"I have to find the right balance of two styles, mixing and matching so everyone will be happy"
Joey Newcomb’s “Thank You Hashem” is a Corona wedding staple, of course! And to rekindle the matzav in a small crowd, I find that Beri Weber’s “Kerestir” niggun always gets the crowd pumped.
Following the direction of my rav, I will not sing while there is mixed dancing. I once arrived at a wedding in the City of London, where the event planner had booked me for a twenty-five minute slot, within a line-up of other singers and entertainers. He’d assured me that dancing would be separate, but when I arrived, it wasn’t so. I was stuck—I knew that I couldn’t sing. When I asked what was going on, the bride’s uncle, who was a lawyer, came over to censor me for “causing the couple embarrassment.” The sticky situation was resolved by the kosher caterer, who creatively produced a line of huge flowering plants. In the end, the crowd loved the twenty-five minutes of well-known kumzitz classics so much that they kept asking for more, while the men and women kept to their own side of the flowers.
We have a family nusach for the Hagaddah, which is a staple in the extended family. Of course, I need to make things kid-friendly, and my kids like to sing Hershy Rotenberg’s composition for “Kadeish, Urchatz, Karpas, Yachatz” — that’s the one Avraham Fried sang on Project Relax. I sing that with special-needs groups of children too, to prepare them for Pesach.
Since I sing for a very diverse spectrum across the communities here, I once sang at a Jewish wedding in a very trendy South Manchester crowd, and some teens told me afterward that they never knew Jewish music could be even more entertaining than their regular nightlife.
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