Wally Brill

The Covenant is the brainchild of artist/producer Wally Brill.  After twenty years of producing hit records in the US and Europe, Brill thought he was going to write an opera based on tapes of found conversations.  Instead, an encounter with vintage tapes of Jewish cantoral singing led Brill to perhaps the most surprising project in his remarkable career.

That career began inauspiciously, as a gofer for Roulette Records in New York.  But that led to an internship in Roulette's A&R department, which meant young Brill, fresh out of high school, got to go to recording sessions.  He decided that producing music was what he wanted to do; the question of where was answered after seeing a concert of Pentangle and the Incredible String Band, two of England's top folk-rock bands, at Carnegie Hall.  Brill moved to London, where his brother, Dudley Sutton, was making a name for himself as an actor.  There he opened a small, 4-track demo studio.  Not long after, pop singer Kirsty MacColl and her band came in and made a couple of records.  The success of those records got Brill a production deal with Stiff Records - the label that unleashed Elvis Costello, Lene Lovich, Nick Lowe, and Ian Dury upon an unsuspecting public.  At nearly the same time, Miles Copeland asked him to produce records for IRS, which meant that Brill was also making some of punk rock's groundbreaking recordings.

Brill's subsequent career was diverse, to say the least.  There was a brief fling working for a major label in London and Los Angeles ("too corporate," he says); six years as an independent producer and engineer working in a 16th-century manor house in southwestern England in the mid 80s; and one night in a Parisian jail.  "I was arrested for playing flute on the streets," he recalls; "but it was election night, and tradition says that the next day everyone arrested for a misdemeanor is released."  Along the way he produced a series of Euro-dance hits, did pirate radio from a transmitter in the North Sea, and produced records for English singer Annabel Lamb, to whom he was married at the time.  (The Covenant recording, in fact, is dedicated to their son.)

After moving to San Francisco at the request of the experimental dance group Voice Farm, Brill says he "lost the muse for a while."  He credits a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco with getting him back into music.  "Seeing those Fauveist paintings gave me inspiration - I realized, you can do what you want," he says.  He began looking for the right project, and a tape opera seemed like a good possibility.  But in 1995, his girlfriend's father, Dr. David Neiman, introduced Brill to the sounds of the great cantors of the early 20th century.

Brill had already fallen under the spell of the West African Islamic singer Salif Keita and the legendary Pakistani Sufi vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the sound of Jewish cantoral music struck home.  "When I hear Keita or Nusrat sing," he reflects, "it's a sound I could only describe as inspiration.  In secular music, it just sounds like they're trying to make money.  The sound is different."   Brill was looking for a way to express the inspirational side of music, and heard it in the cantors' voices.

American listeners got their first glimpse of that sound when Brill released the track "Kiddush Le-Shabbat" on the Six Degrees compilation Festival of Light.  Much of that album's success (it peaked at #2 on the Billboard World Music charts) can be attributed to the buzz created by Brill's contribution.

But Brill was also determined that The Covenant not turn into another Deep Forest/Enigma clone.  He found additional inspiration in an unlikely source: Auschwitz survivor Helen Lazar.  "She's the most life-affirming woman I've ever met," Brill says.  Possibly the youngest survivor of Auschwitz, Lazar's voice is featured in the track "A Typical Day," a darker work that immediately takes The Covenant out of the realm of pop sampling.  "I really feel like it reflects the breadth of experience for secular Jews, like me," Brill explains.  "Culturally, some of it is funny, and some of it is tragic.  And it's all mixed up together."

Brill called upon all of his producing and engineering skill in putting this project together.  Using instruments as diverse as the Indian tabla and Australian didjeridoo as a context for the cantoral singing, he highlights one of the great benefits of modern technology - the ability to communicate across cultures.  "It's all just like different tunings of the same music," he says.  He also took different approaches to producing the songs.  On "Rtzeh," for example, Brill took a keyboard demo of the song to Joe Goldring and Tim Mooney, left them alone in their studio and turned them loose.  He then took their tapes and cut them up to create the tracks that accompany the singing.

The Covenant's approach to the original cantoral songs is also quite experimental, but as Brill points out, the sampling is done "with love, respect, and a reverential sense of humor."  In fact, it's not too different from what these cantors did themselves: in the early years of the 20th century, the cantors, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, took their prayer tradition out of the synagogues and into the theaters and concert halls.  In effect, they did just what Brill and company have done -- taken the haunting sounds of these ancient melodies out of one context and put them in another. The proof is in the recordings themselves; the reason they even exist is because of the enormous popularity of these cantors as perfomers.  Some of these cantors were among the most sought-after singers of their day - on a par with the pop and opera stars of the time.