The Tanakh Improvisations

Judaism has shaped my musical life from the beginning, but its presence in my work has shifted over time—from explicit engagement to a more embedded influence and now toward renewed openness. In my thirties, Jewish texts, stories, and questions stood at the center of my music, culminating in Kabbalah Blues/Quantum Funk (2000).

That trajectory also reflects a broader pattern in American music. Songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carole King, Billy Joel, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen rarely made explicitly Jewish music, though several drew from Jewish sources or carried Jewish musical and cultural inheritance into popular forms. Their work often bears the imprint of habits deeply shaped by Jewish experience: questioning, moral inquiry, irony, longing, argument, tenderness, and emotional complexity. Leonard Cohen, though Canadian, stands somewhat apart from this pattern. He drew openly and repeatedly from Judaism, not only in “Hallelujah”—one of the great lyrics, to my mind—but throughout a body of work in which biblical, liturgical, and prophetic language became part of his native artistic vocabulary.

Philosopher Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has written about the danger of becoming attached to cultural signs while losing contact with the referent itself. That idea resonates with me here. Jewish influence can persist through style, gesture, melodic contour, harmonic sensibility, argument, humor, lament, and moral pressure—even when the sources are unnamed. You can hear this especially in figures like Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin, both sons of cantors, whose melodic worlds were filtered through American popular culture but remained connected, however transformed, to Eastern European hazzanut.

For many years, that felt like the right path for me as well: allowing Jewish ideas to shape the music from within rather than naming them directly.

Recent years—and recent events—have clarified the need to reconnect more openly with those sources.

As old hatreds return in new forms, certainties erode, and institutions prove less durable than they once appeared, I find myself returning to foundations. Not for political answers—others are better equipped for that work, and I will point readers toward some of them—but for something older: a conversation that has endured empires, exiles, persecutions, revivals, and countless attempts at its eradication.

That enduring conversation begins with texts, and The Tanakh Improvisations is my way of re-entering it.

In this series, each piece starts with a passage from the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. The music is freely improvised and may involve piano, electronics, percussion, strings, voices, or whatever the moment calls for. These are not settings of the text but responses to it—questions, arguments, reflections, digressions, and, at times, moments of wonder.

I begin where the text begins.

בְּרֵאשִׁית א׳:א׳

“In the beginning.”

The piano part is freely improvised. The other elements—in this first piece, synth, percussion, and AI video—are elaborations on the improvisation: commentary on the original, midrash after the fact.

And so the beginning remains—not behind us, but waiting to be heard again.