sway machinery
Jeremiah Lockwood for The Forward
The Sway Machinery’s Jeremiah Lockwood recounted his trip to Mali for Festival Au Desert to The Forward this morning. You can check out that awesome article HERE.
“Ag Mohamed invited me into a Tuareg tent, where men were singing together in call and response. He nudged me into the circle, and we clapped and sang along. Two little girls were accompanying the group with drums, under the watchful eye of their mother, who was coaching their playing. Everyone was laughing and applauding each other’s creativity with raucous catcalls. In my mind’s eye, I saw the needlepoint on my grandparents’ wall, and I could hear the singing of zemiros, or Jewish hymns, and the sound of nigunim, wordless melodies, with my grandfather and my cousins at my grandfather’s tish. I looked around the faces in the tent and saw the kindness born of mutual respect. And I was grateful because I had been blessed to fulfill a verse of scripture: “Behold how good it is to sit in the unity of brotherhood.””
View From The Desert
I’ve been talking a lot about Mali’s Festival Au Desert, which The Sway Machinery just performed at. For some reason, I’m just totally captivated by the idea of a music festival right in the middle of the desert sand dunes. When I found BBC World Service’ gallery of photos from the festival, I knew I had to share some of them here:
Sway in the Desert
Afropop.org has a great article recounting the recent Festival Au Desert, including some great insights on The Sway Machinery and what seems like their multiple collaborations with Malian musicians. You can check that out HERE.
“In the early evening in one of the tents a remarkable collaboration occurred as the American group, Sway Machinery, had a jam session with the Malian band from the city of Gao, Super Khoumeissa. At the outset, their music couldn’t be more different but as they played together a wonderful melding occurred. Super Khoumeissa has a unique sound that immediately hooked both Animal Collective and the Sway Machinery. As Jeremiah Lockwood, the leader of Sway Machinery put it, their sound is a “unique interaction with amplification technology that spins traditional music and repositions it into the realm of hardcore electronica.” The horns of Sway Machinery lent a chromatic depth to Khoumeissa’s already reverberating buzz, and Lockwood’s guitar playing melded perfectly into the mix. The groups made an arrangement to record together in Bamako a few days after the Festival ended so we’ll have to wait to hear what comes out of this meeting in the sands.“
What We Did With Our Winter Vacation
Well, we’re back from vacation, and it’s time to catch you all up on what you might have missed over the break. Here ya’ go:
- The Faster Times included The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble in their Best of 2009 Music list.
- The Boston Survival Guide chose Girls in Trouble to include in their 2009 Band Roundup.
- Made Up Disease (MUD) posted a really nice and very thorough ode to JDub, including a whole bunch of our artists, like The Macaroons and Balkan Beat Box.
- Music magazine Blurt included Alicia of Girls in Trouble in their The Artists Have Spoken: Best of 2009 feature.
- JTA’s The Fundermentalist shed a little light on the recent Jdub/Nextbook partnership.
- The Forward listed Soulico and The Sway Machinery as picks on their 2009 Forward Fives list.
- The University of Oregon’s Oregon Voice had a great writeup on Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker.
- DJ Anjali listed Soulico’s Exotic on the Speaker as part of his Top 5 of 2009 in the Portland Mercury.
- Digital City has a fantastic interview with Dave Schneider of The Macaroons — conducted by Corn Mo’!
- The Sway Machinery is one of LimeWire’s Best of 2009 Staff Picks!
- Jeremiah Lockwood, of The Sway Machinery, published an op-ed in The Forward about the band’s trip to Mali.
- Our friends over at Tablet Mag talk up The Macaroons in a podcast dedicated to the best family-friendly music of 2009.
Last but not least, I’ve posted more photos from Jewltide 7 under the cut! All credit goes to Dan Sieradski.
WNYC Loves The Sway Machinery!
Hey there everyone out in the world. Happy new year!
The Sway Machinery is leaving this weekend for Mali to perform at the Festival of the Desert and to record our new album. It’s the most exciting project we have embarked on so far and we are truly grateful to begin the new year on such a positive and hopeful note!
This week we’ve been included in a few best of 2009 round-ups–HERE you can check out a clip from our WNYC performance last spring, currently featured in a broadcast of Soundcheck’s Best Live Performances of the year. Thanks, John Schaefer!!
The New York Times Does Hanukkah With JDub
Yesterday, JDub, The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble all got some great mentions in The New York Times’ T Magazine blog. You can check that entire article, “Not Your Bubby’s Hanukkah Music”, out HERE. Full text is also included after the jump.
“Alicia Jo Rabins’s tender version of the “other” dreidel song “Sivivon Sov Sov Sov” should be a Hanukkah standard. Her plucked violin and gorgeous voice could be a Jewish “Silent Night.” “The great thing is that even Hanukkah songs are in minor keys,” says Rabins, “which makes it easy to cover them with a creepy twist.” Rabins also plays in the great klezmer punk band Golem and has her own project, Girls in Trouble, which chronicles women in the Old Testament.”
Help The Sway Machinery Get to Mali!
The Sway Machinery has put together a very special fundraiser to help them along in their pilgrimage to Mali for Festival Au Desert, and that is taking place 12/12 at The Sixth Street Synagogue in NYC:
LIVE AND IN CONCERT
SHAKING THE PULPIT
OF THE 100 YEAR OLD SIXTH STREET COMMUNITY SYNAGOGUE
325 E. Sixth Street (between 1st Ave. and 2nd Ave.)
The Sway Machinery
Saturday December 12 @8:30PM
A WILD CELEBRATION of the 2nd NIGHT of CHANUKAH
-A CONCERT FUNDRAISER FOR-
*THE SWAY MACHINERY PILGRIMAGE PROJECT*
PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE NOW
$15.00
— OPEN BAR —
Rocker-Cantorial innovator Jeremiah Lockwood accepts an historic invitation to be the first Jewish performer to hit the stage at Mali’s “Festival of the Desert” taking place in the heart of Islamic West Africa
IN 3 AND A HALF WEEKS!
The band needs your $ support to unleash
“THE SWAY MACHINERY PILGRIMAGE”
film documentary, CD recording and fund raising effort with Emmy Award winning filmmaker, Jonathan Hock who will follow The Sway Machinery on an extraordinary journey thru the Sahara desert and Malian recording sessions as ombudsmen of peace, reconciliation and collaborative musical discovery.
“The Sway Machinery Pilgrimage, as they have entitled their Africa project, is a beautiful example for the world of the great role artists can play in building bridges of love and understanding between cultures. This project is of clear importance in establishing new and positive images of Jews and Muslims engaging with each other.”
–Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman, Cordoba Initiative
GOOD NEWS ABOUT JEWS AND MUSLIMS
DOESN’T SELL AS WELL AS BAD NEWS
WHICH IS WHY THE SWAY MACHINERY NEED YOUR HELP
- TO RAISE FUNDS IMMEDIATELY-
AND MAKE SOME NOISE
Pilgrimage, pt. II
Hey everyone.
The temperature in my brain keeps mounting as I work my way forward with all the logistics of our trip to MALI! We are planning a big kick off benefit concert Saturday night, December 12….more about that soon! Still, I’m rapidly tying up all the loose ends, getting my travel inoculations, finishing arrangements for the new material we will be recording, trying to talk to as many people as possible about travel in Mali to prepare myself!
We are still crazy short on funds for the trip, so if anyone out there feels like supporting this project, here’s a link to a donation site.
THE SWAY MACHINERY: Pilgrimage
Hey everyone!
I am in a state of great excitement preparing right now for The Sway Machinery’s first trip to Africa!
We have been invited to perform at the legendary Festival of the Desert in Mali, the festival that launched the career of Tinariwen and has featured all of the greats of Malian music (Ali Farka Toure, Selif Keita) as well as international luminaries like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and Manu Chao!
We are hitting the big time: playing for an audience of 10,000 in the middle of the SAHARA DESERT…I kid you not.
The Sway Machinery will also be the first band representing any aspect of Jewish culture at this massive Malian festival. As you may know, Mali is an Islamic nation, where Judaism was formally banned in an Inquisition in the year 1492 (the same year as the more famous Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion of the Jews), so the prospect of traveling to Africa as a representative of the Jewish community is extremely daunting, exciting and deeply humbling!
While in Mali we will also be followed by a small film crew documenting our experience, PLUS we will be recording our next album in Mali after the festival
It’s all too much to describe in one blog entry, so I will attempt to post weekly updates about the progress of our preparation here on the JDub blog page. Also, I’d like to put it out there that we are still grossly under budget for this project. Feel like getting involved? You can make an immediate impact on the success of this unprecedented meeting of cultures by making a tax-deductible donation. Click for the donation page of our fiscal sponsor, Joodayoh, Inc:
Above is a video clip from the Festival. Feast your eyes! Khaira Arby, who is featured in this clip, will be one of the guest artists performing with us on the new Sway Machinery album that we will be recording!
Antibalas announces residency in Brooklyn
The Brooklyn afro-beat kingpins, hardest working band in the industry and not to mention members of JDub’s The Sway Machinery, Antibalas are back! Er, sort of. Antibalas is temporarily bringing the party back to Brooklyn for a weekly residency at the Knitting Factory. The concerts—to be held December 3rd, 10th, 17th, New Year’s Eve, and extending into January, 2010—promise to hearken back to Antibalas’ legendary Africalia! dance parties at Tribeca’s now-defunct No Moore club, and further cement the band’s’ irrepressible reputation as an unstoppable live music juggernaut.