Kabbalah and Yiddish harmonise for an old-new sound

Melbourne musos Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss, together with academic Nathan Wolski, have created an album that reimagines a 300-year-old Yiddish song book. MIRIAM HECHTMAN asks them how they did it.

Cousins Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss are musicians and core members of the band Husky. They grew up together in Melbourne’s secular Yiddish community and together with Husky’s sister Evie, form the music trio The Bashevis Singers.

Dr Nathan Wolski is a scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition with a special focus on the Zohar, the 13th century classic of medieval Kabbalah. Now an academic at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) at Monash University, he also grew up in Melbourne’s secular Yiddish community.

In 2020, in a project funded by the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash Univeristy, the three began working on the collaborative album, Soul Joy 1727, which will be released this month. The album is a reimagining of the oldest Yiddish song book, Simkhes ha-Nefesh part 2, by Elkhonen Henele, son of Rabbi Binyomin Wolf Kirkhhan, first published in Fürth, Germany, in 1727.

The collaboration went something like this: Nathan created something that “looked” like a modern song from the original lyrics. Gideon would then play the single line of melody from the 1727 edition. After they all reached agreement about the genre and vibe they wanted, Gideon, Husky and Evie disappeared into studio land for a couple of months, "and emerged with something ripped straight from the bowels of the 18th century, that sounds at once familiar and like nothing you’ve ever heard before", as they described it.

HUSKY

It was sort of because of lockdowns that all of this happened. In between lockdowns in 2020, Nathan and I met at a little gathering at [artist and musician] Anita Lester’s place. I walked over to say hello and we ended up talking all night about Kabbalah. I asked him, how does the Zohar deal with love and death and God and wine – all the big things.