Jewish Wedding Music Secrets Revealed
Binyomin Ginzberg unravels the Gordian Knot of Jewish wedding music
Although customs vary, most Jewish wedding bands—at least, in this Ashkenazi-centric exposé—seem to follow a set formula. Wedding attendees know what to expect, anticipate certain moments, and take those conventions for granted.
But where do those things come from?
How did certain songs worm their way into the repertoire? Why do most weddings have two dances, and why is the second dance different from the first? When did modern, electric instruments replace accordions and clarinets? Why do Hasidic weddings sometimes end with a mitzvah tantz, an anomalous custom where the rebbe—or community leader—“dances” with the bride? And how did line dances become a thing?
On the surface, these practices seem timeless, yet they’re in an almost constant state of flux. But who gets to decide what gets tried, what sticks, and is any of that etched in stone?
To figure this out, I spoke with Binyomin Ginzberg, an in-demand bandleader, sideman, and seasoned veteran of the cutthroat New York-area wedding circuit. Ginzberg’s breadth of knowledge and expertise is impressive, which is obvious from our freewheeling and comprehensive conversation below. He’s been in the trenches for decades, and recently published, The Music of the Mitsve Tants: in the Courts of the Hasidic Rebbes, which, in addition to being a much-needed primer on the mitzvah tantz, contains over 150 transcriptions of Hasidic dance melodies. He also leads the Breslov Bar Band, an ensemble that reimagines traditional Hasidic nigunim in nontraditional contexts, and, through his association with the international klezmer scene, recorded the wedding music for the Netflix series, Unorthodox.
Ginzberg plays the keyboards, and has an intimate connection to the magic of music making. “You can create a powerful moment for people with music,” he says. “When I play a Hasidic nigun—even if it is a reggae version of it or whatever—I am connecting the contemporary listener to something that happened musically and spiritually 200 or 300 years ago. It is powerful and empowering to do that and to see the reactions from people, because on some level, they’re getting something deeper than just coming to hear a song.”
I spoke with Ginzberg at length about the mysteries of the Ashkenazi Jewish wedding. We discussed the roots of the standard repertoire, the oversized influence of Lag B’Omer celebrations in Tzfat, the evolution of wedding band instrumentation, the history of how heavy metal shred guitar became accepted as a legitimate part of the culture, the Breslov Bar Band, and the crazy connections and serendipity that led to his work on Unorthodox.
Once you knew the basics, did you take lessons to get up to speed, and what kind of teachers were you studying with?
I studied jazz piano for a while with Garry Dial in Manhattan privately, he’s a pretty well-known jazz educator. I studied rock piano with a fellow named Moogy Klingman—he’s not alive anymore—he played with Todd Rundgren. I also had a music teacher that one of the wedding bands connected me to. They said, “There’s a lot of stuff that you need to know to play a New York simcha,” and they put me in touch with a wonderful musician named Harry Max. He was a bass player and part of the core rhythm section that’s on pretty much all of those classic Jewish recordings made in the mid-to-late-‘80s and early ‘90s, before they started recording the rhythm sections in Israel. Avraham Fried, Mordechai Ben David, he was a part of all those classic recordings.
At my first lesson, he gave me one of those classic Israeli tunes that you would play at a simcha during the cocktail hour, which a yeshiva kid would never know, and he said, “I’d like you to re-harmonize this for our next lesson.” I took him seriously and instead of just changing one or two chords, I wrote a whole weird harmonic re-envisioning of the tune for him. I came in the next week, he looked at it, he had me play through it, and he listened. Then he said, “I am going to charge you less for the lessons now.” We started having these lessons where I would come in, it was supposed to be a 45 minute lesson, but I’d probably be there for an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours. I’d first sit down with him. He’d give me a cup of coffee, and he’d put something on the record player to listen to. Every time it was something different. One time it might be a Bach Prelude. Another time it might be Milt Jackson or Stan Kenton. He was a big Clare Fischer fan, and a big Antônio Carlos Jobim fan. He introduced this yeshiva kid to all these outside the box—for me, for what I grew up with—sounds. He has a very strong Jewish heart, and a very strong sense of music. He loves music and Jewish music in particular. He brought a really high level of musicianship to playing even at simchas. You wouldn’t expect that the bassist at a wedding to be a virtuoso musician in those days, but he really was.
What are the roots of the standard wedding repertoire?
I think it builds over time. Things fall in and out of favor. But the general core material is there. The second dance at a Yeshivish or Hasidic wedding fluctuates a lot more than the first dance set. An up-beat dance song that will work in a first dance, it’ll become popular and you might see it there for a year or two.
Do audiences care? Do they complain if they don’t hear certain songs?
It depends on the audience. The Modern Orthodox crowd is a lot more behind, and they don’t care as much about the newest, latest stuff for the most part. If you’re playing a wedding in Lakewood and a big star released a CD that morning, the yeshiva boys want to know if you can play three or four songs at the wedding that night. They are hyper into it, but they also get over it really fast. There is a lot more in the Hasidic world than in the Yeshivish world in terms of the dance pop-type stuff that comes in, you play it for three or six months, and then you never play it again.
Why is that?
It's not necessarily a good song. It was in because it was the moment, but it’s not because it's a good song. It would be the functional equivalent of playing something like “the Hustle” or “the Alley Cat” or “the Macarena” at a secular wedding. Sometimes clients will ask me to do that, because they have nostalgia for that moment, and the same thing is true in the Yeshivish world. There are songs that become super-hits, that you can play, and some songs that for a few months you play it, and then nobody wants to hear it again.
But some stuff, like the Motown hits at secular weddings, are timeless classics.
Right. You have that as well. There’s a certain repertoire that will be recognized and appreciated no matter what. Much of that is Hasidic nigunim. There’s also a repertoire from Meron, in Israel, like Middle Eastern and Mediterranean horas—the intersection of Arabic and Jewish music, where melodies crossover—those are tunes you also you play at a Hasidic wedding.
Meron? As in Mount Meron outside of Tzfat?
Right, that’s where Rebbe Shimon bar Yochai is buried, and over the years it’s become a gathering place around his yahrzeit on Lag B’Omer. There’s a big Hasidic event every year, where they come and dance, and light bonfires. There’s a certain repertoire that’s evolved that includes a lot of cross-pollination of different musics—as I understand it—that happened in the 1950s and ‘60s with local Druze and Arab musicians, of Middle Eastern horas, or as they call them, debkas.
Would a debka be like an Israeli hora?
Similar, but more Arabic. The tempo is slower. The word hora means different things to different people. If you say “hora” to a yeshiva guy, it means slowed down second dance Hasidic music with a disco beat or Middle Eastern groove—or today, contemporary EDM—at that same tempo. If you say “hora” to a secular Jewish person, it’s “Hava Negila” and “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” If you say it to a klezmer musician, it’s a staggered 3/8 rhythm also referred to as a zhok, a Romanian rhythm, which is a staggered 3/8 rhythm with the emphasis on one and three. You hear a lot of klezmer pieces with that background, and those tunes are still in.
In the evolution of Jewish weddings, when did it switch from accordions and clarinets to what is today basically a rock band? Were people resistant and how did that come about?
That was already happening from before I was born—I am 47—and in the 1960s and ‘70s, people were listening to non-Jewish music and learning how to play it. Some of those people went on to form Jewish bands, to write their own material, or to play Jewish material using their instruments and the styles they knew and loved from outside Jewish music. You started seeing a lot more of that, and it slowly filtered onto the bandstand. Groups would play for a youth convention or a school event. People would ask for those songs, and then they’d ask the wedding bands to play those songs. If the band has an accordion and a clarinet, they’re not going to be able to cover Poogy’s “YoYa.” It’s not going to sound right. You need an electric guitar. The instrumentation changed, but it was a chicken and egg situation: the musical needs caused changes in instrumentation, and the changes in instrumentation impacted the songwriting. That’s evolving today as well. For example, for a long time you saw only electric guitars at weddings, but in recent years, there are artists like Eitan Katz and his brother Shlomo, who play weddings with an acoustic guitar.
Have ba’alei teshuva [people who embraced Orthodoxy later in life] contributed to those changes as well?
That’s not necessarily from ba’alei teshuva. For example, there are some serious shredder guitar players who grew up in the Orthodox community, even in the Hasidic community. They didn’t grow up necessarily listening to shred metal, but at some point a guitar player at a wedding caught their ear and they started taking lessons. Some of these guys study online with various fusion musicians from Italy or wherever. Nowadays, the world is a lot different. You can sit at home, decide that you want to learn something, and do it at home without having to do all the things you had to do 30 years ago to be able learn that.
Meaning that shred guitar playing is something that a guitarist could naturally end up getting interested in because he’s looking to learn more about guitar playing?
Right. Somebody on the bandstand caught your ear and you wanted to understand that more. Some of the guitar players when I was first starting out were either not Jewish or secular Israelis who were in the U.S. for a number of years, and they had serious chops. You could listen to them and try to learn some things, try to copy them, and then you could take the next step. If that guy was influenced by Van Halen, then maybe you would check that out, too. Unfortunately, that same kind of thing didn’t happen with keyboard players. I kind of wish it had.
Is there pushback to doing that? Do people get upset if they hear you quote a rock song or a guitarist shredding in the metal style?
Yes and no. Every community is different. One of the challenges for being a bandleader is knowing your audience. The Code of Jewish Law starts off, “I keep God before me at all times,” and then, “Know before whom you stand.” I always translate that as the first rule of public speaking or band leading, which is, “Know your audience.” If it’s a super Yeshivish job, we’re not going to play heavy rock beats and throw in pop music quotes, because it’s not appropriate.
How do these audiences differ? What is the difference between Hasidic, Yeshivish, and Modern Orthodox?
There are a few differences. One difference is in their exposure to secular music, their view of what the role of music ought to be at the party, and what’s important. There are two kinds of Hasidim. There is the heavy Hasidic spiritual side, and there’s the culturally Hasidic, as in, we look a certain way, but we like to have a good time, too. You have to know who’s there, and then you either play the latest Hasidic pop hits for the second dance, or you do the older, classic nigunim. In the yeshiva world, the same things applies to an extent, although the in the yeshiva world—to my mind—as a general rule has less of an understanding of music as an avoda, or service of God, than the Hasidic world does. Some do, for example, Rav Hutner had a very strong sense of this, but if I had to stereotype, the Hasidim are hyper into music and the yeshiva guys want to dance at a wedding, but maybe they don’t have as spiritual a view of music in general, although some individuals do. In the Modern Orthodox world, there’s less of an appreciation for what makes Jewish music, “Jewish music,” as it were. If it has Hebrew words and a cool beat, then it’s great.
What’s the story with the Breslov Bar Band?
The Breslov Bar Band is like my fun project. What happened was, I was playing weddings and parties for many years, but one of the things that you feel as a wedding musician is that you’re very constrained. You have to play what the party needs. When I am playing a wedding and I am playing “Od Yishama,” it’s the millionth time I’ve played it, but for that bride and her mom dancing together, they may have had that dream of dancing to that song for 20 or 30 years. I love that I am able to provide that, and it’s great, but I can’t decide, “Hey, I wonder what this song would sound like if I played it in seven, or if I completely re-harmonize it, or if we slow it down and put a reggae groove behind it.” I can’t do any of that, because they have to be able to do that dance and those moments.
I was at a point where I wanted to do something creative with music, and I was feeling very drawn to Hasidic music. I have a friend who was trying to curate a Jewish music night in a jazz bar in Brooklyn, and he reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a night. Perfect opportunity. I said sure, made five phone calls, and had a band. We went and did that first show. I wrote up charts for the band, we played off charts, and 85 percent of what I heard in my head was what happened on the job. We didn’t rehearse, it was just the synergy that these particular musicians had relating to Jewish music, but using different musical language than you might do if you were playing a simcha.
What’s it like playing that music to a sitting or listening audience?
I love doing it. My goal when I play, any time I play, is to create a powerful Jewish musical moment. Listeners will do with that what they will. When you’re playing a very secularized wedding, and they want to just have a hora, and you come in to be the Jewish music for that, to me, that’s very powerful. If I am playing in a bar, and somebody is listening to Hasidic nigunim and connecting to it in some way, whatever they do with it—whether they’re Jewish not—if they have a moment, for me, I consider that a big success musically. And we’ve had some really cool stories that happened while we were playing shows.
How about the work you did for Unorthodox, how did you get that gig?
Unorthodox is interesting. Many years ago, someone reached out to me to play a singles dinner his organization was running. I played the dinner in a restaurant, and it was the worst event ever. Apparently, they had opened the net too wide in terms of who might come, so there were no potential matches. The event was falling apart—I was supposed to just play background music—but the guy who was running it came over and asked me to play songs for people to listen to. It turned into a mini concert, where I took requests from the crowd and played songs. After that, he called again and asked about doing a concert. I had an idea to do a concert based along the concept of, “Funny, you don’t sound Jewish.” I would do the original versions of songs that were presented as “Jewish” to the frum community, but weren’t. The most famous of those is Mordechai Ben David’s “Kumt Aheim,” which people know as, “Yidden.” But it was actually lifted from Germany’s 1979 Eurovision entry, a song called “Dschinghis Khan.” I put together a setlist of that sort of material, but the night before the concert, the guy cancelled it because it was supposed to snow. It never happened and I never did anything with that material, but the week before the gig, I was playing a dinner, and the trumpet player in the band was Frank London. We were talking and he asked what I was up to. I mentioned that I had this upcoming thing, and that I was going to do “Yidden” in the original German and so forth. He laughed, and then a while later, he called about a gig for a woman turning 31 and making what she called a dyslexic bat mitzvah. She was active on the Yiddish Klezmer circuit, had gone to KlezKamp, and knew Frank London. She also knew a woman who taught Hasidic dancing there, and hired the two of them to organize her bat mitzvah music. Frank had another concert that overlapped, and hired me to cover the first hour as the bandleader. The woman was a little contrarian, and told Frank, “I want the original German version of ‘Yidden’ for when we do the line dancing.” And I had just told him I know it [laughs].
Thank God he didn’t tell me who was going to be there. I went to this party, and I am playing and singing and having a great time. Frank joins us and the band sounds great. Then they decided to do a mezinka tantz, and two people got up to sing with the band who Frank clearly knew. They started singing, and it was familiar. I knew these voices from somewhere. It turns out it was the late Adrienne Cooper, who was a famous Yiddish singer and educator, and Michael Alpert from Brave Old World and the klezmer revival. Both famous klezmer musicians. These were people who at that point in my life if someone said, “I want you to play in front of them,” I would have been very nervous. But he didn’t tell me anything and I was just doing my simcha thing. It was an amazing experience and at the end of that, the dance person—her name was Jill Gellerman—and I had jelled pretty well. All the Yiddish people were there, and I guess they saw how I interacted with that community, and at the end of it they decided to call me up and offer me a fellowship to KlezKamp to lead the band for the dance person’s class. I wound up doing that for quite a few years, and as a result I made a lot of connections with people on the klezmer circuit.
In Unorthodox, the badchan [a type of humorist who entertains at weddings] is a fellow named Dan Kahn, who is a Yiddish musician. He has a project called Painted Bird. They were trying to do it authentically, and they needed to recreate a Satmar wedding. I think initially they were going to use Dan’s klezmer band, but they realized that if they wanted to be authentic, a Satmar wedding today wouldn’t have a klezmer band. It would have a one-man band keyboardist with maybe a horn player or additional musicians. I got a call from Germany, from the production company, asking if I would be willing and able to do it on a super-fast turnaround. They needed the music in order to film the scenes.
Did they want original music?
It’s not original music. They had specific songs they wanted. There are actually two mitzvah tantz nigunim, and then the simcha dancing at the wedding. I did those tracks, as well as the background music for while the couple are in the yichud room after the ceremony. They’re alone talking, and the Hasidic waltzes happening in the background, that’s me.
You wrote about book about the mitzvah tantz as well. Explain what that is.
There are three types of mitzvah tantz that get done. There’s the typical Hasidic family that does it, in which case the mitzvah tantz will be an hour-and-a-half or two hours. Then there are the people who come from a Hasidic family, but don’t really relate to it. They do it because it’s their custom to do one. Those take about an hour. Then there are the ones the rebbes do—for the Rebbe’s granddaughter or daughter or son—and those can last until six or seven in the morning. Hours and hours. I remember as a kid being at weddings for nine or 10 hours easy, because my mom would want to stay.
Over the years, as I looked into the mitzvah tantz, I found some sources that addressed it and talked about the beliefs. Some were written, but I’ve also asked Hasidic rebbes and rabbis about their thoughts on it. Basically, there’s a mystical, Hasidic idea that what man does in this world is mirrored in the heavenly spheres above. There is also an idea that the masculine and the feminine attributes of God need to be unified in some way. The wedding symoolizes that. The mitzvah tantz is in effect a symbolic representation of these unified aspects of God, and so it is viewed as a very spiritual moment. If you look at these rabbis when they are dancing, they aren’t necessarily looking at the bride or interacting with her—some are in a way that is very respectful—because they treat it like they are encountering the divine at that moment. As much as it is a musical moment, it is a powerful spiritual moment, too, and they believe that they are accomplishing incredible spiritual things through doing this ritual.
What’s in the book?
It’s mostly transcriptions. I wrote a big essay at the front explaining the mitzvah tantz, the spiritual ideas behind it, different customs, the music, and how the songs are played. If you want a good collection of Hasidic music, to see what that’s about, whether or not you’re interested in the mitzvah tantz, the book is a wonderful collection of a lot of classic tunes as well as a lot of specialized songs.
It’s a powerful thing.
The Alter Rebbe [Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad] said that music is the pen of the soul. It speaks to us in ways that other things don’t. Hasidim say, “When you don’t have what to say, sing a nigun.” It doesn’t have words, but your heart says what it needs to say without words.
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