By COLlive staff
Sound Heights normally operates out of a storefront on East New York Avenue in Crown Heights that is both a professional recording studio/performance space and also hosts Chassidus classes and music workshops.
At this time of stay-at-home orders, the classes, workshops, and previously unreleased music are being made available online for free, in addition to an archive of podcast episodes featuring interviews with singers and musicians including Benny Friedman, Eli Marcus, Andy Statman, and Sound Heights board member Peter Himmelman.
Sound Heights Director, Rabbi and musician Yisroel Arye Gootblatt has been giving a weekly Thursday night class exploring music in the light of Chassidus, specifically as applied to musicians and their lives. He has been researching, developing and translating sources on this topic for years, teaching both men and women’s classes in Crown Heights and beyond. The half hour classes are live-streamed and archived, with pdf sources and original translations, at soundheightsrecords.com.
Also continuing online is Sound Heights’ weekly Sunday nightsongwriting/composing workshop. Raphael Rice, a professional video editor and Sound Heights regular, says, “Yisroel is fine-tuning the balance between chassidus, creativity and seder in a very inviting way and being a part of the songwriting workshop has pushed me to apply all those things my own work.”
Sound Heights has recently produced “Second Soul”, Friday Night Chabad House-style davening for listening and learning, by Chazzan Shloime Rabin.
Singer Ephraim Goodman, also a Sound Heights board member, says, “Even though we have an amazing recording studio where we have been getting together to jam and create, these days we all have to make do with what we have at home. This is a big part of the Sound Heights mission, to empower you to make music with whatever you have, whatever your skills.”
In that spirit, they are releasing a brand new Brooklyn Jazz Warriors single, “Last Stop on the Train to Utopia”, written and recorded at home in self-quarantine.
Rabbi Gootblatt says about the new song, “It is about hope in dark times, using these precious final moments on the threshold of redemption to increase in Torah and Mitzvos, Simcha and Music. This is something we learn from the Rebbe, to sing in celebration and anticipation of the miracles that are sure to come any moment with the True and Complete Redemption.”
To make a tax-deductible donation to Sound Heights use this link.
AUDIO “Last Stop on the Train to Utopia”
I believe everyone has a musical spark that just needs to get tapped into!
Please visit our studio and join our classes, songwriting workshops or jamming session!