Joey Weisenberg’s Spontaneous Jewish Choir filtered into LaunchPad, a community arts center in Crown Heights, Saturday, April 16. The members came one by one, receiving hugs from the other choristers. They set up chairs in a circle, and began to sing. Joey played ruminative mandolin and guitar, his brother Sam gently drummed, myk freedmen freely decorated on lap steel guitar. The choir has two types of songs: wordless chants and Hebrew prayers. I sat at the edge of the circle, and sometimes stood. Theirs is a music that nestles in the listener’s chest. "Brooklyn is a spiritual node," I philosophized. Over and over, one confronts advanced mysticism in this borough: Hasidic masters, African-American shamans, the Jehovah’s Witness HQ. "If the sun and moon should doubt/They’d immediately go out," quoth William Blake. Likewise, "If Brooklyn should doubt/It’d immediately be Queens."
I sometimes sang, just to vibrate with the choir — to hear more intimately their vastness. (For this music, especially when heard with closed eyes, expands into symphonic sphericity.)
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