As the Afro-Semitic Experience — the band headed by pianist Warren Byrd and bassist David Chevan exploring Black and Jewish religious music and the connections between them — readies for a year of concerts and recordings, it also finds itself marking a big anniversary: The band played its first concert, at Congregation Mishkan Israel, 25 years ago.
In the years since, it has recorded 11 albums and played concerts around the country. Band members have come and gone, and a couple have passed. But the creative camaraderie between Byrd and Chevan persists, as they continue to find common ground and work toward unity in the community.
The Afro-Semitic Experience began in part because of its band members’ willingness to cross cultural and geographic borders even before they were a band. In the 1990s, Byrd was part of a group that did a weekly series at City’s Edge, a jazz club in Hartford, that included a jam session. Chevan had just recently moved to the New Haven area from Brooklyn and “was trying to find out who the players were.” He didn’t know about the musical divide that tends to exist between New Haven and Hartford musicians; “that was one of the first rules we broke,” Chevan said.
Chevan found a scene with a “trifurcation” in it, Byrd said. There were older musicians, jazz scene veterans; younger musicians, often recent graduates from the Hartt School of Music; and people Chevan would describe as “jazz adjacent.” Those groups tended to keep to themselves. But Byrd was in a group called the Explorers, which played a set at City’s Edge on Thursdays and held a jam session on Wednesdays. “People would come, all kinds. So it became an interesting ground to unite people,” Byrd said.
Byrd can’t recall the specific night that Chevan visited the session, but “somehow I left an impression on him,” he said with a chuckle. Because a little while later, “David walked up to me and said, ‘how would you feel about exploring a duo thing where we’re looking at our respective sacred music from our respective heritages?’ ” Byrd recalled. Byrd was intrigued and gave Chevan his card.
“Next thing you know I’m getting a phone call, some months later, that he had this group that was playing at Charlie B’s” — which used to be on Chapel Street, where The Study is now — “and he’s like, ‘yeah, I’m trying to see if you’re willing to get with the concept.’ ”
“Yes, I did speak like that then,” Chevan said with a laugh.
Chevan had landed a regular Friday night slot with Bassology, a swing-based group he still heads up. One of the members of Bassology was Will Bartlett; occasionally Alvin Carter played drums. In the fall of 1997, Byrd then invited Chevan to play bass for a gig he and Carter had with a group at Foxwoods casino that included music from the Black church tradition — specifically a song called “Soon and Very Soon, We Are Going to See the King.”
“This is me looking at it with rose-colored glasses,” Chevan said, “but I think they were a little surprised and pleased that I could hold my own.”
“It was a pleasant surprise to see that he knew that song,” Byrd said, “and that he could get through it with us.… I always enjoyed musicians who could go outside of what they were known for.“
As a musician who played across a variety of projects and resisted pigeonholing, Byrd worried a little at first that Chevan’s idea of exploring Jewish and Black sacred music together meant that he might “get stuck being all about integration and trying to fix all the evils of racial differences. Is that what my life’s going to be about now?” In hindsight, he dismissed those concerns as “silly.” He said yes for the “chance to explore something I’d never explored before, and that was right up my alley.”
Brian Slattery Photo
Byrd and Chevan.
Chevan’s idea for musical collaboration across traditions suddenly snapped into focus in late 1997, after speaking with Jonathan Gordon, then cantor at Congregation Mishkan Israel (CMI). Gordon invited them to play for the synagogue’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. project. Chevan and Byrd both brought “songs they knew that would give some juice to the whole project,” Byrd said. “We got together and really started throwing pieces at one another,” Chevan said. “Our first inclination was ‘what’s an interesting vehicle … that already has the emotional content that I want, that I can then go explore?’… Back then it was finding pieces that can bring us somewhere.”
“I had some Jewish things and Warren had some church things, and where do they end up?” Chevan added. But they also found significant overlap between the two traditions. “There probably would not really be what there is now without the other,” Byrd said. “One of each one fed each other.”
The Afro-Semitic Experience’s first performance was that CMI service in 1998. They were inspired early on by the album Steal Away, by bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Hank Jones, who use spirituals for exploration. “A lot of the early stuff we did has some of that energy,” Byrd said.
“Just the whole idea that you could use those pieces as vehicles was really such a revelation,” Chevan said. “Not that it was the first time anyone had done it, but they had done it in such an intentional way.”
But “there’s some other stuff where you listen to it and you can tell we both have strong personalities sort of at work with each other.… There was this wondrous friction between us going on, but also reverence for the music.”
In a short time, the Afro-Semitic Experience became a sextet, with Byrd on piano, Chevan on bass, Carter on drums, Bartlett on clarinet and saxophone, and Stacy Phillips on violin, often joined by Baba David Coleman on percussion. They played all over the country and began steadily writing songs in addition to continuing to explore their traditions. They suffered their first loss when Phillips died in 2018, and a second loss when Coleman died in 2021. The band’s current lineup — Byrd, Chevan, Carter, and Bartlett, joined by Saskia Laroo on trumpet and Jocelyn Pleasant on percussion — is carrying on the work.
“Jazz musicians are often praying as we play,” Byrd continued. “Our way of playing is a prayer,” as seen in Coltrane, Mingus, and Ellington. They hearken to “spirituals, to gospel influences and sounds. This kind of marriage was always there for Black music, this kind of interplay, kinship.”
Walking Through The Valley
The Afro-Semitic Experience has followed its artistic path within a shifting context that, in a way, has almost uniquely positioned them to talk about the current political climate that has prevailed for the past few years. On one side have lurked questions about cultural appropriation, which has “become a thing now,” Byrd said. But, he pointed out, it has been with musicians for decades — perhaps even from the beginning. “Ray Charles was excoriated by the church” for bringing gospel into secular contexts, he said. But then on the other side of that was Thomas A. Dorsey, considered by some to be the father of modern gospel, who asked “why should the devil have all the fun music?”
“The history of creativity has always been a history of appropriation, of one kind or another, whether it’s the slave master hearing the slaves, or the slaves hearing the slave master,” Chevan pointed out. “Everyone’s hearing each other. There’s going to be some listening, and some borrowing. Right now we’re living in a time of anxiety over that because we want whatever we do to be fair and righteous.” But “I don’t know that it would have changed anything we ever arranged or composed.”
For Byrd, playing with the Afro-Semitic Experience “represents a kind of evolution. I don’t know if it’s up, or to the side, but we have these ways of turning and pulling, and trying to find a way of dealing with each other. It often works along cycles of age and age difference. The new generation may be a little more focused on trying to embrace authenticity, and appropriation is a crime when it doesn’t highlight the energy and struggle of the originators. I can empathize with that. I don’t empathize with the idea that it’s supposed to stay with that. I think what’s always happened for me, as an artist, is that because I have such humongous ears, I’m going to take things in, and absorb it, and it’s probably going to come out on my instrument. It’s going to come out in my art.”
“Things come in and we distill them, and they come out again,” Chevan said.
“I don’t want to be in that black-and-white world when it comes to this,” Byrd said. “I don’t see the point.… when we start to limit ourselves as to what we can create in the first place, and what we can present ourselves as, it’s kind of a sad world to be in.”
On the other side, Chevan recalled a conversation he accidentally heard in the coatroom after a performance about a decade ago, in which a man said to his wife, “I don’t understand why they have to be so political. Don’t they know that the civil rights war was won?” At the time, “we were trying to talk about things that people weren’t talking about, in terms of issues of race,” Chevan said.
“Yes, and in a way that people weren’t talking about it,” Byrd said. “I didn’t know of any other project up until that point that actually proposed a marriage between and exploration of Jewish liturgical music and African American church music. I can’t think of one and never detected one.”
“You ask the question,” Chevan said, “but then you have ask yourself, ‘where is the question not being asked, and what’s the result of that?’ And I’m thinking right now, of course, of Florida, and what’s going on in Florida politically, where a lot of things are going to be against the law to teach, and therefore the kinds of conversations we’re having right here and right now aren’t even going to be legal in Florida, at least in a classroom — the place where minds are bent and shaped and challenged. That’s going to be a whole part of the population that’s not having this conversation at all. Even if you don’t resolve anything, at least the fact that you thought of it puts you in a position of honest vulnerability about the work that you’re doing.”
Having done the cultural work for 25 years, Byrd and Chevan have lived with those questions for a long time — long enough to have reached an understanding that, in one sense, expecting to find hard answers to the questions of how to make art that confronts politics and history can itself be a trap. “The minute you answer the question, you have to ask yourself if you’re giving yourself a self-serving answer to justify whatever decision you’ve made, whether it’s to do the piece or not do the piece.” Doing the work brings up the questions again and again. “There have been moments where I don’t know if I’ve edited something out so that I could avoid that thought,” Chevan said.
In another sense, they also know that the search for answers, or at least exploring the questions, lies in the work itself. “I think the great thing about what we do is that Warren is always engaged in honest risk-taking. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it’s a belly flop. But it’s the best,” having created “a safe arena to take risks making music. Because audiences are forgiving — and when you do hit everything, and it all comes together, it’s just mind-blowing, the beauty and the energy of the sound.” In keeping with the music the Afro-Semitic Experience draws from, it involves “magical leaps of musical faith.”
As the Afro-Semitic Experience begins its 26th year, enriched by experience and refreshed by younger musicians coming into the band, Byrd and Chevan also have their eyes on what’s ahead. This month will find them performing in Boston and New York City. “I would love to get to a point where we expand who we reach and find some way to incorporate a larger listening public,” Byrd said. “We’re getting there. I’m always positive.”
To that end, in addition to booking shows again, the group is planning to head back into the studio. The band had plans to record when the pandemic struck in 2020. Baba David Coleman, who was supposed to appear on that record, died in March 2021. Undeterred, the band is nearly ready to record their next collection, My Feet Began to Pray. It will feature vocal and instrumental numbers, a mix of originals inspired by the most recent racial and social justice movements alongside more traditional material. “I’m itching to get back in the studio,” Chevan said.
But they always return to what brought them together 25 years ago, too: playing music together.
“I like to try stuff,” Byrd said, and music can be a “forum to push the envelope, make some kind of revolt happen. It doesn’t have to be avant-garde music … it’s just a matter of being present and allowing that feeling to be real, and vibrant. It sounds a little like fried air,” he said with a laugh. Yet performing “seems to open me up in a way that takes away all the inhibitions, and the heart seems to radiate,” he continued. “It’s becoming hippie talk now, but maybe before I got to the gig, or sometime during the preparation for playing, I’m a little closed off, or defensive, or just very reticent. And then, in the course of the gig, and playing, and doing all this wondrous leaping for great heights, and chance-taking, and appropriating, and interweaving everyone else’s ideas on the bandstand — all of a sudden, I’m in another space, and I’m high.”
Coming to understand that “it could really be a therapy for me, a catharsis, was important, and to begin to even further understand what that was doing for me was important. So I’ve begun taking measures to allow myself to be ready for those ways of expressing myself. I don’t always succeed. I’m a human being. I have moments where things go back into themselves. I go back into my shell. I go back into old ways of coping. But that music brings me up to another place where I feel free. I can’t think of a more fancy way of putting it. It just opens me up.”
