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# 5 Michael Attias – Berechit
Album: Michael Attias – Credo
Label: Clean Feed
Released: 2005
Michael Attias alto & baritone saxophones
Reut Regev trombone (except 7)
Chris Lightcap bass
Igal Foni drums
Mark Taylor french horn (1,2,5,6)
Sam Bardfeld violin (1,2,5,6)
Tracklist:
1 Credo 8:34
2 I’s 9:06
3 Orange 4:31
4 Dream That Darn 5:06
5 Hot Mountain Song 8:20
6 Mes Petites Amoureuses 8:32
7 Labat 2:43
Israeli and NY artist Attias recorded this album in April ’99 in three configurations: trio, quartet and sextet, based around his core trio of Igal Foni and Chris Lightcap.
Avignon, Summer of ’95, rooftop of an old farmhouse. Lain across the stone in the afternoon sun is some sheet music I picked up off a pew in the deserted Cathedral of Notre-Dame des Doms where I’d gone that Sunday morning hoping to hear a Frescobaldi mass sung and instead found this piece of paper with the Credo section in rudimentary sing-along notation. I brought it back across the Rhone and spent the rest of that Sunday afternoon refurbishing its rhythmic contours on my alto. The sun shines on the stone, the song resounds in the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle a hundred miles away….
The last tune on the album is another piece of liturgy. Berechit is the first word of the Old Testament, means “in the beginning”, and began the Torah portion I sang for my Bar Mitzva as a boy in Minneapolis, using Ashkenazi neumes (melismas) though I much preferred the Sephardic melodies my father sang and which he’d learned as a child in Marrakesh. Triple-exile…Years later the neumes have been thoroughly Morroccanized. Igal sounds like five Gnawa drummers at once playing on the Djma-El-Fna, Chris has turned his bass into a guimbri, Reut and I are cantors in snake-charmer drag: “BERECHIT BARAH ELOHIM ET HA SHAMAYIM VEH ET HA’ARETZ”. Get the Hebrew text and sing along! So strange and beautiful to revisit those times and these sounds. This was an album of friendship and youth. It’s full of flaws and inspirations that at this point seem to belong to someone else but somehow related to me, a cousin? a lost brother? I am grateful to all the players documented here. 10 years after that Sunday in Avignon, 6 years after it was recorded, I’m happy and proud that Credo is finally seeing the light of day. I sincerely hope you enjoy it…
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