$8.99
Sold by music on Tradebit
The world's largest download marketplace
3,252,177 satisfied buyers
The world's largest download marketplace
3,252,177 satisfied buyers
MP3 chava rachel saban - B'Kashti
14 MP3 Songs
WORLD: Judaica, WORLD: World Traditions
Details:
"Chava Rachel is the Jewish ''Enya''- cool groove songster of new music from Israel."- Zohar, L.A., U.S.A.
"I highly recommend this album- it changed the course of my inner life, and surely I have not been the only one." Tsfat, Israel
"This album has just touched such a deep part of my soul, words don''t do it justice. Walking through the streets of London, listening to your music, I just feel like I''m walking with G-d..." Ravit Mikail, London, U.K.
"Gifted with the craftman''s refinement of woman''s voice, Chava Rachel has the power to bring one to a future light- a groove that''s sweetly divine." Adina Rosen, Tsfat, Israel.
Chava finds her voice-
a true story of the soul awakening through song
i never thought i had beautiful voice inside of me. I was a violinist, but not a singer. when my best friends joined the choir in high school i did also, but that was singing in the protection of a group. no one could get me to sing alone. i really had no voice.
then, something happened to completely change the course of my life. i was a junior in Yale college, pursuing a literature degree along with a musical career as a classical violinist, when a wheel flew off the car i was driving. the car flipped, i was knocked unconscious, and had my first spiritual awakening. i clearly experienced the next world, and felt the presence of a friend who had passed away. i heard a heavenly sound; the sound of myself playing the violin. it was the sweetest sound in the world. i began to realize that this sound was inside of me, the song of my soul. i began to realize that i had a soul.
i began to sing in order to heal myself. first, i noticed the healing effects of the vibration of my voice on my physical body. i sang very simply, just tones, no songs. “Ahhhhhh” for example. i moved when i sang, just expressing my inner world with body and voice. then i began singing while playing the violin. nobody does this, except for gypsies and some eastern european folk musicians. i harmonized my voice with open strings and found whole worlds opening up. i stopped playing classical music altogether. i started to play with a great jazz group, The After the End of the World Quartet. i joined a women’s band, Flo Stigmata. i started to write songs for voice and violin, very simple ones. i was doing lots of improvisational dance, and sometimes i would bring my violin and voice to a jam session. the more i moved my body, the better my arms felt and i could play my violin. and the more i sang, the more my soul healed and awakened and started to guide me on a journey that would eventually take me to the land of Israel, where i could truly become who i am, a Torah- loving and observant Jew. in 1994 i released my first album, Eva Sola. it was a minimalist album, simple songs of violin and voice, recorded together in one take.
next, a solo performance piece using the low-flying trapeze grew out of these experimentations with dance, song and violin. in 1996 i created “the girl, the devil, her violin,” (performance and soundtrack) in which i sang, hung upside down, and played my violin from the trapeze. i told a story about a girl who sell the souls of her family to the devil in exchange for a violin which will help her win the love of her beloved. i toured with this performance from SF to Portland, to New Zealand, to Ireland, India, and finally Israel. in Israel my tshuva (spiritual return) began and continues with song.
how did i know that i belong here? because the melodies sung around the Shabbos table of a Chabad family were so familiar, so easy for my soul to follow. i was ragged and rough from 6 months in india, and that one, first Shabbos broke my heart. a week later, in Tsfat, the holy city, i was standing by the grave of the Arizal on his yartzheit. a rebbetzin who met me taught me a very profound and important niggun called Arba Bavot, which we sang together on the walk down to the graveyard. by the time we got to the gravesite my heart was completely opened and my prayer flowed from me like a waterfall. i asked the Arizal to pray for me to make tshuva, to get married, to become holy, to have children; i asked for a complete transformation that would enable me to shed the many layers of false selfhood i had developed like armor after so many years in a personal and collective exile. i begged to be opened to the truth and to be able to receive and truly internalize it.
slowly and very quickly my life started changing. while staying at the mystical hostel Ascent in Tsfat a young Israeli musician heard me playing violin and offered to record my next album, Seeds or Dust, 1998. i named the album after the choice i was making, to leave behind the dust and death of India and move towards the life, fertility, and hope Israel represented. i enrolled myself in a very special Midrasha (women’s Torah school), Berot Bat Ayin, where i began learning how to read, study, and analyze Hebrew texts. at the same time i was learning how to be a Jewish woman as is praised and explained by our sages, and exemplified by the shining, hard-working mothers living in that place. After 6 months, in the season of the harvest festival, G-d answered my most ardent prayer and introduced me to my soulmate and marriage partner, Yosef Saban. We were married on the first of April, 1998. We lived in the center of Jerusalem in a house we called the “Elf House” because of an engraving of an elf on the front door. I was pregnant and so happy! Planning the birth, a friend suggested i record music that i would like to listen to during the labor and from this came my album, Tetze Pua, Music for Birthing, 1999. This is perhaps my personal favorite of all my albums. It has helped many women through the life transition of birth, and is playful as well as serious...
Yimale, 2001 was my next album, recorded between the births of my first and second daughters. These were all songs that i wrote in my first few years of being religious, so the album celebrates this new and exciting relationship i was feeling with G-d and the Jewish people. one song, “Baby, What will you Be?” includes my baby’s in-utero heartbeat and her first babblings. “Avoteinu” sings the story of Itzchak and Rivka’s meeting as the Torah explains it. “Tati” came from an important practice of speaking intimately with G-d as one would with a close friend.
B’Kashti, 2004 is my most recent album. All of the songs are the poetry, or praises of King David put to song.
After a short time in Israel i decided to change my name from Eva to Chava, which is the Hebrew pronunciation of my birth name. i also took on the middle name Rachel, for i was named after my aunt, Chava Rachel. (for those of you who knew me before, my name was Eva Festa...)
my story continues on. i feel blessed to be continuing and contributing to a tradition of singing women, of Miriam the prophetess who led the women in a song and dance of thanksgiving after the parting of the Red Sea, of my grandmother Helen/Odel who loved to sing, and of myself, as i find new ways of bringing song and joy into the world.
File Data