"I'm Not Going to Be Anybody's Disciple": Sacred Nonconformity, Sahara Blues, and the Coming Cantorial Revolution with Jeremiah Lockwood

Bad Rabbi Media

Jeremiah Lockwood is not only the hardest working man in Jewish music, he is one of its truly great living visionaries and practitioners. In this great conversation he describes his journey growing up in a "cantorial family" with a grandfather who was a famous, record-selling star at the end of the "Golden Age" of Jewish cantorial music; to being a teenager obsessed with Southern Blues apprenticed to the great bluesman Carolina Slim; to starting his own band, The Sway Machinery, "singing hazzanus in a hard aggressive rock band that's sort of a hedonistic party band, and also a ritual experience, and also drawing very explicitly and heavily on West African music..." (because of course it does!) He talks about how his initial inspiration for the band came from a nomadic Saharan tribe whose members were transcribing their traditional music into a rock band format. Speaking of indigenous musical traditions (including Ashkenazi hazzanus) as forms of "esoteric knowledge," one of his overarching projects is to uncloister it so that "it should be readily available for people to get joy from it, in terms that are legible."

Listen to the interview, then go listen to his music!