Radical Jewish holiday concert
Don’t expect to hear traditional tunes about lighting candles or spinning dreidels at SF Live Arts’ “A Chanukah Concert Like No Other” scheduled for Dec. 9 in St. Cyprian’s Church at 2097 Turk St. in San Francisco.
The concert features the local duo Book of J — which the New Yorker praised for its “expansive musical landscape that encompasses gothic Yiddish songs, Piedmont blues, queer politics and Leonard Cohen covers” — and Israeli composer/singer Victoria Hanna, known for mixing ancient texts and Middle Eastern music with hip-hop and other ingredients.
“We’re like the Weavers for these apocalyptic times,” says Book of J vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg, referring to the great American folk quartet of the 1950s and ’60s. “Freak-folk meets radical Jewish culture.”
Eisenberg, a live wire who founded the feminist avantrock band Charming Hostesses, formed the duo a few years back with Jeremiah Lockwood, a fine practitioner of the intricate Piedmont blues fingerpicking guitar style and a vocalist whose singing is rooted in Jewish cantorial tradition.
Lockwood played in the New York City subways for several years as the protege of the late bluesman called Carolina Slim, and had sung in the choir of his grandfather, famed cantor Jacob Konigsberg.
He met Eisenberg at a popup Jewish record store in the Mission District, where he played some old songs whose melodies she knew, but by different titles. She learned them as labor songs growing up in Brooklyn, in a family of community organizers. The version of Woody Guthrie’s Bible-referencing “You Gotta Walk That Lonesome Highway” she knew was “You Gotta Go Down and Join the Union.”
“We’re both interested in American psalmody, and how religious songs — in both black and white traditions — draw heavily from the Hebrew Bible,” Eisenberg says.
They sing “Freedom Plow,” a version of the old hymn “Keep Your Hand on the Plow,” which includes the lyrics, “We will not shirk or fall in line/ And we will see justice in our own time.”
“It’s got power, and talks about what’s happening in America today,” Eisenberg says.
She and Lockwood like mixing those American songs with Yiddish tunes and mystical Hebrew love songs called piyutim, seeing “how these different kinds of songs talk to each other.”
They plan to perform “Khavela,” an early 20th century Yiddish song about a woman on a picket line shot down by police.
“It’s a beautiful waltz,” says Eisensberg, who has included a Hanukkah song, though not a happy one: “Siete Hizhos Tiene Khana (Khana Had Seven Sons).” Sung in the Judeo-Spanish language Ladino, it tells the story from the Second Book of Maccabees about the woman who watched the tyrant Antiochus murder her seven sons for refusing to renounce their faith, then killed herself.
They also do “The Partisan,” the stirring French Resistance song popularized in English by Cohen. It was on the duo’s Cohen program last spring at SFJazz Center, where they celebrate a new album in February.
“It became an anthem for us amidst the tumult of the 2016 election,” Eisenberg says.
For more information, go to http://sflivearts.org
Chambers onstage
Jeff Chambers, the invaluable Bay Area jazz bassist who has been fighting cancer, is back playing, performing duets with pianist Larry Vuckovich on Sunday, Dec. 3, at Piedmont Piano Co. El Vucko is celebrating Chambers’ return to their music making, and his own 81st birthday. The hummus and red wine are on him.
Chambers’ friends and fans can help with his medical expenses at www.gofundme. com/jeff-chambers-medicalfunda
For more information about the concert, go to www.pied montpiano.com
Glass for 2
To toast composer Philip Glass’ 80th birthday, Other Minds presents an all-Glass “Music for 2 Pianos” concert at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley on Dec. 6 featuring Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa.
Raising funds for Other Minds, the duo plans to play the suite from Glass’ dance opera “Les Enfants Terribles”; the suite from the opera-withfilm “La Belle et la Bête,” joined by a wind octet; and “Four Movements for Two Pianos,” written for the duo by Glass and described by Davies as a “barn burner.”
For more information, go to www.otherminds.org
Walters, alone
Ashley Walters, the bracing Los Angeles cellist who co-founded the adventurous Formalist (string) Quartet and is a member of jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, plays solo at San Francisco State’s Knuth Hall on Dec. 12. Walters plans to perform pieces from her new “Sweet Anxiety” recording, including Nicholas Deyoe’s “another anxiety” and Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XIV.”
For more information, go to https://webapps.sfsu.edu/ public/webcalendar