Jewish Prayer Music Gets A Modern, Upbeat `Legacy`

October 17, 1986|By RICHARD S. GINELL, Los Angeles Daily News

The orchestral music has a lively, jumping beat, with some passages that sound as if they came right out of a lush film score, while Nathan Lam`s rich baritone weaves in and out.

One is sometimes reminded of the music of Leonard Bernstein, who has made odd-meter rhythms from the Middle East his own personal signature. On one track, Biti, the music even switches to a jaunty, 1920s quasi-Dixieland beat.

Jewish prayer music never sounded like this.

The music most commonly associated with weekly Sabbath services and such holidays as Rosh Hashana has a vaguely Middle Eastern melody that sounds as if it came from out of the rocks. It is typically sung by a solo, solemn cantor.

That`s why a soon-to-be-released Jewish liturgical album called Legacy sounds so startling. Legacy is the most visible product of Stephen S. Wise Temple`s progressive Jewish music program in Bel-Air, Calif. Lam, the synagogue`s cantor, is helping to make Los Angeles a world center of Jewish music.

Most of the music was written by film-television composer Michael Isaacson, who, though not officially on the temple`s staff, contributes a piece of music during each High Holiday season. Other pieces have been contributed by noted Hollywood sound track composers Charles Fox, David Shire and Aminadav Aloni.

All were commissioned by the temple and are performed regularly at temple services -- albeit in scaled-down arrangements. In addition, the temple also distributes orchestral versions of these pieces without the vocals to temples around the country, so that other cantors and congregations can participate.

According to Isaacson, contemporary Jewish music is mostly a post-World War II phenomenon, born out of the Holocaust as a way of expressing either the great optimism of survival or the horrors Jews had witnessed. Jewish prayer music has been in place for decades. So it`s no wonder there is a limited number of composers writing music for Jewish services.

``I could name only two or three people,`` said Isaacson, citing his teacher Robert Starer, Samuel Adler and Bernstein (``He was the Great White Hope of Jewish music``) among the handful of composers who write Jewish music. ``It is not the kind of music one writes to make money. You have to be quixotic. It`s a small market.

``This syndrome of being American has taken the best composers away from expressing their Jewishness. Maybe they thought it was too parochial. Christian music spans everything from classical pieces to punk rock. When you talk about Jewish music, you`re talking about one publisher (Transcontinental Music) and a handful of albums.``

Just as Legacy counters the image of traditional prayer music, Lam`s office in the Wise Temple complex shatters forever the stereotype of the solemn, isolated cantor. Near his piano is a recording booth and an array of recording equipment with which he makes demos for his students. In addition to his cantorial duties, Lam is also one of the busiest vocal coaches in Hollywood.

That modern attitude carries over to the way he conducts his duties at the temple. Lam, 39, began commissioning new music the day he became cantor of the Wise Temple, on July 1, 1976. Prior to that, he had been doing some commissioning while working in a Long Island, N.Y., synagogue.

Lam takes pride in the results he gets in his office studio and in Evergreen Studios, which Charles Fox lent out for the Legacy sessions.

``Every kid can go out and buy a synthesizer, buy an 8-track or 4-track thing and come up with a pretty good product,`` he said. ``So unless we come up and make this stuff sound as good as anything that comes out, people aren`t going to listen to it.

``Nothing that I want to be associated with is amateur. Therefore, that`s why whether it`s a pickup orchestra in town or the Israel Philharmonic, I believe that everything you do has to be top quality. If you don`t like the music, it`s not because it wasn`t produced well.``

Isaacson, 40, born in Brooklyn, was brought up as an Orthodox Jew but left formal studies in high school. He didn`t abandon his religious involvement, however. During his musical training with Starer, he became aware of the possibilities inherent in Jewish music.

``I realized that Jewish music was composed by somebody, because when you hear it in temple, you think it came from God,`` he said. ``Then when I realized that, I realized that the music I thought was eternal was really only 100 years old.

``That changed my whole perception of what Jewish music could be. I began composing in a contemporary style, and I began composing for other temples. I have been trying to stretch the sound of what Jewish music can be.``

In his quest to do so, Isaacson formed a recording orchestra in Tel Aviv, the National Symphony of Israel -- made up of members of the world-famous Israel Philharmonic. It is this group that plays on Legacy.

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