‘Wedding Album’ That Ushered a New Era in Jewish Music

By Sruly Meyer for COLlive.com

Welcome fellow Jewish music fans to our first edition of “Throwback Music”. This won’t just be another article about a cool famous album or song, but we will be working hard to give you context, details, stories about the process of the album or the after effects. If you like a little behind the scenes with your nostalgia, this will be the place you wanna be!

Going through albums for our first edition, a lot of names come up that we would think of as classics. Abie Rotenberg’s Journeys perhaps? How about Regesh, or Destiny, or maybe D’veykous? Those would be great ideas, however those albums came out in the mid 80s, and I wanted to go back even further, to almost the dawn of the Orthodox evolution of Jewish Music.

How far did we go back? 1971, that is years before albums like Regesh. Now, we all know that R’ Shmuel Brazil was the force behind Regesh, and many other things to come. Did you know though that Shmuel Brazil started even earlier? Yes, in 1971 he composed 8 of the 10 songs on a groundbreaking new album, “Ohr Chodosh”.

Let me paint the picture here, this was an era before there were any real new “wedding songs” around. Unlike today, wedding songbooks can be 50 pages long. In those days, it was a very shortlist. Along came two friends and roommates in Yeshiva, a young man by the name of Shmuel Brazil, and another Yossi Toiv, who attended the famous Shor Yushuv.

R’ Shmuel composed a new song. In the Yeshiva they called it “Shmelke’s Nigun”, a song that would go on to be sung at weddings regularly even today, 50 years since it was first composed. Isaac Gross, the leader of the Neginah Orchestra heard about the song. He came to the Yeshiva and offered R’ Shmuel Brazil $400 for this song. When you calculate the inflation rate, of $400 in 1971, to how much that would be in 2020, the answer is just over $2500.

As someone who has worked on many albums with many composed for the last 10 years, I can tell you the most we ever paid for a single song was about $1500. Most songs today can be purchased from composers for anywhere from $500 to $1000 typically.

They didn’t take the offer, and instead decided to make their own record, with more such songs. The album was called Ohr Chodosh. The music was recorded by the Josh Goldberg Orchestra. Josh was a clarinet player, who was part of the classic American band, The Messengers.

Ohr Chodosh consisted of Yussle Lieber, Nachum Deutsch and Yossi Toiv. If Yossi Toiv’s name sounds familiar, you were right, Yossi went on to become Country Yossi. There are so many things that came out from this album that had effects on the Jewish music world for years to come. Yossi composed two of the songs, and R’ Shmuel Brazil composed the other 8 songs.

Under the instruction of his Rebbe, he did not ever perform with the group on stage. If you ever wondered why the Nigun that started this off was called Shmelke’s Nigun, well, it was their nickname for R’ Shmuel in Yeshiva.

Today, R’ Shmuel Brazil still works on music, and composes, but he is also a Rosh Yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel for many years. Another fun fact, Shmelke’s Nigun was considered too “uptempo” at that time, too wild and modern and was banned in many places, including Camp Morris, a popular Frum camp at the time.

Interestingly enough, when Ohr Chodosh performed in Brooklyn College, a new singer on the scene opened for them, his name was Mordechai Werdyger, also known as Mordechai Ben David (MBD).

If you go through the albums song list, you will find many, many other songs that were famous and are still sung at kumzitz tables and weddings today.

One of them is the classic Bilvovi, which is considered the most used Chuppah song of all time by bands today:

Yossi composed two classics, one “Alleh Yidden”

Here’s the original members singing “Alleh Yidden” at its 50th anniversary:

Another song was “Oh The World” which arguably would be the first Orthodox Jewish English song at the time

R’ Shmuel also composed another timeless classic “Aileh Vrechev”, he is famously quoted as saying “I regret that in the song ‘Aileh Vorechev” I left out the word “Elokainu” and he says, “it bothers me til today.” One more song you might know is, “Eitz Chayim”, a song that is still snug in thousands and thousands of Shuls every year on Simchas Torah.

David Golding, who together with Suki Beri owns Suki & Ding, is the current owner of the album. Ding told me he was 9 years old. It had a tremendous impact on him. He remarks that Yossi Toiv was only 16 years old when he composed Alleh Yidden. The record was a massive hit, and everyone owned it.

If you go to youtube where many of the songs are online, you can see in the comments how many people write lovingly about these popular songs. The most often left comment was that they, or their father or son or daughter walked down the Chuppah to Bilvolvi.

I reached out to a lot of friends in the music industry and they all had the same thing to say. Singer Yaakov Young told me “This was the first Jewish album I ever listened to and it changed my life and inspired me to sing!

Another person who didn’t want to be named, told me that his father wasn’t frum before this album came out. He replayed the album so often, it literally impacted him to become more in touch with his Neshama and eventually become frum. The only other albums at the time that had that type of effect on people were Carlebach albums.

Shmelkie’s Niggun:

The full album is available at https://mostlymusic.com/products/ohr-chodosh-1-cd?variant=835232793

I hope that you enjoyed this deep dive into Jewish Music history. If you’d like to share your own thoughts on this album, or want to suggest other albums or songs for future throwbacks, please e-mail me at [email protected]