A couple of weeks ago I had a great albeit brief visit to one of my favorite cities in the USA. Warren Byrd and I had been invited back to the Jewish Temple in Alexandria for a concert. I looked for somewhere else for us to play to go along with that performance and we were very fortunate that Cantor Rebecca Garfein was able to bring us to Temple Sinai of New Orleans for a Friday night service.
We even had a chance to meet up with my long time friend, Jackie Harris for an extraordinary lunch at Dooky Chase
After lunch we hurried across town to rehearse and get ready for our service at Temple Sinai of New Orleans.
The service was a blast. Rebecca has such a beautiful voice and her congregation enthusiastically sings with her. Moreover, Warren and I got to play with three great New Orleans based musicians all of whom have the kinds of musical skills that we love so much. It was so fulfilling to be playing with Glenn Hartman, founder of the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars, Ben Schenck, leader and founder of Panorama Jazz Band on clarinet and Walter Harris, drummer for Preservation Hall Band. We taught them Unity in the Community during the rehearsal, along with our arrangement for We Shall Overcome. They brought it during the service.
We had so much fun sharing our music with the congregation and with this wonderful group of musicians. So much of what we do is proscribed by the way that services are to unfold. But with good musicians, there's a lot that can be added in spontaneously in the moment to add to whatever is going on. We did a lot of that. Ben is quite adept at adding little phrases that just bring the moment to another level.
Warren and I played a sermon in song. We played a couple of pieces from the Afro-Semitic Experience repertoire. It was a tease as we wanted to play even more, but it's a service and you need to keep things tight and moving along or you'll never get home so . . . (sorry no pics from our sermon)
Here we are after the service:
We had a lot of fun meeting members of the congregation during our post service dinner where they served red beans and rice and chicken jambalaya! A New Orleans dinner at a New Orleans synagogue!
There's lots more to the trip. But this is all I have in me tonight. Hopefully I'll add more to this story in the future.