The Nigun Project: Melodies I Have Seen

By Jeremiah Lockwood May 18, 2010

Soulful: Lockwood and Ziegler reinterpreted ?Melodies I Have Seen.? Image by Courtesy of Jeremiah Lockwood

While doing my research for the third installment of The Nigun Project, I discovered a melody in a Yiddish chapbook that was published in New York City in 1947. The book bears the striking title “Yiddish Nigunim I Have Heard…and Seen.” This magical little book, compiled by Moshe Gutman, constitutes a kind of testimonial and tribute to the author’s village in Europe, newly relegated to the rubble of memory by the devastation of the war. The soulful and rich melodies transcribed by Gutman from the memories of his youth bespeak a rich and complex world. The melodies communicate both the workaday melancholy and commonplace pleasures of life.

For this piece I had the great privilege of working with Itamar Ziegler, an incredibly talented musician whose work will be familiar to readers from his recordings as bass player with Balkan Beat Box. I first encountered Itamar through his work with the Brooklyn-based avant-garde rock band Pink Noise and later fell in love with his accomplished and extremely funky solo albums. His third solo effort is about to be released in Israel and Europe, and will also be available online stateside.

On this track, entitled “Melodies I Have Seen,” Itamar is on bass moog synthesizer and drum programming, and we both weigh in with guitars and vocals.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO