Kol B’Seder Celebrates a Half Century of Creativity in Music Making

“We’ve been singing together for 50 years,” Rabbi Dan Freelander ’79 marveled, as he and Cantor Jeff Klepper ’80 sat down to talk about the anniversary of their iconic Jewish music duo Kol B’Seder, and their role in driving the evolution of synagogue music.

To honor the milestone and the group’s impact, the Center for New Jewish Culture recently held a celebration at the historic former Union Temple space in Brooklyn, with a Kol B’Seder performance featuring longtime partners and friends like Cantor Jill Abramson ’02, Director of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, and faculty member Cantor Joshua Breitzer ’11, Clinical Instructor of Cantorial Arts at HUC-JIR, and Senior Cantor at Congregation Beth Elohim – who were joined by cantorial students and the Congregation Beth Elohim Teen Songleaders.

The event was also a fundraiser for Sing Unto God, an organization that trains emerging Jewish songleaders and produces the Hava Nashira Songleader Conference, founded by Cantor Jeff Klepper in 1992 with Kol B’Seder’s contemporary and cantorial school namesake Debbie Friedman z”l, who was a member of the HUC-JIR faculty.

As part of the occasion, the alumni duo released the Kol B’Seder Anthology from Transcontinental Music Publications, which contains recordings and printed music of their 113 songs, from beloved classics like their 1973 setting of “Shalom Rav,” to newly released works from their latest album We Are Partners.

The 300-page anthology also includes “an extended essay on the role that we played in the last part of the 20th century in influencing and changing North American synagogue music, within the Reform movement in particular,” Freelander said.

But even as the duo basked in the recognition, they were also quick to point out that they “did not invent the idea of singing ancient Hebrew words to contemporary, popular sounding music,” as Jeff Klepper put it. “It was an evolution, and part of that evolution started in the 1950s at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, where Cantor William Sharlin, who was the director of the music program, used to teach with guitar. A number of our early partners in the camp movement were students of Cantor Sharlin.”

Those alumni from Hebrew Union College and the camps run by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism) went on to be members of congregations, and then leaders of congregations, Freelander explained. “And they wanted the melodies of their youth. And they brought them in as mainstream into the synagogue.”

And that, Klepper, said, led to the emergence in the 1960s and ‘70s of “a new kind of participatory synagogue and Jewish community music that was heavily influenced by the popular music of the time and the American folk tradition – Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, but then heavily overlaid by the new pop sounds of the Beatles and James Taylor and Crosby Stills and Nash.

“Then you throw in a dash of Shlomo Carlebach and the new Hasidic music of that time, some pioneer songs of the 1940s and ‘50s, and then the contemporary Israeli music – which was, in a funny way, an imitation of American Pop music, but with a Mediterranean sound. So we incorporated all those,” Klepper said.

Over the arc of Kol B’Seder’s career, their style increasingly gained broader acceptance in the cantorial world. One decisive factor, Freelander said, was that, like Debbie Friedman, the duo was undeniably grounded in Jewish knowledge and tradition. “Both Jeff and I are graduates of a Hebrew Union College education, from the same traditional background that every rabbi and cantor gets. It wasn’t a rejection of what had come before. It was an integration of what we had learned into our own styles.”

“In keeping with the spirit of Kol B’Seder and our namesake, at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music we focus on legacy and innovation, as we carry forward music from past decades and teach our students to express it with contemporary stylings,” said Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music Director Cantor Jill Abramson. “The power of a duo touches us in a unique way — the combination of their voices, their synergy, but also the power of collaborative artistry, it echoes the tradition of chevruta study, or learning with a partner; they have created and modeled ways for rabbis and cantors to collaborate and for ancient wisdom and contemporary aesthetics to co-exist.”

Today, Kol B’Seder’s legacy is not only part of the establishment, but also has enduring relevance for young people, thanks to the spread of their music on the internet, Klepper said. “Now we’re into the social media revolution, which is the main reason that people really know about Kol B’Seder. We have a lot of younger acolytes, the second and third generation after us who have been brought up on our style.”

 

Images courtesy of Julie Markes Photography