Hebrew School is an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.
The project exploits the unavoidable interplay of contemporary and traditional music, employing creativity and sincerity to create music which speaks to a young Jewish audience. David has applied an experimental ‘indie’ sensibility to a wide auditory vocabulary of Jewish music including Yiddish folk, Zionist and Palestinian nationalist pastiche, and (perhaps scandalously) motifs from Reform and Conservative prayer in American synagogues.
By doing this David has both recreated and commented on the state of modern Jewish identity in America and has found music buried in the lives of American Jews attending Hebrew School. This project has begun the process of creating, recording, promoting and performing this music.
David’s album was a part of the Heeb 100, and was enthusiastically recommended. “With songs in which traditional melodies are demolished and remade into electronic parables, Hebrew School is a thorough lesson in ingenuity.”
David Griffin began studying music at age 7, when he began ten years of classical piano instruction with renowned Russian pianist Ludmilla Lifson at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA.
His Bar Mitzvah present at age 13 was a classical guitar, which he continues to use in his work. David studied music at Sarah Lawrence College and the sarangi in Delhi, India. He went on to work at Mother Teresa’s clinic in Calcutta while playing with a group of Anglo-Indian jazz musicians.
Since returning to America he has played as a dance accompanist in Berkeley and in a New York Klezmer band, The Murrays, which were featured on NPR and in the Village Voice.
David now plays with the faux-French band Nous Non Plus and collaborates with several choreographers, including the critically acclaimed Christopher Williams. David is constantly writing and composing, focusing on Jewish music, 1960’s pop, indie rock and experimental music.
