Support Eliana Light's album Ora Hi ("She is light")
One of our favorite Jewish music colleagues is releasing two albums this year, funded by supporters like you! Please consider contributing here.
We were already fans of Eliana Light when we met her at Limmud a few years ago. Since then, we have had the great fortune of singing, playing, chanting, and leading prayer services with Eliana on several occasions.
Last week we were honored to be a part of her amazing concert and live album recording for Ora Hi ("She is light," the title track), Michael as sound engineer and me (Bonnie) on harmonium and vocals. Start to finish, the experience of spending these two days making music with Eliana and an all-star cohort of musicians was inspiring, spiritual, unforgettable! This particular group (Drew Cohen, Coleen Dieker, Chava Mirel, Sammy Rosenbaum, Sam Rotenberg, and Ariel Root Wolpe) had never been its own band before. Yet at least from my perspective, our energy together and the organic creation and evolution of our collective sound was remarkable. It was an inherently stressful undertaking that somehow carried way more joy than stress, even for Michael whose engineering job was monumental!
Eliana described the feeling as if a "dream" a few times over the course of these two amazing days, and that definitely captured it for me. It was a dream to participate in a project like this, to share the stage and the liner notes with musicians of this caliber. Kosi r'vaya! ("my cup overflows" - the link is to one of my favorite chants from Rabbi Shefa Gold - and Rabbi Gold includes a snippet of kavanah about that chant here as well).
I wish I could have bottled this synergy up and carried it around to cling to and share with everybody forever! Short of that, I have been basking in the rough mixes Michael is sending around, and the live concert recording, and eagerly anticipating the release of Ora Hi so that everyone can have a little bit of the love, hope, and light (She is light!) we felt making it.
