An Evening with Duo al Rouh & Friends — Nov. 22nd
Palestinian multi-instrumentalist Zafer Tawil, performs alongside friend, collaborator, and oud player Rabi Zaki Asher – a set of sorrow songs, traditional and new, that give voice to the brokenness and yearnings of our days. The textures and aesthetics of shared poetry, musical modes, and memory create vessels of song tender and wide, places of safety and comfort that make room to reach unto the depths.
Songs from the queens of the Arabic canon, Fairouz and Oum Kulthum, stretch between the sorrows of their days and ours, alongside folk songs, sufi poems and melodies, and new compositions the two performers have written together, from within the longings of recent days. In welcoming the truth and grief of one another, the two make room for new sounds to emerge from the place of shared displacements that mark the stories of each of their communities.
Jerusalem born Zafer Tawil is fluent on the violin, oud, qanun, percussion and nay. He is the most in demand musician of the Brooklyn Arabic music community, and he is the most joyful. Rabi Zaki Asher, studied the oud and Arabic maqam with Lebanese master Bassam Saba for many years. He is the creative director of the Temenos Center for the Arts, a New York 501c3, and is an activist for Palestinian liberation.
Join Rabbi Zachi and friends for Friday evening ceremonies to welcome Shabbat, everyone welcome, music, wisdom, friends, dance, stillness, kiddos, poetry, wilderness … kiddoss welcome … feel free to bring treats to share, bread, wine, cake, flowers, seeds, cookies, dolma, kombucha, the gift must move.
Friday Night Ceremonies
Big Mystics
Join Rabbi Zachi Asher and friends for studies in Jewish mysticism – we will explore the Kabbalistic tree and the system of the Sefirot as a template for somatic, psychological and spiritual practice. Using Hebrew/English texts from Shaarei Orah, a 13th century study of the symbol sets associated with each Sefirah, we will create personal maps for each spiritual energy (Mystery, Wisdom, Compassion, Judgment, Beauty, Will, Acceptance, Planting, Embodiment), and set them in dialogue with a wide array of lenses and sources, Rumi, Bachelard, Jung, prayer, activism, song.
Everyone is welcome. Sessions are sliding scale $22-$36, and drop in (come to any single session or all of them, and we’ll catch you up). Free for Temenos members. RSVP through our mailing list. Wednesdays at random, in Kingston in person, and on Zoom the same evening.
Lala Tamar is a vocalist, musician and the winner of the New Fund’s Grant for the Essential Arts. Born into Moroccan and Brazilian lineages, Tamar is an independent artist and researcher in the fields of North African, Ladino and Andalusian music. She plays percussion instruments, Gimbri (Moroccan bass), composes and writes original music based on the North Africans Jewish and Muslim feminine traditions. Tamar performs and collaborates with musicians in Morocco and worldwide, amongst them: Mehdi Nasuli, Karim Ziad, Mnat Aishta, Yossi Fein, Omri Mor, Aminka and many more. Lala has created the first album ever to be recorded in the lost language of “Haquetia” (Moroccan Jewish Ladino) and is active in promoting awareness of North African Jewish heritage and preservation worldwide. She is a voice teacher and holds North African women’s sacred singing workshops all around the world.
In the singing workshop, we will learn to sing a variety of chants, Piyutim, Gnawa, and Haquetia songs, in Hebrew, Arabic and Haquetia.The group will investigate the aural similarities between the languages within the musical context. focusing on the experience of the North African form of communal call and response singing. Lyrics will be given with English and Hebrew transcription.
In the women’s dance workshop, we will immerse in North African tribal dance working on the natural movement of the body and using the natural body weight as the base of our motions. Movement and dance will be held through traditional songs, rhythms and scales from the Moroccan tradition.
Blessed Shwag - Temenos T’s!
WOMEN IN THE GARDEN - this tee was drawn by our beloved Rumi, it features women with baskets in a garden or grove, with fruit, trees, hills, owls and a serpent. We chose for the back, a quatrain from another Rumi, "My work is to carry this love as comfort for those who long for you, to go everywhere you've walked and gaze at the pressed-down dirt."
HEART CIRCLES - this tee was drawn by an anonymous 14th century kabbalist as a visual guide to accompany the manuscript of a mystical text. It depicts the process of spirit moving through the Sefirot, the primordial circles and energies, through a channel. It is a visual of representation of how the substance of soul comes into the world and takes on form through us. We chose a quote from the 19th century Japanese Zen Master Nakahara Nantenbo, "Born within the circle of the world, the human heart must also become a circle."
THE GIFT MUST MOVE - the quote for this tote comes from a book by Lewis Hyde called the Gift. Temenos is participating in the creation of new gift economies of relation and exchange rooted in generosity and the laws of spirit. When we hold onto gifts they sour, when we help the gifts move, they sow blessing.
Piyut Sahra
A new album is in the works with sounds drawn from the West African Tradition and Moroccan Chaabi, featuring master Kora player Yacouba Sissoko, Cheick Hamala Diabata on Ngoni, and vocalist LALA Tamar.
Ten at Dreamland; Healing and Lineage
Ten at Dreamland; Healing & Lineage is the first instrumental record from The Epichorus, recorded live, ten musicians in a circle at Dreamland, a church turned recording studio outside Woodstock, NY during the summer of 2018. Unexpectedly, our teacher and friend Bassam Saba was in town from Lebanon and joined us to record the album. These performances are some of the last recordings of the unparalleled performer of Arabic music and master of the nay (reed flute), as Bassam passed of Covid, on December 4th, 2020.
Healing & Lineage includes performances by the Epichorus of songs from the Arabic tradition composed by by Riyad Sunbati, Hamza El Din, and Saleh Kuwaiti, set alongside three new compositions from bandleader and composer Zach Fredman.
To accompany the digital album, the Epichorus will release a 70 page book with original artwork, photographs and short essays that tell the story of these songs and the artists of the generations who came before us, whose music became our teaching and our inspiration.
Click here to hear the album and purchase the book
