The old saying goes, “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” But in this particular case, it’s Nefesh Mountain that’s coming, to celebrate Chizuk Amuno Congregation’s 150th anniversary.
A Montclair, New Jersey-based musical outfit that fuses Appalachian bluegrass and Americana with Celtic and Eastern European melodies, Nefesh Mountain will perform on Saturday, Jan. 28, at 7 p.m. in the main sanctuary at Chizuk Amuno, 8100 Stevenson Rd. in Pikesville.
At the heart of Nefesh Mountain, a quintet founded in 2015, is husband-and-wife team Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff, both of whom are multi-instrumentalists. The band’s most recent album is “Songs for the Sparrows,” which was recorded in Nashville and inspired by a family “roots trip” to Poland and Ukraine in 2018. Among the guest musicians on the album are bluegrass luminaries Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Bryan Sutton.
“This is an album that, under the hood and above, brims over with celebratory pride: It’s the music one sings to announce themselves, and simply to embrace the bountiful place to which their life’s journey has taken them,” wrote Andy Crump of the No Depression music magazine and online publication. “With this record, Nefesh Mountain invites us to consider the Jewish past not in grief but in gratitude: We’re alive, so it’s incumbent on us to sing life’s praises, which frankly applies to the present, too.”
Rolling Stone called Nefesh Mountain “a master class in string music,” while their music was described by Bluegrass Today as “Infectious, exuberant and infused with pure melodic prowess.”
When asked by the JTA global Jewish news source in 2021 about the title “Songs for the Sparrows,” Lindberg said, “[The] sparrow is a bird that lives all over the world, on every continent. For us, these little birds symbolize the small but mighty voices that have been discriminated against throughout the ages. These songs on the album are for them, for the lives that were lost in the Holocaust, for the voices silenced, for anyone facing hate, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism.”
In the past, Nefesh Mountain has performed at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts in Owings Mills and for Pikesville’s Har Sinai-Oheb Shalom Congregation.
For information about the Nefesh Mountain concert at Chizuk Amuno, visit chizukamuno.org/event/nefesh-mountain-in-concert.html.
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