Hebrew School

Hebrew School is an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.

The project will exploit the unavoidable interplay of contemporary and traditional music, employing creativity and sincerity to create music which speaks to a young Jewish audience. David will apply an experimental ‘indie’ sensibility to a wide auditory vocabulary of Jewish music including Yiddish folk, Zionist and Palestinian nationalist pastiche, and (perhaps scandalously) motifs from Reform and Conservative prayer in American synagogues.

By doing this David will both recreate and comment upon the state of modern Jewish identity in America and find music buried in the lives of American Jews attending Hebrew School. This project will begin the process of creating, recording, promoting and performing this music.

David Griffin began studying music at age 7, when he began ten years of classical piano instruction with renowned Russian pianist Ludmilla Lifson at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA.

Email David at hebrewschoolmusic@gmail.com or call 617.939.3880

David Griffin’s Myspace page

David Griffin began studying music at age 7, when he started ten years of classical piano instruction with renowned Russian pianist Ludmilla Lifson at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA. His Bar Mitzvah present at age 13 was a classical guitar, which he continues to use in his work. David studied music at Sarah Lawrence College and the sarangi in Delhi, India. He went on to work at Mother Teresa’s clinic in Calcutta while playing with a group of Anglo-Indian jazz musicians. Since returning to America he has played as a dance accompanist in Berkeley and in a New York Klezmer band, The Murrays, which were featured on NPR and in the Village Voice. David now plays with the faux-French band Nous Non Plus and appears often in the klezmer-punk band Golem. He often collaborates with choreographers, including the critically acclaimed Christopher Williams. David is constantly writing and composing, focusing on Jewish music, 1960’s pop, indie rock and experimental music.

This project is supported by a grant from the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and made possible with major funding from UJA-Federation of New York.