Songs of Desire – Pharaoh’s Daughter (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I love the idea that our ancient tales and archetypal characters are still a root source for many of the stories we tell and the music we make. As if the music itself is an ever-evolving vessel for carrying the wisdom through the ages, and the music maker merely a custodian of sacred truths. And if this is true in a very general sense of much music made today, consciously or otherwise, Songs of Desire is a very deliberate exploration of such an idea.

Conceived nearly twenty years ago, the idea was brought to life by musician and Pharaoh’s Daughter band leader Basya Schechter, who studied with scholar and musician Yosef Goldman, to explore, uncover and fully understand the deeper meanings of the texts known as The Song of Songs. This, in turn, enabled her and the band to create a sonic vision of what, for thousands of years, had been merely words captured on parchment, the dry and dusty world of academia and canon, thereby breathing new life and relevance into the stories. Once lifted off the page, this important collection of poems, dreams, and metaphors pulses with tales of romance, yearning, and forbidden love, carefully reworked into something sensual, seductive, human, relatable, and, most importantly, alive. And these stories in particular, and the themes in general, are found as a very human heartbeat in the sacred tomes and texts of faiths across the globe.

And just as this vibrant re-presentation of this important and much-discussed story moves through Spanish, French, Arabic, Yiddish, English, as well as the original Hebrew, it is the language itself that adds to the mystery and melody; musically, sounds are drawn from all over the musical map, across genres and geographies, and where language might be a barrier, it becomes music in its own right.

“Asleep” sets the scene: lovers meet for a secret nighttime tryst in the City of Peace, but it also introduces us to the exotic sounds that carry the story being replayed here. Anchored by a busy beat, the surrounding space is filled with the sounds of the traditional and the modern: Oud and guitars, flutes and violins.

As soon as the opening bars of “Yonati” drift in, a sonic picture is painted, this is not here, this is not now, at least it seems so to those of us in the modern West, this blend of Middle Eastern folk traditions, of music that came to the us by another path, of what would centuries after these stories were written be termed “arabesque” is almost an act of spiritual and sonic time travel.

“Better” is a song built on gorgeous waves of vocals, themselves as much instruments in their own right as a form of direct communication, the hushed ebb and flow of beats and chiming motifs, exotic and incendiary. “Lebanon” is an ancient sound rendered in the style of modern folk-pop music, just as such sounds would have been the popular music of the day in their own formative era. And similarly, the recent single “Oori Oori” spans the same distances while reminding us that, irrespective of chronology, culture, creed, or country, it takes a dead heart not to immediately connect with the joy that emanates from it.

Read the music papers, and you will be bombarded with lazy music journalists announcing the new Dylan (not me, other lazy journalists) or crowning the new Led Zeppelin, as if people can’t conceive of anything more musically important than reviving something only fifty years old. Song’s of Desire puts such shallowness into perspective. Here are songs based on stories that are between two and a half and three millennia old. If that isn’t a real connection to our own rich past… well.

What makes this project, this album, these musicians, and Basya Schechter so demanding of your attention is the way they remind us that such stories in our ancient texts, our holy books, our historical records are as full of life, color, heart, and indeed heartache, joy, and humanity as anything being written today. They just needed the right interpreter and the perfect medium to restore them to their vivacious glory.

Songs of Desire by Pharaoh’s Daughter is out now on *Tzadik Records.*