The Wizard of Schnoz

[magid]

I went to Techiya's spring concert, which had Honorable Menschen as their guest. Yay, Jewish a cappella!

Honorable Menschen started, and I was not organized enough to jot down their play list. They sang "By the Waters of Babylon," and a Luganda/Hebrew song from Uganda. And they sang a David Broza song, Mitachat Lashamayim (Note: linked YouTube videos of the songs are non-a cappella versions throughout.). There were a couple of others, but my memory has failed :-(.

Techiya made it easy on me by listing everything in the program:

1. Melech Shelach (Izhar Ashdot)
   
2. Cuando El Rey Nimrod (traditional Ladino song)
   
3. Mah Ashiv (from Psalms)
   
4. Elokai N'tzor (from Jewish liturgy)
   
5. Hafinali (Subliminal)
   
6. Halikha LeKesariya [Eli, Eli] (Hannah Senesh, David Zahavi)
   
7. a filk on a Green Day song, "Wake Me Up When Passover Ends"
   
8. New Soul (Yael Naim)
   
9. Rumania, Rumania (Aaron Lebedeff)

Interspersed between the songs were little skits about Lag B'Omer Homer looking for help counting to Shavuot, and on his quest for the Wizard of Schnoz's help ("Follow the Infinite Corridor"), gets some companions: Tu B'Shvat Scott, the Shmini Atzeret Ferret, and Tzom Gedalia Talia. Very silly stuff. (And for the record, the schnoz was noticeable, but the help was lacking, and the friends found that they could help each other instead.)

---

Totally unrelated: two other videos I came across while finding those linked above that I really liked: Molly Picon in a klezmer band, 1936, and Mayumana. There's also a lot of Gidi Gov stuff available, which made me all nostalgic; I listened to Not a Day Left (on cassette!) almost every erev Shabbat the second year I was in Israel.

Comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

For your records, the Honorable Menschen set list was as follows:

1. Lech Lamidbar (http://www.hebrewsongs.com/song-lechlamidbar.htm) (Chaim Hefer/Sasha Argov)
2. Ahavat Olam (from the liturgy)
3. Mitachat Lashamayim (http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=mitachatlashamaim) (David Broza/Meir Ariel)
4. Abayudaya Hinei Ma Tov
5. By the Rivers of Babylon

Glad you came and had a good time! (And it reminded me that I haven't seen you in ages and should do something to fix that. :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Do you happen to know anything about the history of By the Rivers of Babylon?

And yes, we should find a time :-)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I happen to have handy the CD liner notes from By the River (http://www.honorablemenschen.org/discography.html), so here. :-)

1 By the Rivers of Babylon
MUSIC Brent Dow/Trevor McNaughton (The Melodians)
LYRICS Adapted from Psalms 137 and 19
ARRANGEMENT Karen Livescu/Adam Roberts
SOLOISTS Joseph Mazor, Betsey Gardstein, Adam Roberts, Alison Lobron, Tamar Shusteff, Karen Livescu, Deborah Sager
RECORDING D.A. Wallach/Quad Sound
MIXING Mike Quinn/The Moontower
Variations of the lyrics of this song have been used in many different contexts, including the music of the Rastafarians, who saw their situation as similar to that of the Jews in Babylon. In arranging this tune, we listened to a wide variety of versions and were inspired largely by Boney M, a disco-inflected group from the ’70s and ’80s, and Juba, a six-part Canadian a cappella group.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!