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Courtesy of David Lazaroff
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If a century of motion pictures has taught us anything, it’s this: sometimes a single night can change a life. At other times, it can change multiple lives, or, at the very least, the short-term versions of them. This we know. It appears that an early December concert at the Off Broadway nightclub has set in motion a series of events that will have several local musicians collaborating well into the future, with a quick-turnaround, digital album the immediate result of their first evening working together.
So, let’s back up to early December. On Friday, December 2, the Brothers Lazaroff headlined the Hanukkah Hullaballoo at Off Broadway, which followed an appearance by Kinky Friedman at the same club. During the course of a few sets, Klezmer meshed with folk and electronica and spoken word, creating a mix of sounds that might’ve read strangely on paper, but which worked remarkably well in the live setting. As soon as the members started home late that night, texts were exchanged, with performers dreaming of not only putting together another night like this, but dreaming about a Jewish-influenced music or arts festival—and perhaps recording together, as well.
That part of the project not only came alive as an idea, but as a fully realized project. Released as a digital album on bandcamp.com, Eight Nights is credited to Rabbi James Stone Goodman with the Brothers Lazaroff, featuring Will Soll’s Klezmer Conspiracy. Added into that mix of credited performers were two additional sound producers, including: St. Louisan Ben Kaplan, in his alter ego, The Vaad; and Denver’s Paco Proano. Recorded in what was a essentially a one-shot studio session—with a mild amount of post-production by engineer Jacob Detering—the disc has raised over $5,000 for the Harvey Kornblum Jewish Food Pantry.
All of it started with the one gig.
Goodman remembers “that Friday night. I did services at the synagogue, then made it down to Off Broadway. I got on stage with about 10 musicians, and I was singing and reading poetry I had written around the themes of the Hanukkah holiday. There were many different versions of the lessons of the Hanukkah story, and I wrote a different lesson into each night’s poem: the series is called ‘Eight Nights.’ One of the groups with us on stage asked me if I had an edgy piece. ‘I have a ninth poem for an imagined ninth night,’ I said, ‘real edgy.’”
Post-show, Lazaroff quickly contacted his friend Detering at Red Pill Entertainment. They set up a recording date for the next Tuesday and invited in the live musicians from both the five-piece Brothers Lazaroff and the Klezmer Conspiracy, a working trio. Proano and Kaplan sent in additional beats and loops, some of which were literally created on Kaplan’s plane trip to Philadelphia over that week. The remainder of the live musicians met at Deterin’s Red Pill Studio, sat down for a communal meal, then began a recording session that all members believe had a touch of the special sprinkled on top.
“There was something in the room that night that exploded for everybody there,” Kaplan says.
Flexibility in expectations was a big part of that.
As Lazaroff wrote in his notes for the experience, “at first the idea was to play the three Jewish tunes we played that night, and recite three nights over each tune, mixing in some drum loops, samples and sound design as we went. Stopping tape when we lost our way. I was concerned this approach wasn't disciplined enough, to work with nine musicians who hadn't played much together. I got a little nervous. I then started getting hit with ideas to make it a no-fail situation—break it up so that we create enough music for each night. Really, I started thinking about it as a hip-hop/spoken word album and less of a Klezmer-experimental rock thing. In the end, we got something completely unto itself: improv ideas based on the three Jewish tunes, most starting and ending based on sound design and loops, with very clear and defined music that matched up with each night.”
“He doesn’t get to hang out with the indie rock guys that much,” Kaplan says of Goodman. “It took some younger musicians to say ‘Come on over and hang around with us. We see the value in what you’re doing and it could be interesting.’ That really lit him up. I felt the same way. I hadn’t played out in a while. With recording, you’re on the edge of it all, but it isn’t like playing out. And here was an environment that’s really supportive. It lit me on fire. After it was done, I thought, ‘Yes, yes, yes. This has to happen again. Why did it take so long?'”
What didn’t take long was the process of transferring those live cuts into final, release-ready tracks. Adding the “Ninth Night” cut, as well as a short closer entitled “Fire and Light,” the 10 tracks were immediately set upon by David Lazaroff and Detering, who used some older-school recording ideas to push the pieces to completion. Lazaroff feels that the artificial, but real, pressure they put on themselves to get the album out to the world by the first night of Hanukkah inspired a quickness in their steps that brought out the best in everyone.
“It opened up this whole other energy for us,” Lazaroff. “It was weird. We’d wanted to do something with hip-hop, noise music and other stuff. This project ended up doing that. It was interesting how easily some of those elements can be combined. As a band, we’ve always played Klezmer, we’ve played Jewish weddings. To have a full Klezmer ensemble [with us] was really cool...Ben immediately had this idea of a Jewish music festival, and I had an idea of a record. My brother, Jeff, said ‘Are you serious? How do we have time?’ Well, we’ll do it live and we’ll be done with it. We’ll put it out on bandcamp and we’ll see what happens. I wanted to have a little time to sit down, mix and tweak it. But we did that in about five hours, total. To me, if you listen to it objectively, it sounds like it took a lot to work. But it’s made me think about our next record.
“You can really overthink things,” the songwriter adds. “In this case, we played and improvised for an hour, which didn’t go on tape. Then, the next 40 minutes went down. It was really cool, really made me want to be more interested in that kind of recording. Our next record will be all acoustic, with no overdubs. Sure, we want to mix it and make sure our vocals are right, but limitations can make things seem a lot more cohesive. I’m knocked out by how it turned out.”
“I sent all of my parts on the plane," remembers Kaplan. That’s how quickly it came together. they’re going into the studio on Tuesday, it was mixed on Wednesday, and they were done mixing by Thursday night. It’s up and out by Monday. The first night of Hanukkah was Tuesday, and it was done by then. It was insane. I had no idea of the scope when he first emailed me. ‘Send me some beats and loops, we’ll record a couple songs.’ I come back and it’s a 10-song epic. Amazing.
“That’s the interesting part of this,” Kaplan says, analyzing the live vs. technology feel of Eight Nights. “It was very much about getting people in the studio together. I was the only one that wasn’t; I’m in an airplane throwing beats together, exporting them to an ftp site. And they become the spine of a bunch of songs. That’s extraordinary. Then to come back and... wow. I had no idea what I was coming back to. It exceeded my expectations. I just wish I’d had a chance to be in that room.”
To this point in time, then, David Lazaroff’s notion of an album has come about. Now comes Kaplan’s notion of a music fest...
“Everyone came into this through relationships with the Brothers,” he says. “I thought that this was a real community event. They organized the event, and brought all these disparate sounds and artists together. I told them, ‘Dude, we ought to do this more often.’ How did this not exist? It should exist going forward. There were a number of times when we were hanging around at Off Broadway when I thought we’d just walked into Willamsburg. There was a hip energy that’s not often associated with the Jewish community here in St. Louis. And this was a hip Jewish show.
“It’s often a family town when it comes to Jewish life here,” he adds. “There’s a little bit of a young professional thing happening. And there’s a lot happening around the synagogues. This was well outside of that. A bunch of guys that had affiliations, but aren’t wearing that on their sleeves. The Rabbi’s also a maverick that way. There’s an interesting energy that was there, a Jewish energy in South St. Louis, which itself isn’t a hotbed for that. There was a sense of hip Judaism. And it’d been the first time I played out in eight years, which was a really big deal. I hadn’t played out that long, and they gave me an opportunity to work through material that I’d been playing around with for years. To me, that was all really exciting.”
The next step, then, might be another single show. Or it might be a couple of nights, split by a variety of performers. Whatever it is, it’ll have a basis in the young Jewish musician community in town, but according to all, it’ll try to be informed by, but not limited by, the Judaism this core group shares.
For now, the short term, there’s still the matter of getting the record into people’s ears, with more money to be raised for the charity component.
“Definitely, I think we found it that it kind of struck a chord with people,” Kaplan says. “Maybe that came from the connections to the Rabbi. But there’s something existential about the music produced. It’s very much coming from the Jewish soul, and I connect with that, anyway. It may be that, to me, it feels like home. But home fed through a distortion pedal. There’s also all of us having conversations at the show, this feeling that this is hipper than what usually happens in the St. Louis Jewish community. Hopefully, this is the impetus for people to rally around and create, to own their Jewishness in a way that’s artistically interesting.”
Concludes Goodman, “The whole thing happened in the space of two, three weeks. We all felt we had fallen into something wonderful and out of it we created a piece of art we could be proud of. It felt like a phenomenon. I was along for the ride and exulting in every moment.”
