A Little History
(Scroll down to watch a short video of Captain Zohar and hear some samples of our music)
My fascination with music and spirituality began at age four when my grandmother played me the sound track to Jesus Christ Superstar. The impression made by Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, crooning and screaming as the musical Jesus character, hardwired music and spirituality as inseparable in my nervous system. Despite the obvious Christian association, I eventually came to see the drama of Divinity played out off stage at my Uncle Howard's Passover seders, and later at Rabbi Vogel's Shabbat table in Rochester, NY (Chabad of Rochester). There I was introduced to the Niggun- the wordless prayerful melodies which characterize Hassidic music. I graduated from the Eastman School of Music with a degree in music composition in 1991.
The band Captain Zohar began in the early nineties as an experimental improvisation project, using Kabbalistic number/letter permutations as a basis for musical structures. By the late nineties, it had evolved into a progressive rock band which blended Klezmer and Jewish theatrics with high energy, polyrhythmic and sometimes quite atonal composition. Think Frank Zappa meets Martin Buber. This incarnation of the Captain played around the Bay Area between 1998 and 2001.
In 1999, I began working with Jewish Meditation Center Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, where I began to teach a mode of Jewish spirituality I call "Torah of Awakening". By February of 2000, I began to serve as CHL’s music director and helped launch the popular musical services which have been happening regularly ever since. These sacred musicians become known as the ensemble Shirat HaLev. In 2005, I reunited with original Zohar musicians and childhood friends Josh Miele and drummer Sam Markewich, along with other instrumentalists and vocalists to resurrect the present incarnation of Captain Zohar: A “tree of life” with it’s roots in Klezmer and Jewish devotional music, a trunk of progressive rock and it’s branches reaching toward the heights of Indian Classical music. In 2012, I was given ordination by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi as Minister of Sacred Music.
We are available to play our unique form of performance music for concerts, sacred music for prayer and concerts, as well as classic Jewish music for weddings and other festive occasions.
My fascination with music and spirituality began at age four when my grandmother played me the sound track to Jesus Christ Superstar. The impression made by Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, crooning and screaming as the musical Jesus character, hardwired music and spirituality as inseparable in my nervous system. Despite the obvious Christian association, I eventually came to see the drama of Divinity played out off stage at my Uncle Howard's Passover seders, and later at Rabbi Vogel's Shabbat table in Rochester, NY (Chabad of Rochester). There I was introduced to the Niggun- the wordless prayerful melodies which characterize Hassidic music. I graduated from the Eastman School of Music with a degree in music composition in 1991.
The band Captain Zohar began in the early nineties as an experimental improvisation project, using Kabbalistic number/letter permutations as a basis for musical structures. By the late nineties, it had evolved into a progressive rock band which blended Klezmer and Jewish theatrics with high energy, polyrhythmic and sometimes quite atonal composition. Think Frank Zappa meets Martin Buber. This incarnation of the Captain played around the Bay Area between 1998 and 2001.
In 1999, I began working with Jewish Meditation Center Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, where I began to teach a mode of Jewish spirituality I call "Torah of Awakening". By February of 2000, I began to serve as CHL’s music director and helped launch the popular musical services which have been happening regularly ever since. These sacred musicians become known as the ensemble Shirat HaLev. In 2005, I reunited with original Zohar musicians and childhood friends Josh Miele and drummer Sam Markewich, along with other instrumentalists and vocalists to resurrect the present incarnation of Captain Zohar: A “tree of life” with it’s roots in Klezmer and Jewish devotional music, a trunk of progressive rock and it’s branches reaching toward the heights of Indian Classical music. In 2012, I was given ordination by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi as Minister of Sacred Music.
We are available to play our unique form of performance music for concerts, sacred music for prayer and concerts, as well as classic Jewish music for weddings and other festive occasions.