"Yigal was always a tremendously gifted composer. The songs he created were not just 'noisy music' but real songs"
We worked hard. Initially, we took any child who could sing without going flat, and then we’d try to teach him how to sing. Choir rehearsals were held every Sunday, and the children’s vocal abilities grew over the months. Some needed quite a bit of training, but once taught, they came through.
I had a lot of musical experience, but I’d never worked with children. Yigal, though, was a teacher — he knew boys and had a knack for encouraging them. We both lived in Stamford Hill, but Yigal taught in Golders Green, so he had some connections there. There wasn’t much appreciation for the choir in Stamford Hill at the time — it was known as “Yigal’s meshugassen” in the early days — but there was more interest in Golders Green, and as the records came out and the choir was better known, more children applied. Several of them eventually became maggidei shiur and roshei yeshivah, proof that encouraging kosher talent never hinders development.
Yigal was always a tremendously gifted composer. The songs he created were not just “noisy music” but real songs. They were different from the Jewish songs sung at that time, and admittedly, when I’d hear his new material for the very first time, it didn’t always grab me. But once I heard it twice, I always caught on. And those compositions have stood the test of time.
We needed funding for the records, which Yigal raised. The first two records, Ma Navu and Borchi Nafshi (the “tzitzis album”), in 1970 and 1971, were recorded in a very expensive, advanced studio, where Frank Sinatra had recorded. The amount we paid for an hour of studio time was what I earned in a week working for a real-estate company. We arrived there with the choir and a band and recorded the music and the vocals together. I think that the distinctive sound on those records was because the entire thing was recorded live, together, instead of on separate tracks. In fact, the engineer could not believe how well-mannered our boys were.
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