Tales Of A Jazz Rabbi
Rabbi/Musician Greg Wall talks about his very Jewish musical journey
If nothing else, Greg Wall is an enigma. He’s an in-demand, world class musician—he plays the tenor and soprano saxophones—as well as a noted composer, bandleader, and forward-thinking improviser. He’s also a congregational rabbi, and heads the Beit Chaverim community in Westport, Connecticut. He lives comfortably in both worlds—because, obviously—and found his way to the rabbinate by way of his experiences as a musician.
Wall’s journey, almost 40 years in the making, started when he was a student of tenor legend, George Coleman. A fellow student, via an unusual chain of events, recommended him to the iconic New York-based Israeli band, the Piamentas. That association led to regular gigs on the Hasidic wedding circuit, which somehow morphed into religious observance and studying for rabbinical ordination.
Parallel to Wall’s spiritual odyssey, he’s been a fixture on the New York jazz scene since the early 1980s, and was a big part of the emerging downtown scene, especially as those musicians began embracing their Jewish heritage and music. From 2009-2012, he was the rabbi of the Sixth Street Synagogue in the East Village, and curated a nightly music and educational series—the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy—that featured a big band, the Ain Sof Arkestra, which he co-led with trumpeter Frank London, many John Zorn-related projects, and even the beginnings of Jon Madof’s Carlebach-meets-Afrobeat ensemble, Zion80.
As a leader, Wall’s many musical projects include the innovative Jewish jazz group, Hasidic New Wave, a number of solo projects, and Later Prophets, which features pieces that use the biblical cantillation system as a springboard for composition and improvisation.
“I was teaching myself, and then my son, how to read the Haftorah,” Wall says about the origins of Later Prophets. “I had never learned it. I learned everything from a tape when I had my bar mitzvah. I started learning the cantillation markings, and then I played them on my saxophone. I recorded a few biblical verses outright—where I had the Tanach [the bible] on the music stand in the studio—and I wrote pieces based on certain phrases or verses.”
Wall has been keeping a low musical profile since the start of the pandemic, although he’s still running his synagogue and maintaining his busy teaching schedule, albeit online. We spoke about his incredible journey from secular jazz-head to becoming an Orthodox rabbi, his years with the Piamentas, his work with Hasidic New Wave, the ‘90s-era explosion of creative Jewish music in New York, and how music has been the main focus in his life, which, ultimately, had a major impact on his spiritual life as well.
When did you start studying at the New England Conservatory?
I went to U Mass for one year, and then I took early retirement—much to the dismay of my family—because now I was a college dropout. But I knew during the first couple of months during my first year that I did not want to be a music theory major, I wanted to be a performer, and I really wanted to learn to play the saxophone well. I knew I needed to take a year off and practice eight or ten hours a day, which I did. Then I went to the New England Conservatory, and I consider that my school. Throughout my whole experience at the Conservatory, I was connected with people who were lightyears ahead of me—and not just faculty, students as well—and that drove me to put the time in to not only get the facility, but to really develop my ears, and to try and put everything together. When I moved to New York City in 1982, I had a collection of musicians who were all moving to New York at around the same time. I had people to play with when I got there. That became my scene, Conservatory transplants in New York who were all trying to make it, and all of us were driving back to Boston every weekend to do gigs to make money.
Did you get exposed to Jewish music at the Conservatory? Wasn’t Hankus Netsky doing the Klezmer Conservatory Band at around that time?
I remember when Hankus started that project. He put a sign on Beethoven [editor: before the internet, students at the Conservatory posted messages on a large statue of Beethoven], “Who wants to be in a klezmer group?” No one had heard of that before. Don Byron, Frank London, and a few other people signed up for that. I was actually going through a period studying traditional New Orleans jazz at the time. I had a group and we were transcribing—the same way that Hankus had the Klezmer Conservatory Band learn the language, which was memorizing the recordings, mimicking the recordings, and transcribing it and getting the nuance. I was doing the same thing with Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds, Omer Simeon, and the great New Orleans clarinetists, and listening to a lot of Sidney Beceht and Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and all of that.
But I did play some Jewish music at the time with a great friend of mine, Michael Maleson. He was a wonderful trumpeter and great musical personality. We started something called the National Jewish Music Ensemble. We had some connections and we’d make concerts in Minneapolis and St Louis. We were not really immersed in klezmer tradition although we did play some klezmer music. It wasn’t until much later that I got into klezmer, but not at the Conservatory.
Did your embrace of Jewish music lead to your embracing Judaism, or was it the other way around?
That’s an existential question [laughs]. The first thing I did when I moved to New York was that I needed to get a teacher. Someone had given me the Local 802 phonebook, and looking through the 802 phone directory was getting the phone numbers of your heroes. At that time, I knew what I needed was discipline in my playing. I felt I needed more control, so I called George Coleman up. George Coleman is the quintessential saxophone jock and I started studying with him. He had a little apartment on 14 Street between First and Second Avenues, and it was a one bedroom apartment. The bedroom was closed, but in his living room there was a couch, and then in one corner there was a Fender Rhodes piano. He would sit at the Rhodes and when you were having your lesson you’d stand next to him and play. He’d write things down for you, and the couch was the waiting room. Whoever came next would sit on the couch until he was done with you.
My lesson was on Thursday at three o’clock and following me was a guy with a yarmulka and a beard. I don’t remember asking his name, but he was always friendly, and I would see him every week. One day, I get a phone call. “Hello Greg, this is Meir from George Coleman.” Somehow he got my number. “I want to know if I can study with you.”
I had never met an Orthodox Jew before. My mother had told me that Orthodox Jews were crazy and this proved it. Why would someone who’s studying with one of the greatest saxophonists in the world want to study with me, a 21-year-old pipsqueak? I asked him why, and he said, “You went to the Conservatory. George Coleman is self-taught. I’d like to hear what you have. I know that you studied with [noted jazz educator] Joe Allard and there is a lineage there.”
He started driving out to my house. I was living in Jersey City—he lived in Crown Heights—his name used to be Marty and he was actually a guitarist. When he graduated from college, he went on the road with Brother Jack McDuff. This guy was playing the major league road warrior jazz scene, but he didn’t like the guitar that much. He wanted to play saxophone, but he supported his family by teaching guitar for the New York City public schools. One day, he asked me if I would mind if he davened mincha [pray the afternoon service] at my house. I said, “Knock yourself out.” I didn’t know what that was.
A couple of weeks after that, he asked if I wanted to put on tefillin. I’d never seen tefillin before. But I liked this guy, I liked him very much. He’s a very nice guy—and by the way, he was the best student I ever had—I put on tefillin, said Shema, took it off. The next week he asked me to do it again. I liked him, so I did it. It literally only took a minute. Every lesson I would put on tefillin. Next thing, he invited me over to his house for Shabbos [the Jewish Sabbath is from sundown Friday night until sundown the next day, and religious Jews often invite guests either for a meal or to stay for the entire thing].
I had never spent Shabbos anywhere. Friday afternoon I drove through Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn—before the gentrification it was an interesting neighborhood—and then I got to Montgomery Street in Crown Heights where he lived. I went into his house on Friday afternoon. The table was set. It’s gorgeous, and there’s silver on the table. His family was small at the time—he only had eight children—and the children came out, and they were dressed and lined up in age order. The challah was homemade and there was incredible food. And I couldn't wait to get out of there. I hated it. I had the worst time. He had also invited another friend of his, and the majority of the conversation turned to why everything I was doing in my life was wrong and how I need to listen to the Rebbe and do all these things. But they weren’t rabbis. They weren’t able to tell me why I should be able to do that. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Ironically, a couple of weeks later he developed some type of throat issue and he had to give up playing the saxophone. But that was my first experience with Shabbos and Orthodox Jews.
Many months passed, it’s now June, and I’ll never forget this day. I was in my apartment in Jersey City, and the phone rang at three o’clock in the afternoon. “Hello Greg, this Yosi Piamenta. I need a saxophone player for a wedding tonight.” He got my number from Meir. There were four musicians in the Piamenta band, but they had booked a 14 or 15-piece wedding on a Monday in June. I was thinking, “Who gets married on Monday night?” But being the Piamentas, they decided that they would hire 10 more musicians that day. Of course, Monday in June is prime time for the Jewish wedding scene, there’s not a busier time. I got there, it was at Marina Del Ray in the Bronx, and it was the Piamenta band, nine old guys, and me. The old guys had hearing aids and canes and they hadn’t played in a long time. Meanwhile, I did not know any of the music that they played. Not one song. They all sounded exactly the same. But this is the Piamentas, and every chance they got, they started to jam.
And I could jam.
We connected, and basically the other nine guys stood around—or sat—and I stood up there and we were jamming. At the end of the night, I felt like I met my long lost brothers. They asked me to join the band. They told me that I reminded them of Stan Getz, with whom they had recorded a record. Stan Getz was one of the people responsible for getting them to move to New York and leave Jerusalem. Suffice it to say, I started learning the music. Avi Piamenta called, and said, “I have job for you.” I told him I hadn’t learned the music yet. He said, “That’s ok. It’s in Baltimore. You’ll drive to Crown Heights and we’ll take a bus to Baltimore. He called me back two minutes later. “On one condition, you use the money to buy tefillin.” So I got tricked into getting tefillin.
I eventually learned up the music, and I realized that I didn’t love Hasidic music. I loved the Piamentas. But now that I knew this music, I could start working, and I was able to actually make money. I was playing every night during season, a lot of the time with the Piamentas, although if the gig called for four people, I wasn't there. If they had five, I would be there. But I started working for all the different bands that drew from the same pool of musicians, and it was ok. I didn’t really like it so much, but where else was I going to make money, cash, during the week and then Friday and Saturday night I could still play?
You were still able to do creative music on the weekends. It didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter. But I started spending a lot of time with Jews, and with religious Jews. I realized that there was something really cool about this. I saw how children, even though they were wild, would listen to their parents. I sensed that there was something bigger than me going on, and I became curious. They would pray at the drop of a hat, “We need someone for minyan. Stand here.” It felt good to me being counted for something. I didn’t really understand it that well.
Around the same time I answered an ad in the Village Voice for people who were starting a world music group. I went out to Kew Garden Hills, Queens, and what’s this world music group? It was a few yeshiva guys—one wasn’t religious anymore, one was getting ready to go to medical school—and they wanted to start a wedding band. They were not the best musicians, but musically literate. We played a couple of weddings and they wanted to run us out of town on a rail. We were messing with it. People don’t want to hear a creative “Od Yishama.” They want you to play oom-pa oom-pa. That’s it. But it turns out that the leader of the group, the drummer, was actually a very good singer, and the singer—who wasn’t such a great singer—was a really good songwriter. The two of them wrote these songs, and their originals were really good. We convinced them to just play their original music, and they created the group, Kolos. Kolos started playing a lot. We started getting a big following among young orthodox Jews, who would come to clubs in New York to hear us.
Was this in the mid-‘80s?
This was mid-‘80s. In 1988, I looked up from the stage—I was playing at a place called First on First in the East Village—and I saw this woman. I said, “Thank you God.” I walked right up to her, and we were married a short time later. That night was November 19, 1988, and we consider that our true anniversary.
Actually, I left out an important detail. A group of Conservatory students—this was the group I was playing New Orleans music with—we moved to New York together, and branched out. We started playing 1930s-style, like Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Chu Berry, and then added ‘40s acoustic R&B like Louis Jordan, and things like that. We became very popular. We got a gig at the St. Regis Hotel in the King Cole Room. It was a really great gig. It paid retirement benefits. Crain’s New York Business did a story on the group, about six young musicians making a living from playing music. The band was called the Hi-Tops, and we were together for a long time.
But I was also playing for all the wedding bands—the Neginah Orchestra, the Neshoma Orchestra—and I didn’t really care for it, although I was getting more involved in studying Judaism. We had a few kids, and I had some experiences that made me want to give my kids a Jewish education that I didn’t have. We resolved to put our kids in a Jewish school.
Were you still playing gigs on Friday nights at that point?
I was still playing gigs on Friday nights. We moved to Livingston, New Jersey, so my kids could go to Kushner Hebrew Academy. I didn’t want to be hypocritical, so I started studying, too. There was a Kollel in the town from Lakewood, and Wednesday nights they had a program, and I started learning for the first time.
That was 1999, and December 31, 1999, that was the millennium. That was the big gig where you could make more money playing music than you ever made in one night ever. The Hi-Tops were offered a gig for a ridiculous amount of money, and that was the time that I decided I wanted to keep Shabbos. I turned it down. My friends in the group had seen it coming. They couldn’t believe I would turn it down. But I did, and the Hi-Tops went on with out me that night, and I became Shomer Shabbat [Sabbath observant]. A few months later, my career started taking off. I started getting these breaks.
When did you start Hasidic New Wave?
Trumpeter Frank London, who was a Conservatory classmate of mine, and was also in that group Kolos with me, he had just started a klezmer group called the Klezmatics. We did a tour for the Knitting Factory and decided to take some of our favorite Hasidic tunes that we both knew from the Williamsburg/Boro Park wedding circuit and play them with jazz musicians. Hasidic New Wave was born. We recorded four CDs on the Knitting Factory label and did a lot of tours. I became sort of well known for my work with that group of original music. I was writing for the group, and still doing some of the Hasidic gigs. I also started getting calls to play at people’s weddings. They would call me directly. I put together a group of my favorite musicians and taught them how to play some of the Jewish dance music, and the rest of the time I would play my own brand of Jewish jazz. I did very well financially, and paid the musicians more than they would get from other people. It was really great. I did that through the 1990s into the beginning of the 2000s.
What was Jewish jazz? Would you use a Jewish melody as the head and then improvise?
I was sort of doing that. I had started learning klezmer music. My Jewish jazz started to become informed by this language of Jewish instrumental music, which I had learned from transcribing performances of people like Dave Tarras, Naftule Brandwein, and Shloimke Beckerman. By that time, I think I had a strong Jewish jazz identity and I had time to study at that Kollel. I had been going there on Wednesday nights for an hour and got my first Talmud experience as well. They invited me to come any time durning the week, because they were there Sunday-through-Thursday. I started going for an hour a day, and then two hours a day, and then next thing I knew I was studying for my rabbinical ordination.
Was your schedule study all day, and then jazz gigs at night?
I was studying in the mornings at the Kollel, in the afternoons I practiced, and then I would play at night. I was still doing some Hasidic gigs. The Piamentas band had changed its form because Avi Piamenta moved back to Israel. I took his place in the group—that was in the late ‘90s—Yosi started becoming very popular. He was featured in Time magazine as the “Hasidic Hendrix.” We started getting some really good performing opportunities and playing in New York at the Bottom Line and the Wetlands, and playing concerts around the country. I loved playing with the Piamenta band, because to me, that was Jewish jazz. Even though it was a rock band, that’s like saying Traffic is a rock band. You can be a jazz soloist. You’re still improvising. That was a great experience for me. Plus, the more you’re out there, the more projects you get involved with. The more people want to have you play.
In 2006, I went to Jerusalem to take my final tests to get my rabbinical ordination. The ceremony was at the Western Wall. I got my certificate, and the first thing I did was drive to Kfar Chabad, and I looked for Avi Piamenta. He gave me a hug. I handed him the certificate. He looked at it, and he starts yelling, “Moshiach!!! Moshiach!!!” He couldn’t believe it.
So now I was a rabbi, but I had no intention of being a congregational rabbi. I kept studying at the Kollel. A couple years later, in 2009, and I got a phone call from a friend of mine. He said, “Greg I have a shul for you.” I wasn’t interested. I was playing music and at that time Hasidic New Wave was really doing well. I was producing things. I was having a great musical life and learning Torah. But he said, “It’s in the East Village.” I said, “Hmmm.” The East Village is where I met my wife. That’s Bohemian New York. It started to change to what it is now, gentrified, but back then it still had some of those elements. So I became a rabbi in the East Village at the Sixth Street Synagogue. I did that for three years.
Did you start curating a music series at that time?
That’s right. I turned the shul into the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy. Every night of the week there’d be a class, and after the classes, there was klezmer music. I had friends of mine curate the different nights, and then I kept my night, which always featured me playing with a group. Monday nights were an open study hall with study partners for anybody who wanted to come. We had the big band, the Ain Sof Arkestra, which Frank and I started. We did all original music. For a while I think we were the only Jewish big band playing original Jewish jazz in the country, maybe the world. I don’t know. The Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy was going strong. I became friendly with John Zorn. He started doing shows there, and John Zorn could draw a huge crowd. I got a recording contract with Tzadik Records, and did a couple of records for that. But I ended up leaving and went back to playing music full time. That was in 2012. In 2013, I got an email from one of my congregants who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, who said they were looking for a rabbi. August 1, 2013 was my first Shabbos in Westport, and I’ve been here ever since.
In New York in the 1990s, the Jewish music scene was exploding. How involved were you with that scene?
Heavily. That’s what really got me started on the international level. Zorn had a relationship with Michael Dorf, who ran the Knitting Factory. Dorf had the business drive, and he got some money, but Zorn had the connections with music. Zorn would come up with the lineup, and the Knitting Factory became a compelling place to go because there were great musicians playing there. It was this post-modern downtown aesthetic which became known as the Downtown Scene after a while. Zorn has a lot of interests, and one of the things he became interested in was his Jewish background. He coined the term, Radical Jewish Culture. He and Dorf had a parting of the ways, but Dorf jumped on Radical Jewish Culture. He organized a tour of Europe in the early ‘90s. Hasidic New Wave was on that along with the New Klezmer Trio and God is My Co-Pilot, which was a Jewish-y punk band. Gary Lucas was playing solo to a German silent film that he wrote a score for. The scene took off, and when the Knitting Factory moved downtown to Leonard Street, there was a lot of Jewish culture going on. Hasidic New Wave played there a lot. It wasn’t uncommon that I would play at the Knitting Factory three or four nights week sometimes with different projects, a lot of them having some Jewish flavor to them. Makor, on the Upper West Side, opened later and we played there. Also, Zorn was a consultant at Tonic, and we started playing there, too.
Was it a way for Jewish people to express themselves Jewishly as opposed to through something like the blues or jazz? Were people looking for an authentic type of Jewish expression?
I think so. It’s funny how klezmer became attached to this. I guess to appreciate the radical avant-garde nature of the music we needed to have something traditional, so we could see what it was—perhaps the logical or illogical—outgrowth of. The Knitting Factory and later Tonic would feature traditional klezmer music.
Like David Krakauer and people like that?
Krakauer was never really traditional. By the time he joined the Klezmatics, they were already doing some other things. But when they started they were pretty traditional. They were never a jazz group, although they used downtown elements. But Hasidic New Wave was always what we called a blowing band. It was meant as a way to improvise together. We had guitarist David Fiuczynski, bassist Fima Ephron, and drummer Aaron Alexander playing with us, and those guys can do anything. It was a very fertile time, and it was a way for secular Jews especially to express their Judaism. There was something cool about Judaism. The blues were cool, and until hip hop took over, jazz and R&B were such an important part of African American musical culture, and there was something very cool about going back to the roots. We didn’t really have anything like that Jewishly. In my Reform Sunday school days, we’d learn Israeli songs, but Israeli songs were not tradition. That was new. That was a manufactured tradition. I think that klezmer and klezmer jazz or Jewish jazz really gave people something to sink their teeth into. Some people got really into it and that led to them learning Yiddish and folk dances. How many people became religious? Not too many. But for me, the music, the whole scene, the traditional music, the weddings, and the Hasidic nigunim, that really brought me into Jewish culture and religious culture in way that was able to give me the much needed direction I needed.
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