Jewish Music - BOJAC

It's an odd looking acronym at first from it's initials, but BOJAC (short for The Best of Jewish A Cappella), is probably one of coolest experiences I've had listening to Jewish music. This was the standalone unique pick in our class that I absolutely had to get and talk about for many reasons. Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of traveling to New York with Indiana's premiere Jewish A Capella group, Hooshir (notice the clever Hebrew wordplay...get it?), for which I am a proud member of, and participated in the Jewish Collegiate Festival of the Performing Arts (appropriately named, JCFPA) at The Jewish Theological Seimnary. It was a fantastic experience observing and performing in front of so many people that not only were apart of very talented Jewish A Capella groups across the country, but shared the same passion for Jewish music and performing arts as well.

I have a certain knack for A Cappella muisc in general because it's so incredible to hear what the voice, or in this case many voices from across each range wokring together to create something so extraordinary out of nothing with no help from any other instrumental, except from each other group members voices. BOJAC digs deep to find the best arrangements and performances of Jewish A Capella groups from all over the country.

For starters, Best of Jewish A Cappella is, as it states in the title, Jewish music in A Capella. No other instrument is there to help out with except for the groups voices for melody, harmony, and vocal percussion. BOJAC features many many premier collegiate and professional Jewish A Capella from around the country covering certain songs of Israeli Pop songs, or doing their own original arrangements of songs of Jewish prayer.

The range of styles that BOJAC connects to in terms of Judaism is actually wider than one thinks, due to it's wide range of Jewish music. Each group fires up every style of Jewish music, from religious melodies of Jewish prayer (Six13's Yigdal and Beat'Achon's doo-wop version of Lecha Dodi) to Israeli pop (Tufts University's Shir Appeal's poppy cover of Ani Ohev Otach), in English (Sam Glazer's Shabbas and Sean Altman and Kol Zimra's We Stand As One) , Hebrew (Rutgers' Kol Halayla's rendition of Yaron Hadad's Zodiac)and a bissel of Yiddish (Binghamton's Kaskeset beautifully original parody of Queen in Bohemishe Rapsody, singing about kashered food rather than the journey of a poor boy).

Each Jewish A Cappella group brings something to the table for this and their experience with their own media and performances show it. Many of these groups (such as Kaskeset, The Shabbatones, Shir Appeal, Pizmon, and Six13, just to name a few) have very well structured websites and mention their long history of discography (with sound clips!) and great past performances, along with their own assorted media of past performances from YouTube. The album cover is very appealing to the listener as it shows which group performes which song, as well as let the listener know which university or city each group comes from, as it's always interesting to know that information. In terms of it's corporate structure, a lot of these groups are starting to become, if not already are pretty mainstream on their respective campuses. The collegiate and professional acapella groups are framed under that name, and the music reaches out to basically any Jewish music lover, let alone an A Cappella fan, thanks to their name on campus or in the world.

Each group uses their own style of Jewish A Capella to help promote Judaism through their performances of their arrangements of songs. And every performance is usually very gratifying. I know this through personal experience with Hooshir. We have put some amazing work into the pieces that we've rehearsed for peformances, and each keeps topping the next one.


And for those of you wondering about our performance at JCFPA, I can't even begin tell you how exhilarating it was to be up there in front of friends, family and lots of others who appreciated Jewish A Cappella at JTS. Many people noted that we were one of the best performances in the entire festival. It made the entire trip, regardless of how crazy it was to make a giant step forward onto the map of Jewish A Cappella, worth all the while.


I leave this post with a video of one of our songs performed at JCFPA. This is a cover of Sarit Hadad's K'shehalev Bocheh (A Crying Heart). Apologies in advance for the minor shakey camera.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8RQuYWDfD8


Enjoy!