They are being promoted as two superstars in Jewish music. But when Neshama Carlebach and Josh Nelson perform in concert and participate in the service at the communitywide Selichot program, neither will be thinking about superstardom.
“We both really believe in the power of music and the power of feeling when the community comes together. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}We’re blessed to be able to do that work and to be able to have success doing it,” Carlebach said.
On Saturday, Sept. 5, at Congregation Beth Torah, the popular Jewish performers will be thinking about how their music can contribute to the soul-searching and reflective theme of the evening.
“It’s a deep night,” said Carlebach, who said she and Nelson have been working together for about three years. They will perform that evening without a band.
“It’s celebrating and acknowledging that we all have the chance to begin again. I hope that what we give musically and spiritually will allow people to feel that they have the capacity to begin again and to be renewed,” she said.
Carlebach doesn’t believe it’s easy for us to think that we always have a second chance and are able to have a new beginning and a new start.
“We are always so pulled by our yesterdays,” she said. “I think that our hope is that whatever it is we’re singing … we hope that we present something that will make people feel something and to be inspired in whatever way they need to be.”
Nelson said he and Carlebach — who each have their own solo careers — will perform separately as well as together that evening. It is a night they treat differently than any other because there is reflection inherently built into the experience.
“When you choose music for an evening like that you are really conscious of that underlying context. I want people to feel uplifted and simultaneously to have an opportunity to begin to explore in an inward way,” he said.
Nelson believes that as we move into the High Holidays, it’s a great time to think about ourselves and our relationships with our communities, God and our families.
“In a concert like that we’ll make really strong selections to try to help facilitate that process. Together I think it’s a pretty dynamic experience in terms of an audience perspective because we both bring such different gifts. It should be a pretty powerful evening,” he said.
Both Carlebach and Nelson are eager to participate in the service following the concert as well.
“We’ll be singing and leading prayer and teaching and trying to help contribute to this energy of what happens when a community comes together and really begins to shed the skin of self-protection and become vulnerable with each other. That’s really where the work of the holidays begins,” Nelson said.
Carlebach said the two have had a hand in shaping the Selichot service.
“There are a whole lot of amazing people involved in that night,” she said, noting that they were still creating the service late last week.
The local Rabbinical Association, which is comprised of clergy from all streams of Judaism, is sponsoring the program and service. That’s something that has simply amazed Carlebach.
“I am so moved to know that people from all different spaces and strengths and viewpoints can get along and how they can collaborate with so much love and respect. It’s a very rare thing to see,” she said.
Not the first famous Carlebach
Neshama Carlebach is the daughter of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who is considered by many to be the foremost Jewish religious songwriter of the 20th century. She began joining him onstage when she was 15 and was lucky enough to tour with him for nearly a year before his sudden death in 1994. She was 19 at the time.
She may sing some of her father’s songs at the Selichot program, but notes she and her father are very different.
“I think I’m more contemporary,” she said. “I work very hard to create very, very hip and accessible music arrangements.”
She said there’s no doubt he did influence her musical style.
“It’s about the soul and about the heart and connecting with people and speaking to their hearts and giving them their full attention and being present in the moment. In that sense he is my greatest teacher. I always strive to be able to give as much as he did.”
“Musically his songs, they are mine. I feel they are a part of me,” she continued. “There’s a lot of music that I love but my father, for me, is the heartbeat.”
Carlebach said it can be hard to describe her music.
“I have shades of gospel. When I’m not working with Josh I collaborate with a gospel choir. There’s shades of folk. In my life I’ve worked with a lot of great jazz musicians and in my life there has been shades of jazz, but I feel like my style if pretty unique. It’s definitely soulful and I definitely mean it.”
The multi-talented Nelson
During the course of his career, Nelson has been a musician, a singer, a producer and a teacher. Most of his work today, he said, is “performance based and leading worship.” Among the services he leads is the annual High Holiday services at the 92nd Street Y in New York, the largest Jewish Community Center in the country.
He’s been concentrating on spiritual music for the past 10 to 15 years, which is why he chose to quit the world of academia and reduce his role as a producer.
“As my spiritual work and my spiritual music became more important to me, everything else dimmed in importance and I saw a real sense of calling and a real desire to place my efforts in that world,” he said.
“Aside from my children, it has become the most fulfilling, uplifting part of my life.”
He chose to scale back his producing, generally working on only charitable projects now, because he wanted to spread his own musical message.
“My message is that everybody is trying to get to the same place and that everybody really, truly is made from the same balance of physicality and spirituality. Our job as a community is to try to create doors that people can walk through to get closer to that. There is no right and wrong in what those doors look like and at the moment we can stop judging each other and move to a position of loving,” he said.
He doesn’t want you to confuse what he’s saying with being tolerant. Nelson truly dislikes the word tolerance, and said he’s not trying promote it. Instead, he believes we need to get away from trying not to offend and upset each other and actually find ways to bring us all closer together.
“If we put people in relationships and create an opportunity for them to break down those walls, tremendous things can happen and the world changes very quickly. I see my job as trying to bring the Jewish community together through the message of hope and love and unity.”
Collaborating on a new record
As Carlebach and Nelson began making music together, Nelson said he strongly encouraged Carlebach to take a risk and try something really different from anything she had done in the past. That’s how her ninth record, “Soul Daughter,” expected to be released this fall, came about.
The name is derived from the Broadway musical she created about her father’s life called “Soul Doctor.” During the musical’s run, Carlebach said the media, including Playbill and the New York Times, often referred to her as Soul Daughter, which Carlebach said “was really cool.”
The original cast members from the Broadway show perform on the record, with Carlebach and Nelson producing it.
“I think for me, it’s definitely the most vulnerable, honest work that I’ve ever created,” Carlebach said. “I’m very proud of it and I’m excited to bring it into the world and inspired that Josh, who used to produce everyone in the whole world and stopped producing, that he took this project on, which was a great honor.”{/mprestriction}
