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs) to John Cage and Andy Warhol. A space of intellectual, aesthetic, and political contestation, this radical New York long retained the traces of Yiddish culture, which had known a veritable renaissance there at the beginning of the twentieth century.
However, when the young musical guard of what would become Radical Jewish Culture takes its position in this neighborhood from the late 1970s onward, this very specific cultural atmosphere has already congealed into a certain number of material traces — Yiddish signs, delis that had for some of them by that point become tourist attractions,6 Yiddish theaters with still-visible inscriptions reconverted into concert halls, dilapidated synagogues — and immaterial traces, residual Eastern European accents. Nonetheless, in contrast to an approach steeped in nostalgia, inaugurated by the work undertaken by Georges Perec and Robert Bober around Récits d’Ellis Island (Ellis Island Stories) (1979) and later extended by the filmmaker Chantal Akerman in Histoire(s) d’Amérique (American Stories), made in 1989, the musicians of Radical Jewish Culture seek to map out a space of possible creativity cleared through the thickness of the nostalgic narratives borne about the “lost Jewishness” of this neighborhood.7
In parallel, another possible apprehension of the historical material comes to light. Less sensitive to the narrative languor of traces than to the burning brilliance of motifs that short-circuit the relation to time, certain musicians seize upon the traditions of Judaism that they perceive as heretical. They draw on Jewish mysticism, which they reinterpret in a very personal way. The musicians thus stage their relation to Judaism through plays on the signifiers, customs, and traditions tied to Judaism. The idea of this article is to put these two tendencies into perspective through the exploration of selected works.
I. Traces, reactualization of the memory of places
Problematic criteria of classification
The current musics coming out of the United States have always been celebrated for their diversity. These musics are the property of no particular cultural group. It is not, however, beside the point to recall that the contribution of American Jews to the flowering and recognition of these musics has been considerable. Nor is it beside the point to underscore that among the criteria that have served to classify and analyze these musics — spatial criteria (Downtown, East Coast, West Coast), stylistic (Jazz, No-Wave, Hardcore, Avant-Garde), political, tied to race, to class, or to sex — none bears the trace of these Jews’ intense investment in the development of these musics, this presence thus remaining mysteriously in the shadows.8
The taxonomic observation with which the guitarist Marc Ribot and the saxophonist and composer John Zorn open the presentation text of the first Festival for Radical New Jewish Culture, held in Munich in September 1992, has the value of a manifesto. The criteria that have prevailed for classifying the genres and styles of the so-called alternative musics in the United States have neglected to take into account the importance of American Jews in their singular development since the Second World War.
More precisely, these criteria not only “forgot” that many American Jews had, throughout the twentieth century and in various capacities — from the musician to the club owner by way of the record-label director — invested themselves in the American music industry. They in fact made it impossible for this presence to be truly thought of in a positive way and accepted by mainstream American culture.
Let us return briefly to the “geographic” criteria they evoke: the terms downtown, east coast, west coast set out a series of artistic scenes classified according to the location of the spaces of creation that bore them. This triad interlocks different scales, since if the east coast / west coast opposition points to the continental scale, the term downtown (which must be set against uptown) refers more directly to the urban scale of the city of New York. The promotion of this triad, popular with art critics and the American general public alike for designating the multiple “art worlds” (Howard S. Becker), can be interpreted as a will to skirt the importance of the Jewish presence in these artistic worlds — or even the more subterranean desire to contest the positive value it may have had on the aesthetic evolution of these different scenes, beginning with that of jazz.
The east coast / west coast opposition was abundantly used by jazz criticism from the end of the 1940s to distinguish, within modern jazz then in full ferment, nervous and original New York bebop, borne by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, from a more “cool” Californian version, influenced notably by the trumpet of Miles Davis. The east coast / west coast opposition also incidentally leaned on an opposition between a “black” jazz issuing from the breeding grounds of New York and Philadelphia and a “whitened” jazz prevailing on the West Coast, where in fact many Jewish musicians native to the East Coast settled in the early 1950s, drawn notably by the development of the Hollywood studios and the possibilities of employment offered by the music and film industries.9 This Jewish presence in Californian jazz perhaps explains why one finds, in 1963, a record signed by Terry Gibbs, a precursor in a certain way of the Radical Jewish Culture scene.10
Beyond the variety of influences that nourished west coast jazz and led it to set itself apart fairly quickly from the bebop developing on the East Coast of the United States, the east coast / west coast opposition found itself, in the 1960s, inserted into a political reading of modern jazz associating “black” East Coast jazz with the authenticity of the political, cultural, and social demands borne by African American musicians, as opposed to white jazzmen.11 This idea of a higher authenticity of the political demands stemming from the aesthetic advances borne by African American jazz artists circulated for a long time within jazz criticism, down to our own day.12
Thus, in parallel with the aesthetic itineraries of the greater part of the musicians forming the hard core of Radical Jewish Culture, which led them to evolve, from the late 1970s onward, at the margins of the jazz world, one can detect in them a concern to destabilize the wholly apparent neutrality of the expressions east coast, west coast, and even jazz, with which they may have been confronted in their formative years. They re-inject into them, in a first phase, a spirit of place — through the promotion of the term downtown — then, in a second phase, a more pronounced cultural characterization, through the invention of the banner of Radical Jewish Culture.
The inflection taken by John Zorn and the musicians gravitating around him, pushing him to promote, at the beginning of the 1990s, the idea of a new radical Jewish music nourished within the aesthetics encountered in the clubs of southern Manhattan, lies at the crossroads of personal factors and a collective desire to criticize the surface neutrality of the term downtown.
The guitarist and composer Elliott Sharp, who was an unavoidable musician of this scene from the late 1970s on, points out clearly that many of the punk and no-wave bands active in New York in the early 1980s deliberately avoided advertising that many of the members of their groups were Jewish.13 In the face of this imposed silence there germinated the idea that the American Jewish musicians evolving on these scenes found themselves barred from access to a pride acquired in the exaltation of a living culture, transcending the barriers of genre according to the model experimented with some twenty years earlier by African American musicians around the definition of a “Great Black Music.” This model, disseminated from the mid-1960s in the United States, consisted in affirming that all African American musicians, whatever the specific musical style in which they evolved (jazz, free jazz, blues, rock’n’roll, soul music, etc.), contested with one voice “white power.” It is in a certain way in the prolongation of this affirmation that John Zorn was able to write:
The name Radical Jewish Culture, it’s important to say, was chosen after mature reflection. No one disputes that Franz Kafka, Mark Rothko, Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Lenny Bruce, and Steven Spielberg made a capital contribution to the Jewish culture of the twentieth century. Hence the question: is there a Jewish content in the work of a Serge Gainsbourg in France, a Jacob do Bandolim in Brazil, a Sasha Argov in Israel? Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no — and when I use the expression Great Jewish Music, it is precisely this question that I ask myself […].14
In this context, Radical Jewish Culture also draws its source from the ambivalent model of Great Black Music. However, whereas African American musicians claimed a common allegiance to the Great Black Music current, Jewish musicians became now jazzmen, now rockers, now bluesmen. They thus found themselves torn from the relation to roots and tradition that made the strength of the African American or Latino countercultures in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s.
In fact, Judaism appears here as the destabilizing element of the categories established by aesthetic criticism. On the one hand, it seems difficult to associate this “ethnic” or religious criterion with musical practices most often evolving very far from confessional milieus. On the other hand, Judaism constitutes a category transcending all the others, for it bears values, data not taken into account by the criteria enunciated: the link to an ancestral tradition, the secret influence of cultural schemas inherited from a religious experience, or again the real and imaginary link woven with a history of sufferings and exiles become the collective memory of a community.
When all the categories of analysis have been exhausted, Judaism reduces to a series of traces and clues that the manifesto of Radical Jewish Culture attempted to bring to light, inviting by this means the musicians convened to John Zorn’s carte blanche to deploy their artistic and aesthetic potentialities.
An aesthetic of traces and urban psychoanalysis: the case of Anthony Coleman
Anthony Coleman (born in 1955 in New York) stages in a very theatricalized way the idea of traces erupting brutally into musical discourse. Marked from the early 1980s by the aesthetic of Mauricio Kagel as well as by the New York experiments of Glenn Branca, Anthony Coleman has taken part since the mid-1980s in the musical adventures orchestrated by John Zorn. In 1989, three years before the Munich festival in which he plays an active part, he released his first record, Disco By Night. On it he offers a musical wandering through Balkan Europe, which he had crossed some years earlier and where, in the capacity of an American tourist, he found himself confronted for the first time with material traces of nearly vanished Jewish cultures.15 Mixing rhythms and ornamentation techniques inspired by klezmer with an aesthetic resolutely attached to improvised musics and to jazz, this first record bears witness to an attention to traces resistant to any idea of nostalgia. On the contrary, it seeks to bring forth all the different historical strata carried along by the impressions received in Balkan Europe. This “archaeological” approach is confirmed in the 1990s around a duo formed in 1991 with the saxophonist Roy Nathanson. Anthony Coleman shifts the geographic frame of his musical “peregrinations” from Europe toward New York in order to explore the traces of its Jewish past.
Between 1993 and 1998 he directed an orchestral and experimental project titled Selfhaters (literally “those who have hatred of themselves”). He also formed a very classic jazz trio, but with a far less classic repertoire, Sephardic Tinge (literally “Sephardic tint”), an expression in the form of a knowing nod to one of his masters, Jelly Roll Morton (1885–1941), self-proclaimed inventor of jazz in New Orleans in the first decades of the twentieth century.
These projects, each of which gave rise to several albums released on the Tzadik label in the “Radical Jewish Culture” collection, constantly perform one and the same displacement with respect to the idea of traces. Circulating in different imaginaries of Jewish memory, now Ashkenazi and American in New York (with Roy Nathanson or in the Selfhaters project), now Sephardic and European (with the Sephardic Tinge trio), Anthony Coleman applies himself to thwarting the idea of an overly expected association between klezmer and nostalgia for a vanished Jewish past. Significantly, in one of his most accomplished albums, The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same, he has the musicians of Selfhaters play in unison long series of notes oscillating around a micro-interval. This procedure, inspired in Anthony Coleman by the Italian composer of contemporary music Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988), gives the sensation of a lament that for him figures, far better than klezmer, the Jewish lament. In this mixture of sadness and unease, he also expresses his tender irony toward a trait that has become a cliché of klezmer musicians.16
The aesthetic of the Sephardic Tinge trio likewise performs a troubling displacement of received ideas about Jewish signifiers in music. Interpreting traditional Sephardic romanceros in a jazz format, the trio draws its grammar from jazz, while the repertoire is no more than the occasional vocabulary mobilized for the occasion. In so doing, it indicates clearly that the Jewish stratum in his music is not necessarily the deepest, but simply the pretext; it is in fact jazz and the Latino rhythms by which he evokes his childhood and adolescence spent in contact with the New York Latino communities, and his passion for the great masters of jazz piano — Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Cecil Taylor.
More broadly, Anthony Coleman joins the idea of traces to that of distance from a Jewish past that he can envisage only in a conflictual dimension. Thus the “non-belonging in search of its belonging” underscored by Jabès is reversed, becoming belonging in search of its non-belonging.
II. Symbols, resurgence of the memory of voices
We have tried to emphasize throughout our course the incredible freedom with which the Jewish religion deploys itself in the United States. American Jews envisage religion and its precepts from a proliferation of possibilities: a Judaism open to all forms of practice and of mixtures, consequent upon the way in which Jews symbolically reappropriate the religious (halakhic) imperatives. Identity serves as a frame of maintenance for a religion whose contents and practices are ceaselessly to be reinvented. Many factors come into play here, among them the predominance of the notion of community in the United States as well as of religion both in the private and the public sphere.
In fact, these factors favored the advent of a great variety of currents within Judaism. Beyond the known tendencies such as Orthodoxy, Hasidism, liberal Judaism, or Reform Judaism, Judaism declines itself in every register and admits within itself practices traditionally exogenous to it, whether spiritual practices such as yoga or meditation, or political, social, or sexual activisms. For many American Jews, Judaism is situated outside the play of binary oppositions that traditionally fix it. All sorts of transformations, displacements, and substitutions — most of the time transgressive from the strict point of view of the law (halakha) — leave the spectrum of religiosities wide open within the religion.
This is particularly striking during the celebration of Passover. Jacob Neusner notes:
The Jewish rite most celebrated in North America obliges families and friends to sit down together for dinner. How does an act so profane manage to transform a simple meal into a ceremony so rich in meaning and emotion? Merely reviewing the words that are pronounced does not allow one to discover this, any more than the Kol Nidrei formula (“All vows…”) allows one to explain why the synagogue is transformed, as if by enchantment, into a theater on the evening of Yom Kippur. The choreography, the pieces of dramatic declamation, of music, of song, of procession, the display of symbols eloquent in themselves cannot, by themselves alone, account for the force and the magic of Kol Nidrei or of the Passover seder. The meal consumed according to a ceremonial order transmutes the guests and transports them into the very midst of the path along which a history races at full speed. In the presence of symbols at once visual and verbal, families and friends become — O wonder — Israel coming out of Egypt and freeing itself from servitude.17
If the frame of the ritual Seder meal is maintained, it is possible, in order to attain a successful “transmutation,” to modify its content. In that case, Haggadoth are composed for a particular seder. We gathered for the exhibition several examples, such as the Haggadah of God Is My Copilot, a group present at the beginnings of Radical Jewish Culture. This Haggadah is, in the words of a New York journalist, “a blend of copy art, personal reflections on homosexuality, and ruminations on Judaism in English, bad Hebrew, and Yiddish.”18 The ritual Passover meal is modified by a series of recodifications over the rewritings of the Haggadah that preside over a new order. The Passover ritual becomes a moment of asserting a political and cultural identity.
This idea of resymbolization constitutes a preponderant axis of reading for certain projects that compose Radical Jewish Culture. In one way or another, the projects all partake of a will to put back into circulation the significations attached to it. It is the condition stated by John Zorn for entry into the catalogue:
I have never accepted the idea that it suffices to be Jewish to make Jewish music, nor have I claimed to be the sole arbiter of what is Jewish and what is not. There have been moments when the Jewish element of the music played was not very clear, or else not even present. My role as executive producer is to question the artist. If the answer is simply “I’m Jewish — this is what I do — therefore it’s Jewish music” — the project is rejected and returned to the artist for them to do with it what they like. But if I perceive in their answer a well-articulated thought and if their sincerity and honesty are indubitable, I accept the project, even if I do not entirely adhere to the music.19
It does not suffice to be Jewish to make Jewish music: the music must be, rather, a means of questioning Jewish identity. It is significant in this respect that John Zorn opens his presentation text for the record collection20 with a quotation from Gershom Scholem:
There exists a life of tradition that does not consist simply in conservative preservation, in the permanent prorogation of the spiritual and cultural acquisitions of a community […]. Tradition is also something else. Some of its domains are concealed in the rubble of the centuries and await being discovered and reactualized. Tradition resembles a kind of treasure hunt, and this quest creates a living relation to which we owe a large part of what is best in present-day Jewish consciousness, even when this relation has developed and continues to do so outside the frame of Orthodoxy.21
For John Zorn, Radical Jewish Culture must constitute itself into a “living tradition” laying claim at the same time to the “hidden tradition” brought to light by Gershom Scholem over the course of his research. Indeed, it is these subterranean, non-orthodox — “revolutionary” — currents that allow the orthodox tradition to renew itself constantly over the course of history. By inscribing Radical Jewish Culture under the seal of the “hidden tradition,” Zorn marks his will to engage a renewal of the forms of Jewish music (one may consider in this regard the repertoire he composed and named Masada as an attempt to recreate a Jewish musical language). Such, according to him, must be the essence of the project.
Within Radical Jewish Culture, the relation to mysticism and to messianism is a privileged medium on account of its symbolic charge. One may, moreover, note a terminological identity: the musicians issuing from “underground” currents (literally “subterranean”) use precisely the subterranean tradition of the Jewish religion to express their relation to it.
Fascinated by the mystical force that emanates, in their eyes, from rituals practiced by the Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, certain artists summon, to illustrate their albums, an iconography from which emanates an immediacy in the relation to the divine, capable of bordering on heresy. They find a musical equivalent to these practices in the niggounim, melodies sung ritually by the Hasidim in quest of communion with God. They draw from the classics of Jewish mysticism principles of combining numbers and letters that they then develop in their experimental works. They operate with the same freedom as their elders issuing from the Beat Generation scene, notably Allen Ginsberg, tutelary figure of this movement and author in 1959 of the poem Kaddish, which departs from the traditional prayer for the dead among Jews (the kaddish) to draw the reader into a long whirlwind with meditative accents.
They also invest themselves in local struggles — against the destruction of Lower East Side synagogues — or international ones — against the war in the former Yugoslavia or in the Near East — in the name of an ideal of social justice freely inspired by the messianic concept of repair of the world (tiqqoun olam), to which certain Jewish mystical currents refer, as do the American Jewish modernist movements.
The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun
One of the most successful examples in this vein is the album The Alter Rebbe’s nigun,22 composed and played by Oren Ambarchi on guitar and Robbie Avenaim on drums. The two musicians present themselves as former students of the Talmud and the Tanya, a treatise of Hasidic philosophy written at the end of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (also called in Yiddish the Alter Rebbe), founder of the Chabad branch of Hasidism. On their album, they perform a famous niggoun23 in four movements composed by Shneur Zalman. The four movements there correspond to the four stages of the creation of the world as they are developed in the Lurianic doctrine of creation, called Tzimtzum. The album is an uncompromising musical work and, it must be admitted, fairly inaccessible for unprepared listeners.
The musicians superimpose numerous melodic lines played on guitar and drums, to which they also add electronic sounds. Thus the niggoun, traditionally sung, is subverted by the use of music. However, anyone who knows the niggoun can recognize it immediately on listening to the album. On the other hand, if the voice, which is normally the sole “instrument,” is replaced by the drums, the guitar, and the electronic sounds, it is nonetheless not absent from the interpretation: the musicians call upon a rabbi, Yankel Lieder, who, on one of the tracks, recites a text in a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish that proves to be a psalmodied reflection on the four moments of the creation of the world evoked in the niggoun.
While exceeding the original form of the niggoun, the project also exceeds its traditional intention, namely devekut or mystical union with God. However, the album deliberately creates an atmosphere propitious to trance: the listener quickly loses the sense of passing time on listening to the four tracks that compose the album. The two musicians thus perform a series of displacements within a frame that maintains itself beyond the transformations they make it undergo. They thus approach the niggoun from the angle of reinterpretation and reactualization.
The Sapphire Nature
The percussionist Z’EV also explores the mystical reaches of Judaism in an album titled The Sapphire Nature, released in the Radical Jewish Culture collection in 2002. Z’EV is a specialist in Kabbalah, which he has studied for very many years outside the orthodox or traditional circuits. The title of the album is his own translation of the title of the oldest esoteric book of Judaism: the Sefer Yetsira, generally translated into French under the title Livre de la Formation (Book of Formation). Z’EV spent many years translating the work in a personal and deliberately non-orthodox way. In the introduction that precedes his translation, he writes:
[…] the work comprises, in its accomplished form, four translations: an exoteric version, an esoteric version, a metaphorical version, and an allegorical version — a fifth, “symbolic” version will be rendered by sound.24
Z’EV works according to the logic of the Pardès, a principle that invites the reader to consider four degrees of reading in mystical texts. These four levels of interpretation of the text determine at the same time the intellectual and spiritual journey of the reader. To the four traditional levels of reading, Z’EV adds one, the “sound,” which is in fact the album released in 2002. The music is thus the symbolic transcription of the Sefer Yetzira. The Sapphire Nature is composed according to permutations of sounds that echo the permutations of letters in the book: the musical composition and interpretation are its highest degree of translation.
When he is asked what is the connection between his work of translation and his musical practice, he answers: “It has to do with the ‘central point’ in which all work finds its origin.”25 Beneath the surface, Z’EV admits to attempting to attain the point that would constitute the very source of Judaism, beyond its historical or religious transformations:
It’s like being an ethnomusicologist, he writes. You go and do fieldwork and you find there a music that exists. You try to document that as well as you can, and you bring it back to share it with other people. […] So you have these pieces. It’s a conglomerate, a specific point, possibilities, texts that are called “prophetic” and that exist in parallel realities, as if they were radio stations playing the music of the blood.
There, Z’EV points to the power of revelation inherent in music: it is of the order of manifestation more than of the order of signification. He uses music in order to manifest truths situated outside the normal sphere of listening, to draw the listeners to the source of Judaism such as it is envisaged in the mystical universe. Z’EV adding a symbolic interpretive layer, or Ambarchi and Avenaim subverting the form of the niggoun, are the most convincing examples, within Radical Jewish Culture, of a will that animates many musicians: to inscribe their music in the immemorial more than in history.
Two tendencies thus face each other in Radical Jewish Culture: on one side are musicians who create projects that they inscribe within history, through the investigation of traces. On the other are musicians whose projects apply themselves to underscoring the ineffable elements that compose Jewish culture in its mystical currents. The first conceive their heritage horizontally, through the linear succession of references with which they play; the others conceive it vertically, by superimposing layers of meaning that cut across space and time directly toward the source, a primordial alphabet of Judaism.
These artists tried, from the start, to express themselves culturally, proposing to return, in their works, to the “traces” of a plural tradition: cultural, critical, political. Radical Jewish Culture thus arises from a Judaism perceived as a site of questioning. Across their reflections and compositions, the musicians voice their relation to the history and the art of the Jews. They thus recover the unequaled freedom with which American Jews ceaselessly reinvent their relation to a Judaism proceeding as much from a religion as from a culture in the broad sense. In a few years, these musicians inaugurated a repertoire that bears witness to a unique creative outpouring. Through the sensible experience of music, they continue to reinvent the relation to the tradition from which they issue.
Notes
The acceptation of the term “downtown” in fact far exceeds the music scene that constitutes the frame of this article. This term has defined, since the beginning of the 1960s, the scene of southern Manhattan, as opposed to the “uptown” scene, the geographic limit being situated around Houston Street. This scene emerges in the 1960s at the moment when young experimental artists open informal venues, most often in lofts formerly occupied by factories, in order to play and stage artistic events there more freely than in the venues until then devoted to contemporary creation, most of them located uptown, not far from Lincoln Center. Besides this informal character of the downtown scene’s performances, the latter seems to have crystallized around the idea of provocation, founded on the shock between “high” and “low” forms of culture, the exaggeration of certain principles of composition at work in minimalism or repetitive music, and more broadly the radicality of the aesthetic choices adopted.↩︎
John Zorn and Marc Ribot, “(First) Statement for Program,” manuscript sheet, John Zorn Archives. Translation David Wharry.↩︎
Tamar Barzel, Radical Jewish Culture. Composers/Improvisers in New York City 1990’s Downtown scene, University of Michigan, 2004.↩︎
See notably the personal testimony of the saxophonist Steve Lacy presented inside the booklet accompanying his solo album Sands, TZ 7124, Tzadik, 1998.↩︎
John Zorn, email addressed to the exhibition curators, 2008.↩︎
Cf. on this point Eve Jochnowitz, “‘Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army’: Sites of Jewish Memory and Identity at Lower East Side Restaurants,” in Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, Beth S. Wenger (ed.), Remembering the Lower East Side, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000, p. 212–225.↩︎
Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories. A Jewish Place in America, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000.↩︎
John Zorn and Marc Ribot, “[First] Statement for Program” [1992]. Annotated ms., personal archives of John Zorn. Translation by the author.↩︎
This scene was, moreover, celebrated by the trumpeter Steven Bernstein on his 1999 record: Hollywood Diaspora, the second opus of the Diaspora Suite series released between 1999 and 2004 in the “Radical Jewish Culture” collection of John Zorn’s label, Tzadik.↩︎
Terry Gibbs, Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime, Mercury, 1963. With Alice McLeod, the future Alice Coltrane. In 2004, the trumpeter and arranger Steven Bernstein released, in Tzadik’s “Radical Jewish Culture” collection, an album in homage to this “Hollywood Diaspora”: Hollywood Diaspora, TZ 7191, Tzadik, 2004.↩︎
See in particular Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz/Black Power, Paris, Champ Libre, 1971.↩︎
More generally, many “jazz” musicians attacked the very term jazz, criticized for the incestuous ties this term of confused etymology is said to have woven with American white paternalism toward African American artists. See on this subject the highly polemical position adopted by Charles Mingus, very clearly expressed in the interview granted to Jazz Magazine in 1964 on the occasion of a memorable European tour: Jean Clouzet and Guy Kopelowicz, “Une inconfortable après-midi,” Jazz Magazine, no. 107, June 1964.↩︎
Interview conducted in November 2008 by Mathias Dreyfuss and Gabriel Siancas in preparation for the exhibition Radical Jewish Culture. Scène musicale New York.↩︎
John Zorn, [2006], text accessible at www.tzadik.com [accessed January 2011]. Tr. David Wharry.↩︎
Anthony Coleman, Disco By Night, Avant Records, 1989/1992.↩︎
Anthony Coleman, The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same, TZ 7123, Tzadik, 1998.↩︎
Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism, New York, Basic Books, 1987, French translation Jacqueline Carnaud.↩︎
Roee Rosen, “Sounds of ‘Shtetl Metal’: Radical Jewish Music Hits Downtown Clubs,” Forward, 1994.↩︎
John Zorn, excerpt from the presentation text of Radical Jewish Culture on the website of the Tzadik label www.tzadik.com, New York, 2006.↩︎
Id.↩︎
Gershom Scholem, Israël et la diaspora (Israel and the Diaspora), 1969, lecture given at the annual congress of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, Geneva, May 14, 1969.↩︎
Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, The Alter Rebbe’s nigun, TZ 7131, Tzadik, 1999.↩︎
The niggounim are Hasidic songs sung on various occasions. Each Hasidic court has its own niggounim. Some prefer slow, expressive, and lyrical songs, bringing them to a meditative state. Others favor faster, joyful, syncopated songs, capable of elevating them to a state of spiritual ecstasy of union with God, called devekut.↩︎
Z’EV, The Sapphire Nature [unpublished] p. 6.↩︎
Id., p. 32.↩︎