“I got a sudden phone call, asking if I was in New York, and a week later, I went in and met with Sheya and Mendy”
“We didn’t have music lessons, and we didn’t have many tapes or records. I loved the music that I heard in friends’ houses and on carpool rides to school, though,” he remembers. “Cassettes like Reb Ben Zion Shenker, Carlebach, the London School of Jewish Song, or early Mordechai Ben David. My mother had a degree in music, so she taught me to read notes.
“Then, Avraham Fried was coming to town to sing in concert. I wanted to go, but as we were a big family and my father worked in chinuch, we never did things like going out alone with my parents. Yet my mother took me, and that was huge. One day I’ll be up there, I can remember thinking. But that was far away from my reality at that point.”
Shlomo moved to Montreal after he married, where he landed a chazzanus job in a big shul after he davened there for one Shabbos. On the side, he sang at weddings, and at one wedding, a band leader hired to produce albums for the Sastmar community came over and asked him to sing in the recording studio for a Satmar album called Besof Umachol. Two years later, Mendy Werdyger of Aderet music heard that Satmar album playing in a store. He thought it was Fried singing. When he played the album to Sheya Mendlowitz, they decided together that they had to track the singer down.
“I got a sudden phone call, asking if I was in New York, and a week later, I went in and met with Sheya and Mendy,” Simcha says. “It was like a dream how fast things started happening — soon I was signed up to record an album, with them handling everything for me. It was an unbelievable chain of siyata d’Shmaya that started with a small job for a Satmar album.
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