[...]
Listen to Haran, the latest album by Pharaoh’s Daughter, and you hear a musical journey from Hasidic Brooklyn to ’70s psychedelia, from an Israeli seminary to smoky bars in Turkey, and street scenes in Morocco and Zambia. Band leader and vocalist Basya Schechter has invented her own identity, still rooted in the words, sounds, and experiences of her childhood, but using her global curiosity to launch a reformulation of Judaic musicality. Haran marries the Hebraic and Biblical texts that orthodox children memorize with a modern, globally-informed Jewish sound.
[...]
Rockpaperscissors
Listen to Haran, the latest album by Pharaoh’s Daughter, and you hear a musical journey from Hasidic Brooklyn to ’70s psychedelia, from an Israeli seminary to smoky bars in Turkey, and street scenes in Morocco and Zambia. Band leader and vocalist Basya Schechter has invented her own identity, still rooted in the words, sounds, and experiences of her childhood, but using her global curiosity to launch a reformulation of Judaic musicality. Haran marries the Hebraic and Biblical texts that orthodox children memorize with a modern, globally-informed Jewish sound.
[...]
Rockpaperscissors
[...]Blending a psychedelic sensibility and a Pan-Mediterranean sensuality, Basya Schechter leads her band, Pharaoh's Daughter, through swirling Hasidic chants, Mizrachi and Sephardi folk-rock, and spiritual stylings filtered through percussion, flute, strings and electronica. Their sound has been cultivated by Basya's Hasidic music background and a series of trips to the Middle East, Africa, Israel, Egypt, Central Africa, Turkey, Kurdistan and Greece. She began retuning her guitar to sound like a cross between an Arabic oud and a Turkish saz, with harmonic minor melodies, and odd time signatures.
[...]
Goldenland
[...]
Earlier work by singer and instrumentalist Basya Schechter's Pharaoh's Daughter cleverly blended pan-Mediterranean sensuality with 1960s flower-power lyrics and rich productions. But this time out, Schechter chose to rely on traditional texts—Aramic, Biblical, Kabbalistic and Ladino songs, and poems by Sephardic Yehudah Halevy, Abraham Toledo and Rabbi Isaac Luria and Ashkenazi Rabbi Baruch Ben Shmuel of Mainz—instead of self-revealing texts like "Confession" (with the unforgettable lines: "I am a fake/A hyper-conscious Jewish fake/With a Catholic habit for confession") from the previous release of this band, Exile (self-published, 2002).
[...]
All About Jazz
Earlier work by singer and instrumentalist Basya Schechter's Pharaoh's Daughter cleverly blended pan-Mediterranean sensuality with 1960s flower-power lyrics and rich productions. But this time out, Schechter chose to rely on traditional texts—Aramic, Biblical, Kabbalistic and Ladino songs, and poems by Sephardic Yehudah Halevy, Abraham Toledo and Rabbi Isaac Luria and Ashkenazi Rabbi Baruch Ben Shmuel of Mainz—instead of self-revealing texts like "Confession" (with the unforgettable lines: "I am a fake/A hyper-conscious Jewish fake/With a Catholic habit for confession") from the previous release of this band, Exile (self-published, 2002).
[...]
All About Jazz
