the arts Dreams of pop stardom dashed, L.A. cantor creates Jewish spiritual music rebecca spence
photo/courtesy of ikar music lab
Hillel Tigay
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In 1999, Hillel Tigay was one-half of the now-defunct Jewish rap group M.O.T. (Members of the Tribe). On songs such as “Kosher Nostra” and “Oh God, Get a Job,” Tigay’s “Hebe-hop” alter-ego, Dr. Dreidel, riffed on such timeworn subjects as Jewish gangsters and gelt-minded mothers. Nearly 15 years later, Tigay, 43, is still taking his musical inspiration from the Jewish experience. But with his latest project, “Judeo,” the rap-inspired sendups of Meyer Lansky and Yiddishe
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mamas have given way to heartfelt Hallelujah choruses and the ancient sounds of Middle Eastern instruments. “There is nobody more surprised by this entire project than me,” said Tigay, sitting barefoot in his wood-paneled living room in West Los Angeles. “If someone had told me 10 years ago that I’d be doing this, I would have laughed like Sarah in the Bible story.” Now a cantor at the progressive Los Angeles congregation Ikar, Tigay’s latest musical undertaking is a CD of Jewish spiritual music, sung in Hebrew and Aramaic, that he hopes will cross over
into the spiritual and world music markets. Like M.O.T., which Tigay describes as a kind of “performance art,” this latest project is concept-heavy. Set for a Dec. 11 release, “Judeo” is based on Tigay’s interpretation of what music might have sounded like 2,000 years ago at the Temple in Jerusalem. While the Bible describes the instruments played — cymbals, drums, lyres and reed flutes, among them — as well as the Levites who sang Psalms during sacrifices, there is, of course, no way to authentically reproduce what the music would have sounded like in the Second Temple period. After the temple’s destruction, the rabbis forbade Jews from playing instruments during prayer services as a sign of mourning and the music was lost. “I had two choices,” Tigay said of the album. “Either go for historical veracity or go for real beauty and resonance, and for me it was a no-brainer.” The result is evident on Judeo’s 10 songs, which owe as much to New Wave and classical music as they do to the haunting sounds of the santur, a steelstringed harp used on the album, or the ney, a reed flute played since antiquity. In a sense, “Judeo” represents an amalgam of Tigay’s diverse influences, including the 1980s pop group Tears For Fears, Peter Gabriel and the Bach fugues he has loved since he was a student of musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. During his last semester at Penn, Tigay left Philadelphia for L.A., where he hoped to land a record deal. He managed to secure one at A&M, but it ultimately fell through. His next break, with M.O.T., faltered when the album was released with no marketing budget the same week as new albums from Seal and Madonna. His dream of pop stardom effectively crushed, Tigay took a job as the cantor at Ikar, where a young rabbi named Sharon Brous was building a synagogue community more dynamic than any he had known growing up in Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs. As the son of a renowned Bible scholar and Jewish educator, Tigay was heavily steeped in Judaism and had spent parts of his childhood in Israel. But despite his Conservative Jewish upbringing, and the fact that he was getting paid to sing at High Holy Days services while still in high school, Tigay never imagined he’d follow in the family tradition. Seven years later, Tigay does not regret his decision to “go into my parents’ business,” as he puts it. If anything, Ikar has given him a solid platform for creative expression and experimentation. “Judeo” marks the first official project of the Ikar Music Lab, which Tigay and Brous hope will one day become a physical studio space when Ikar acquires its