He can belt out a song like a rock star accompanied by a big band; croon like Frank Sinatra with just a piano accompaniment; or daven in a rich tenor voice during services at his Conservative synagogue.
He’s Cantor Randy Herman, who has been the full-time cantor at Bet Torah in Mount Kisco, New York, for 10 years. He’ll be here for Day of Discovery on Sunday, Aug. 26, giving an interactive musical family program for kindergarten through sixth-graders and their parents that will take place from 9 to 10:50 a.m. in White Theatre at the Jewish Community Campus.
Cantor Herman will perform songs from his newest CD, “Moving through Time,” holiday songs and a few Israeli and Yiddish songs as well. That afternoon he will also conduct a program for adults from 1:30 to 2:45 p.m. titled “Bob Dylan and the ’60s Folk Revival.” Go to kcrabbis.org to sign up for either or both of these programs.
Career
Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Cantor Herman is a descendant of performing vaudevillian grandparents on one side of his family and off-the-boat Eastern European Orthodox Jews on the other side, which is reflected in his career.
He has been writing and performing songs since elementary school — playing piano and singing. One of the songs that influenced him early on was Billy Joel’s song “Piano Man,” which came out when he was in fourth grade.
“It meant a lot to me. I was 10 years old and at that point people were saying what do you want to be when you grow up and I would say a piano player,” he said.
Cantor Herman said he always thought of himself as a piano player who could sing, but people started coming up to him saying they loved his voice. Then at some point he realized he was a better singer than piano player.
“I became a singer because I could also play the piano,” he said.
Long before becoming a cantor, Cantor Herman had a group called Randy Herman and the Scepter of Benevolence, which performed wild rock songs, “like Zappa wild,” he said.
They cut some CDs and he had a few small successes with the band, but wasn’t making much money. For years he eked out a living as a musician playing piano bars, weddings and studio gigs in Chicago, while writing songs on the side, and started to get increasingly interested in Judaism after exploring Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American and New Age beliefs. He was raised “very Reform,” he said.
His cantorial profession came later in life. He also admits his “soul awakened to Judaism” late in life, so he began attending classes at small ultra-Orthodox shuls. Then he moved to New York and went to some adult classes at the Skirball Center while still working as a musician.
“There would be all these women in their 70s and me,” he said. “Then at some point I said I don’t know if I’m the right kind of person to do this, spend however many years it’s going to take to achieve a certain level of recognition and earning potential as a singer/songwriter, and I don’t want to be just a wedding band singer for the rest of my life.”
He said he began to wonder if there was something else he should be doing, but what could that be? He looked at his life and saw music, performance and spirituality.
“I was a long-haired spirituality-seeking musician,” he said, getting more and more serious about Judaism. He put two and two together and thought “cantor, is that even a job?”
He started visiting cantorial schools and finally realized, “Oh, my God, this is exactly what I have to do; this is going to give me the opportunity to dive way deeper into Judaism and learn the music of Judaism, the real music, how to daven, the prayer mode, the scales and I chose Conservative Judaism.”
He received cantorial investiture and a master’s degree in sacred music from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 2008.
Songwriting
Cantor Herman’s CD “Moving through Time” contains original songs, some Jewish and some secular. But, the cantor asks, are they really secular?
“Like the song ‘Moving through Time,’ there’s nothing remotely Jewish about it, but it’s about the idea of moving through time, which is a Jewish concept,” he said.
Of the 12 songs on his CD, he said two or three are more or less entirely secular, but contain Jewish concepts — it’s impossible to separate the two.
Take for example the song “P’tach Libi,” which means open my heart and comes from a line of liturgy that follows the silent Amidah.
“But all the verses are very personal singer/songwriter-like:
I saw you today while I was still angry
And the way that I shouted just made me feel dead.
I wanted to love you, to cry and to hold you,
But my heart shut the door instead.
“Somebody with their heart closed. So it’s very much coming from the secular world; the words are personal and yet I’m using Judaism.
“I was brought up on the music of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and there’s something a little bit somewhat holy — with a small ‘h’ — about art and music in general, and the process of trying to be Godlike in terms of creation and express something that’s beyond words from the depths of your being,” the cantor continued. “It’s not the same kind of Holiness — with a capital ‘H’ — that I think Judaism is and religion is.”
A song he just recently completed, “Grain of Sand,” has a spiritual kind of tone to it, searching for something larger, but is entirely secular in terms of Judaism, he said.
Cantor Herman said he will keep coming back to writing overtly Jewish songs because he likes to try his own style on liturgical songs and it’s part of his profession. He is passionate about bringing new music into the synagogue, but it has also been a passion in his personal life for much longer (from fourth grade on) to just write songs independent of Judaism.
“It’s a mission of mine in my songs and in my music, but also in my davening, to try to incorporate something that feels like l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, that has a real element of tradition where people feel like something of our ancestors’ generation is touching us in the present, which is very key to Judaism.
“So that’s what I try to do as a cantor; that’s what I try to do as a singer/songwriter. It’s an amazing journey; it’s an incredible blessing and joy and opportunity to get to do this,” he said.
‘Bob Dylan and the ’60s Folk Revival’
Cantor Herman’s afternoon program will address whether Jewishness influenced the music of Dylan and other major folk figures.
Before Dylan, most singers were singing other people’s songs, he said. After Dylan, you could not be taken seriously on an artistic or critical level unless you were a singer/songwriter.
In the beginning of the folk revival, Dylan and others played traditional music, which spoke to the Greenwich Village, alternative crowd in the early ’60s, bringing people back to music that was core and central and traditional, Cantor Herman said.
“But suddenly Dylan is taking poetry from the Beatnik generation, a really artistic kind of avant-garde, nebulous, interesting poetry, and melding that with folk music,” he said.
Dylan has songs throughout his career like “Forever Young,” which starts out “May God bless and keep you always.”
“That’s the first line of the Kohanim (Jewish priests) blessing,” Cantor Herman pointed out. “Then [Dylan] said, ‘May you be forever young,’ so he gave his own beautiful poetic twist on a blessing, but it’s a brachah, a kind of blessing you’re giving someone.”
Another of Dylan’s songs, “Trying to Get to Heaven before They Close the Door,” can be compared to the closing service on Yom Kippur, Neilah, said Cantor Herman. It means the gates of the Temple and the gates of Heaven are closing; you have to get your prayers in so you’ll be inscribed in the book of life.
“So would Dylan have been Dylan had he not been Jewish?” Cantor Herman pondered. “No one can answer that question.”