Guy Mendilow’s
Ancestral and Audio Mix
By Susie Davidson
Advocate Correspondent
CAMBRIDGE - Guy Mendilow began his professional music career at age 10 in the internationally-acclaimed American Boy Choir, touring abroad as well as at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the UN and Boston’s Symphony Hall. By 15, Mendilow, who grew up in and remains a citizen of Israel, Great Britain and the US, was performing solo on the boardwalks of Eilat.
Mendilow has lived and performed in Mexico, Brazil, Israel, South Africa, Canada, Taiwan and across the U.S., and speaks and sings in four languages. In 2001, he released Soar Away Home on Earthen Groove Records. Following his return from Brazil in June, 2002, he began the Guy Mendilow Band, where the influences of the five continents he has called home are mixed in its Brazilian and Israeli, Hindustani, folk, jazz and blues, distinguished by his unique overtone singing. The ensemble, which appears this Saturday evening at 8 p.m. at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, will feature four voices, guitars, bass, cello, berimbau and drums.
Personnel include Boston-based soul/R&B/jazz vocalist Lilli Lewis and mezzo-soprano Carrie Cheron. Jerusalem native and jazz/rock/Middle Eastern guitarist Idan Ballas, New Orleans bassist Jeff McAuliffe, eclectic baritone singer Lyman Opie, performance artist and cellist Lisa Masotta and veteran jazz drummer Mark Nathanson round out the eclectic roster.
Mendilow’s sometimes whimsically playful set incorporate the berimbau, a moody, pulsatingly rhythmic instrument, as well as folk ballads, bossa-style drum beats, and music for his remarkable overtone singing. This signature technique features a steady tonal pitch reminiscent of a bagpipe or tambura. Additional audible strains, often eerie and reedlike and also uncannily produced by Mendilow, improvisationally float above the basic audible ray. The aesthetic melange derives from Brazilian, Israeli, Hindustani, folk, soul and blues genres, as diverse in essence as Mendilow’s own background.
Both sides of his family have included famous rabbinical scholars and heads of yeshivot. “However, I was in fact raised in an atmosphere of religious tension in Israel,” he said, due to the the political influence yielded by the extreme Orthodox. “While my parents had to serve in the military, my father fighting in three wars, for instance, the ultra-orthodox are not obliged to the army, while my family paid taxes, the ultra-orthodox do not.”
The sense of second-class citizenship contributed to his parent’s ultimate decision to leave Israel. “It was not until college in Oberlin that I experienced renewal circles with much music, and an applied Judaism that touched on modern issues important to me.”
His mother’s parents, Sarah and Nachum Gush-Halav, were from Romania and Transylvania. “While teenagers they joined a leftist Zionist movement and worked on the Jewish underground during WWII, smuggling goods into ghettos and work camps and helping Jews escape, by forging documents and other means,” he added. They escaped to Palestine on a Polish fishing boat and were hidden on a kibbutz near the Galilee. “They adopted the surname of the sheltering dairy-farming family, Gush-Halav, ‘block of milk,” said Mendilow. “I grew up listening to my grandfather’s incredible adventure stories.” His grandparents founded homes for troubled youth which set a precedent and changed the nature of social work in the state.
Adam Mendilow, his paternal grandfather, came to Palestine from Russia to found the Department of English at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His wife Myriam founded Lifeline for the Old (Yad LaKashish), which provided support services for both Jewish and Arab elderly and disabled and continues to work today with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia and South America.
“I cannot consider myself a full-fledge Israeli, having lived the majority of my life outside of Israel,” said Mendilow. “Nor am I entirely British, despite my passport, or American despite years of living in this country. Whatever it is I am and wherever I find myself, I place myself in the tradition of my grandparents, who practiced these values.”
The Guy Mendilow Band plays this Saturday, March 29 at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second St. Cambridge. Tickets are $12/$10 for CMAC members, students, and seniors. For more information, call 617-522-9589, or visit www.guymendilow.com or www.cmacusa.org. CMAC is wheelchair accessible.