Consider It Arranged 

For the albums that SUKI BERRY and I have produced over the years, I’m fortunate that my partner is also my arranger. Suki says that the first thing he does when he gets a song is to sit down and learn the song very well, to really get its essence. After that, he tries to come up with the most appropriate arrangement for that particular song.

After all these years of hanging with Suki, what still astonishes me today about his arrangements is that he’s always able to add some type of shtick or a little extra something into the song to make it special. For example, in Avraham Fried’s, “Hashem’s the World” (composed by Suki’s wife, Chumie Berry, with lyrics by her sister Mrs. Miral Simcha and first appearing on our 1985 All Stars — Torah album), at the words “the earth breaks out in melody,” Suki added a few seconds of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which was a fun and really perfect touch for that moment in the song.

Suki, for his part, is never encumbered by location. I’ve seen him create arrangements in airports, restaurants, the back seat of a car, and sometimes even in the studio itself, during a short lunch break.

I believe the component most crucial to the outcome of a song is the arranger’s frame of mind when he sits down to write the arrangement. Many years ago, MBD called Suki for an arrangement to the famous death-camp train “Ani Ma’amin” for one of the sets on his Once Upon a Niggun album. Suki told me how he sat down to arrange it, yet he felt that whatever he tried, he wasn’t doing the song justice. After all, this was a holy song, and it needed to come through that way. Unfortunately, a few days later, there was a brutal terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and after Suki came home from the mass levayah, he sat down at his piano and the entire arrangement fell into place for him.