The paucity of contemporary Hanukkah recordings — aside from the stray song (a few good ones from the Bare Naked Ladies, for instance, and Adam Sandler’s overplayed comic tunes) — has left an opening for musicians with wit, creativity and a real connection with the holiday.
And Erran Baron Cohen, brother of Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, has stepped into the breech with what sounds to me like a holiday classic.
Cohen’s new disc — Songs in the Key of Hanukkah — offers an interesting mix of classics and new tunes rewritten and reconfigured for the new millennium. The album is infused with Cohen’s vast wealth of influences — from trippy beats and samples to spot-on English and Yiddish rapping from Y-Love (a black Jew from New York) and some singer-songwriting stuff.
The new musical clothing suits the material — the stale dreidel song (“Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel/I made it out of clay”) is transformed into a whirling, delirious celebration of childhood and identity. Other songs celebrate Hanukkah’s story of rebellion, of fighting off oppression, and the spiritual wonder of an undying light.
Cohen, told New York Magazine last month that he wanted to take the lackluster songs of the holiday and reinterpret them and reinfuse them with the holiday fun he remembered from his childhood.
To take Hanukkah, which is a great festival that I always enjoyed as a kid singing all the songs. I remember we had this terrible record our parents played with children singing slightly off tune to a really old piano player. As the years went on, I realized they were all really bad tunes and all badly played. So the idea was to use story of Hanukkah and take some of the music of it and update it to make it really cool.
And cool it is.
Here an interview with Cohen on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
Hank Kalet 