Friday evening ceremonies to welcome Shabbat, everyone welcome, music, wisdom, friends, dance, stillness, kiddos, poetry, wilderness.

Shabbat Upstate

Duo al Roo7

Nov. 14th — Racebrook Lodge (Berkshires)

Nov. 26th — Brooklyn Maqam Hang (NYC)

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 has been a vocal supporter of Palestinian liberation.

Piyut Sahra

A new Epichorus 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.

Hagadah 2024 - Why is this Year Different From All Other Years?

This year has been different from all other years in the story of the Jewish people. Throughout our history Jews have been oppressed and killed as they were on October 7th. But never before has a Jewish army fought back with the power and destructiveness we have witnessed, the slaughter of thousands of Palestianins, the annihilation of Gaza, and the starvation of its people. Alongside the violence and protests, debates have raged, disagreements have ruptured relationships, and divides politically, generationally, ethically emerged over the most core human values, the rights of children, the right to safety and food, and freedom.

We wrote the questions in this Haggadah with the ethos of Temenos in mind: Questions that open. Questions that make room for vulnerability, grief, painful truths. Healing takes time. Can we surface the fears, personal and generational, that inhibit us from trusting in a different world? Can we ask and listen as friends and strangers make their way through the stories of oppression in their own lives and the stories of the world we share? If the world is a reflection of the inner lives of human beings, our brokenness is more transparent than ever. Can the Hagadah help us heal our stories that we might heal the world?

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