Back Where I Belong

“When Rav Breyer turned to me, I realized that I was being granted the opportunity to fulfill a dream — the professional music world was always my ambition, but it was really more like a fantasy,” Dudi says. “I didn’t believe it would really happen. I was thrilled to be able to organize the choirs for his album. My salary was a serving of cholent and schnitzel from the Shtisel restaurant, which Rav Breyer would bring to me in yeshivah. It sounds pretty silly now, but back then, it was a great deal.”

As he began rehearsing with the choirs, it became clear that Kalish himself was gifted with extraordinary talent. “Back then, to be successful, you really had to understand music — things were a lot more unforgiving in the studio. There was no such thing as computer-generated music or the sophisticated mixing that goes into an album today. You had to get it right, because they couldn’t just click and cut and paste to adjust any mistakes. I had actually learned sheet music from an old Jew, a Holocaust survivor who lived near the Belzer yeshivah on Agripas Street. He had a huge store of classical music that fascinated me. I would sit in his house for hours going over those musical scores. I taught myself to read sheet music and then began writing my own compositions.”

Growing the Industry 

Kalish’s first chance to use that self-taught knowledge came in 1997, when he was asked to arrange the music for an upcoming Belz album of Rav Yosef Tzvi Breyer called Vesimloch Aleinu. He’d written a score for a string quartet — viola, cello, and two violins — and remembers how mortified he felt when the musicians began to play and the music sounded discordant. “I thought what I had written wasn’t good. But then they played it again and I realized that the glitch was theirs, that the score was good after all. I’m not going to say it didn’t have an effect on me — I realized I had real talent.”

Kalish says that while growing up, the soundtrack in his house was a combination of classical Jewish music and the emerging cassettes of Belz. “My favorite was the Belz album that came out in 1985, produced by Reb Mona Rosenblum and Reb Yirmiya Damen, in honor of laying the cornerstone of the big beis medrash in Jerusalem. It was an authentic chassidic album that featured an array of real instruments, and I couldn’t stop listening.”