Blog Archives

working my way to another album, or maybe two

5/26/2015

Along with the songs I've been writing for a third album of folk settings of liturgical texts and themes, I've also written a small number of songs for young children. Somewhere in the middle, I've been writing a song a year for the great folks at Machane Jehudah, an experiential learning program at Congregation B'nai Jenudah in Overland Park, KS that I've been thrilled to be a part of since 2013. I am about to head there for my third Incredible June, and have already written a new song for the camp. (I won't unveil it online until I've shared it with the staff and campers, but please be patient!)

With all this songwriting, I have enough songs to begin to think of how I will record the next album, and I have a working title (which I also won't unveil for a little while, but hang in there, okay?).

Do I want to record it the way I recorded Ten Miles -- in a local studio with stripped-down arrangements? I am leaning towards this because I like the way it sounds and because I simply cannot afford to make a big-budget, highly orchestrated and slickly produced digital recording. The other option is to record everything myself at home, load it onto a disc, have someone do a poor man's master and self-distribute electronically only. That would still cost me some money but not the thousands that a studio recording would cost. I really want to get my music out there but for a lot of reasons cannot set up a crowdfunding effort just now.

Then, too, there's the prospect of making a separate recording of just my kids' songs. This would definitely be done at home and on the cheap, just me and my guitar. That's all I know at this point.

Here are a couple of demo tracks of songs I've written for Machane Jehudah camp, in 2013 and 2014 respectively. (I recorded Good Morning with some campers during our music chug, so recording quality is not the best.) If you like them and want lead sheets please contact me.

So excited about my upcoming visit to B'nai Jehudah, immediately followed by my first Women Cantors' Network conference in Austin. Wherever your travels take you next month, have an Incredible June!

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going to a gunfight with a bottle opener

5/21/2015

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I visited my alma mater tonight at a friend's invitation. There was a "Jewish Cultural Festival" being hosted by a Jewish student organization. It promised free food, art, music and more.

It was nice to ride up to Portland State's hip, urban campus, with its stately elms along the South Park Blocks. Students lolled on the grass and rode skateboards down the paved ramp past Lincoln Hall (the Music building, which had been my second home back in the day); and the air was cooling down a little from the warmth of the afternoon.

On the way in, I passed a bulletin board where two fliers caught my eye: one for the cultural festival I was about to attend, and another for a Jewish speaker lecturing on Palestinian statehood and Israeli's record of human rights abuses against Palestinians. The lecture promised to be intellectually deep and provocative. It had happened earlier in the week.

The cultural festival was sponsored in part by the pro-Israel organization Stand With Us. It consisted of a long table where tinfoil pans filled with hummus, pita, falafel and various salads were being served; and four round tables which offered, respectively, Israeli snack foods (I got there too late and missed out on the Bamba); bright blue iPhone covers, plastic bracelets, bottle openers on keychains and sunglassess and even beach balls festooned with the "Stand With Us" logo and "I Heart Israel". Also strewn on the tables were informational pamphlets outlining Stand With Us talking points -- about LGBT equality; Israeli technological innovation; Israel as a safe haven for immigrants from around the world; and simple statements that served to justify Israel's existence ("There has been a Jewish presence in this land for 3,000 years," read one talking point). Not a lot of depth here at all.
Two of the tables offered art -- one in the form of some rather childish arts-and-crafts project with press-on foam letters, and another where you could have your hand painted with henna. I supposed this was the "cultural" aspect (Is henna an Israeli thing?). The whole event looked and felt overly simplistic and almost infantalized. Is this what attracts college students today? Where was the emotional and intellectual depth, the questions and answers, students arguing points enroute to a conclusion or hard-won ambiguity? I felt confused, and even a little disappointed.

I met my friend, chatted amiably for a few minutes, grabbed a snack, talked briefly with one of the student organizers (nice young woman, excited about an upcoming Birthright trip and summer internship), and left. There wasn't much of a festival with four tables and a pile of mylar-wrapped snacks and about a dozen college kids in attendance. It was okay; I'd had a nice talk with my friend and a lovely ride across town and I was ready to head home.

On the way out, I passed the bulletin board again, and saw the two fliers juxtaposed next to each other. These were two events scheduled for the same week, doing their damnedest to avoid any sense of connection and yet ending up inextricably connected. It made me think.

Clearly, I was not of the target demographic for this cultural event. I applaud the students for putting it on and for making themselves available to talk openly about Israeli culture. But this event got a lot of support from institutions off campus, and they are the ones I worry about. With all the institutional handwringing about the future of Judaism, the lack of engagement by Jewish youth, and the rise of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses, I think that Jewish institutions need to come up with something better than Chinese-made keychains and simple, sound-bite bullet points if they want Jewish college students to be truly equipped for the intellectual rigor the pro-Palestinian contingent is bringing to the debate. Because if they don't, it will be like sending those Jewish students into a gunfight with, well, a bottle opener.

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make me better, o god

5/17/2015

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Home from Phoenix.

My teaching/artist residency for the academic year concluded with this visit and it was sweet. I've enjoyed getting to know everyone at Temple Chai and wish them much success and joy as they go forward with their new Cantor beginning in July. As I stood in the beautiful sanctuary on Friday night and prayed the silent Amidah, I thought about the first time I'd stood there back in August, and considered how much I'd learned over the course of the last seven months. While I could not ask for anything in my prayers -- it was Shabbat -- I could be mindful of how this opportunity had made me grow, had made me better as a musician and hopefully, as a human being. So I offered thanks for the opportunity, and tried to leave it at that.

But did I?

It is hard, very hard, to really focus your intention during prayer. The prayers themselves are supposed to help make it easier -- we are, after all, a people of words -- but in the end you still have to do the work of really taking the words into your heart and owning them. Even as I offered thanks for the opportunities this year has brought me, I knew that in my heart I hoped for more chances to travel, and make music, and grow.

I am home now for a couple of weeks. It was so lovely to wake up in my own bed this morning, to make up to my sweetie and our cats and our simple life here. I am tired this morning, even after breakfast and coffee. Honestly, air travel does tire me a bit; I don't think our bodies were really meant to hurtle through the air at 500 miles an hour, and I'm certain mine can't do it without experiencing some aftereffects. Still, I really enjoy bringing my music to new communities in far-flung places, the sense of adventure and the warm welcome I've received in every place so far. It's worth a little travel-lag.
And when I go back to a place I've visited before it's even sweeter because of the connections I've made there.

I am greatly looking forward to my third Incredible June and another session of Machane Jehudah camp. But today, there's laundry to do and bills to catch up on and a bicycle that has missed me and could use a spin around the neighborhood. So for today I'll enjoy the simple things about my simple life. May your week be equally sweet!

Steel Bridge bike/ped path, Portland, OR

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mother's day

5/10/2015

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Happy Mother's Day to all who have a reason to celebrate.
I miss my mom, and the things I used to do for her to celebrate this day -- the gifts and cards and brunches and giggles over Bugs Bunny and the ball games and everything else that we shared. How I wish she could see my life now -- my family and friends and the things I'm doing out in the world. I'd like to think she'd be happy for me.
My mom was a deep, complicated, beautiful, sad, smart, funny lady who did her best to raise two independent, smart daughters. Was she perfect? Far from it. But in the end, her daughters grew up and, I'd like to think, recognized and embraced those pieces of her inside them, and incorporated them into the smart, creative women they grew to become. Our parents come to inhabit us in all sorts of ways, and while some of them make us wince in recognition, others of them are beautiful. Thank you, Gloria, for being my Mom. I love you more than the whole wide world's fair.

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first there was crowdfunding. now there's crowdbooking.

5/7/2015

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You read that right. Perhaps it's a new word and I just invented it. Or it was already out there, a thing, as the kids like to say, and it somehow worked its way into my consciousness. Either way, I want to do some crowdbooking. This is where you -- friends of my music -- come in.

I am working on booking a little mini-tour of the Tri-State Region (NY, NJ, Philly) for the first or second weekend in December. If I get enough stops lined up I could spend a whole week there, culminating in a Shabbaton the weekend of December 11-13, 2015.

I am in talks with folks at a synagogue in the Philly area, and will be talking tomorrow with someone in New Jersey. Nothing is guaranteed at this point but the fact that we're talking is good news. However, I am pretty confident these are not the only two synagogues in the region.

And that's where you come in.

If you live in the Tri-State Region, or you know someone who does and who has connections to a progressive synagogue there -- nothing against modern Orthodox but they are far less likely to bring in a female singer-songwriter -- and you like my music, I am inviting you to drop my name to the right people. This could be your rabbi or cantor, your education director or a friend on the board, or a group of families. Play my music for them -- direct them to my web site and invite them to click on everything. And let them know that I am booking NOW for December 2015. If a synagogue wants to book me earlier in the fall, that's great -- but I am hoping to be in Philadelphia the second weekend of December for a Jewish music festival and would love to combine this trip with a visit or two to synagogues in the area. I can lead services, teach classes on music, text study and more, and run a community-wide song session. If you can connect me with someone-in-charge I will be happy to share with them a full outline of what I can bring to a community.

I would love to bring my music to your community! I would love to brainstorm with you and have it result in a new composition! I would love to sing for and with you, and daven with you, and wade into what being Jewish is like in another part of the world. (Remember, I'm from Oregon. Things look different here. That used to be the state travel board's motto, until someone thought better of it.) And you can help make it happen. For now, and for lack of a better name for it, I'm calling it crowdbooking. If you have an idea for where I might appear, let me know, and then tell your contacts there. Help us connect. This trip happens one conversation at a time, one email at a time, one connection at a time. You have the power to become part of that chain. Consider this your engraved invitation.

BONUS: Anyone who can open the door that leads to a booking (save those emails!) will get a free download of a new song from what will eventually become my third album of original Jewish music.

Thank you!
Buckets of Shalom --Beth

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radiant

5/4/2015

January 1, 1983: I am standing outside the hospital nursery, looking at rows of plexiglass cribs where a dozen babies are sleeping. My sister has given birth to her first child, a girl. I scan the rows of babies looking for a tag with the last name. A nurse notices me, my nose pressed to the glass, and smiles. I grab a notepad and scribble madly, then hold my sister's last name up for the nurse. She smiles, nods, and lifts a brand-new baby wrapped in a blanket for me to see. The baby is about ninety minutes old; she is long, and scrawny and very, very pink. And she's gorgeous. And I start to cry. This is the continuation of our family, this tiny thing, and I am overwhelmed with how amazing and beautiful that reality is. The nurse puts my niece back in her crib, peeks out the doorway to the side, and says, "I hope those are happy tears." And they are. Welcome to the world, Simi Rochelle.

Fast-forward through first steps, sibling rivalry, the pre-teen drama of rotating best friends and first crushes and on to the stress of high school. Through it all, this girl grows up and through the moments of brattiness, the tears of hormones and into a shockingly beautiful -- and, not-so-surprisingly, a smart, caring and compassionate -- young woman. She dates, and breaks up and dates some more. She tries college, and finds far more success in the working world. She meets The One. The Keeper. We all fall in love with him, and with the sight of her falling in love and growing in love with this deep, funny and thoughtful man.

When he presents her with an engagement ring on her birthday we are thrilled, but hardly surprised.

May 3, 2015: I am at her wedding shower with my partner. It's a tea party, with antique cups and saucers, cucumber sandwiches, breezy summer clothes and most of us wearing hats and gloves. My sister's living room is crammed with family and friends and the buzz of animated conversation. I recognize a few of my niece's friends from her school days, all equally grown up and living their fascinating lives.
At one point during the gathering, Simi is sitting on the floor next to a couple of her friends.
As she turns her eyes upward to talk with a friend sitting in a chair, I catch her face. Her eyes are radiant, full of sparkles and excitement and the joy of being young and in love, not only with someone but with life. And in witnessing that small, sweet moment of grace, my breath is taken away and I feel so blessed.