The AFRO-SEMITIC EXPERIENCE to Hold Live Performances 12/18

For The Afro-Semitic Experience, there is dancing before the temple of sound. The kings and queens of the Cotton Club trade eights with the rock stars of cantorial music’s golden age. Booker T and the MGs and Astor Piazolla inspire new visions of High Holy Day chants.

Joined by the last of the old-school cantors, Jack Mendelson, the group lays down Further Definitions of the Days of Awe (Reckless DC Music; September 13, 2011), live explorations of cantorial music, jazz, Latin vibes, Afrobeat and soul. Innovative technique and rock-solid roots get feet tapping and spirits soaring. Just in time for the High Holy Days, the (Jewish) New Year and Yom Kippur, the album presents a positive, cross-cultural reimagination of repentance and catharsis.

Creating new settings for the midnight prayers of Selichot, the service that marks the beginning of the most holy time of the Jewish liturgical year, The Afro-Semitic Experience returns worship to its creative, vigorous roots. It celebrates the intersection of gospel spirit and the passion of hazzanut (an ancient Jewish style of cantorial singing). It finds powerful new points of contact with the divine.

“Prayer and study are a major tenet of all three Abrahamic faiths. That’s great, but to get there, worshippers often got rid of cathartic experience,” reflects group founder, bassist and composer David Chevan. “But we need the dancing at the temple, those ecstatic moments. That’s really where we’re coming from.”

The Afro-Semitic Experience released a new High Holy Days Holiday Album earlier in September and has two concert dates coming up in NYC December 18 and January 7.

12/18/2011, Sun
Temple Israel Center of White Plains
280 Old Mamaroneck Road
White Plains, NY
Show: 7:00 pm
Ph: 914.948.2800

01/07/2012, Sat
Hilton New York, Regent Parlor
1335 Avenue of the Americas at 54th St.
New York, NY
Show: 9:00 pm
Ph: 888.717.2727

Learn more at AfroSemiticExperience.net