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In
the Groove
Rabbi David Zaslow
From
the earliest days of sound recordings people noticed something
poetic about the way the needle stayed inside the groove as
the record went round and round. In the 1930’s jazz musicians
coined the term “being in the groove” to describe
the sensation they experienced as they played – when
the music seemed to have a life of its own, and everyone felt
they were part of something bigger than themselves. In the
1960’s hippies applied the metphor of “feeling groovy”
to the state of feeling like the world was harmonious and
whole.
Last
month I visited my daughter, Rachel, in her Park Slope Brooklyn
apartment. On the first night she whisked me off to a local
club called Barbes so we could get a seat for what she promised
was going to be a great jazz jam. She told me that the guitarist
was a young French virtuoso named Stephane Wrembel who played
Django Reinhardt and gypsy-style music like no one else. “Yeah,
yeah” I thought, “like no one else? In Brooklyn?
And what does my little girl, know about great jazz anyway?”
So I said, “OK honey whatever you want to do. It’s
your Brooklyn now. I’m your guest!”
We
arrived an hour early to secure a good seat and started drinking
Brooklyn Lager (they never had a microbrewed beer when I lived
there; the best you could do then was Schaeffer). May 8, 2005
at 9 PM on 9th. Street on the corner of 6th. Avenue deep,
deep in the old country – the musicians arrive: Stephane,
the young virtuoso; a twenty-year-old-looking female guitarist,
(Jewish I think...her last name sounds like Cohen) from Spain;
another guitarist who was a mid-twenties looking guy from
London, a bass player and washboard master David Langlois.
Washboard? Master? What was that homemade concoction of an
instrument on his lap anyway? They started playing “Sweet
Georgia Brown,” and within seconds (okay two minutes)
the groove was set. They followed with an unbelievable improvisation
on “ Bei Mier Bist Du Shayne.” Sometime during the
first set I died and went straight to jazz heaven. And the
music got better by the minute (so did the beer). For three
hours I experienced the jam of jams. I looked at Stephane
and thought, “who is this rebbe...this reincarnation
of one of the great guitar tzadikkim? No one’s fingers
move that fast without Divine intervention! And what about
this percussionist who transforms finger tapping on metal
and wood into exalted solos?” Gevaldt, they were good!
The
next morning Rachel had to go to the Brooklyn Children’s
Museum where she works. On the way she dropped me off at 770.
770 is not just a number – it’s an entire universe.
770 Eastern Parkway is the very place where Reb Shlomo and
Reb Zalman were ordained in the late 1940’s – the
home of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement. The basement has been
transformed into a huge synagogue where davvenen and study
go on around the clock. Arriving at 11 AM I thought I’d
be one of a few latecomers. But, no this is 770! Around the
clock this shul is filled with men and women coming to make
a deep connection to the Divine. By the time I arrived the
shul was populated by lean and pale-faced yeshiva bochers
whose average age was maybe eighteen. Everyone was dressed
in black and white – what a metaphor! Was I the the only
one in color there? I had just walked into the nineteenth-century
world of Jewish men deep in Eastern Europe. It was Brooklynoutside
but Lubavitch, Russia inside.
I
put on a borrowed tallit and t’fillin and within seconds
I was deep in ecstatic prayer – rocking and swaying back
and forth; my eyes flying through the pages of the siddur
– and then satori struck! Zap! The groove I was in the
evening before was the same as the groove I was in during
davvenen. My body rocking during the Stephane Wrembel jazz
jam was the same rocking I was experiencing during my davvenen.
Ecstatic jazz and ecstatic prayer were part of some secret,
hidden oneness that only I was blessed to behold that morning.
If I called out to everyone, “Hey, holy brothers, there’s
a bar up the street that has this incredible jazz every Sunday
night...” they would have tossed me out of the shul.
And if I had gone to the bar and told the Django fans that
their was this great synagogue down the street where the praying
is as good as jazz, they too would have tossed me out. Right
now, I don’t care who tosses me out of their bars and
shuls. I am just thankful to Hashem to have seen that there
is only one groove – one groove and many paths: the groove
of great jazz on Sunday night at Barbes; the groove of great
davvenen at 770 Eastern Parkway; and the groove of being with
my daughter in Brooklyn on a beautiful week in May.
If
you have RealPlayer you can listen to a 3 hour concert of
the guitarist
Rabbi David wrote about at http://www.wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=14925
Guitaris
Stephane Wrembel's websties is
http://www.stephanewrembel.com/home/index.html
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