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May 6, 2005/Nisan 27 5765, Volume 57, No. 36
Childhood friends team up on Jewish record company
JENNIFER GOLDBERG
Staff Writer
Last summer in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jewish, Muslim, Israeli and Arab musicians shared a stage at an event called The Unity Sessions, a concert series devoted to bringing diverse ethnic and religious groups together in the name of music.
The 4,000 attendees had two people to thank for producing the event: 25-year-old Phoenix natives Aaron Bisman and Jacob Harris of JDub Records.
JDub is a nonprofit record and event production company for upcoming Jewish musicians. Bisman, son of Rabbi Mark and Fredda Bisman of Scottsdale, is the executive director and label manager; Harris, son of Kenn and Deborah Harris of Peoria, is the artist incubator.
The two have been collaborators for quite a while. They met at Phoenix Hebrew Academy in 1986 and remained friends even as they attended different high schools and colleges.
"By the time we were finishing up high school, Jake and I both knew that we wanted to do something music-related," Bisman recalls. While Harris studied at Boston University and worked in the management side of the music business, Bisman was involved with Jewish music in New York while attending New York University. Bisman and the other JDub co-founder, Benjamin Hesse, "spent about a year-and-a-half developing the idea for the organization as a record company and also an event production company that wasn't only concerned with making money but was concerned with bringing strong Jewish culture into the secular marketplace," Bisman says.
Today, Bisman and Harris plan music-related Jewish programming for a young audience and release the albums of a small group of innovative Jewish performers.
The JDub artist currently getting the most attention is Matisyahu, a Hasidic reggae performer whose second album, "Live at Stubb's," was released last month. Another artist, So Called, mixes traditional klezmer music with hip-hop on his album "The So Called Seder."
When looking for artists to sign to their label, "we're looking for things that appeal to us, but will also appeal to a wide audience," says Harris. "People who feel like what they're doing Jewishly, they're doing proudly, and feel like it's an authentic piece of their culture. We try to steer clear from things that are irreverent or poke fun at themselves."
Rather than book its artists at synagogues and Jewish community centers, JDub holds shows at secular locations like clubs and parks (when Matisyahu performed in Tempe in February, the show was at the Clubhouse bar).
Harris says that this is done not only because they are trying to develop their artists in the general music marketplace, but because "it's a positive PR piece for the Jewish people, if we can throw the same quality event and we can attract people from all walks of life into a space they can share and learn from."
The club setting is also a natural habitat of the audience JDub has in mind: unaffiliated Jews in their 20s and 30s.
"What we're doing is, instead of programming what we think people want, we're really a part of the community that we program for and create music for," Bisman says. "What we see is that those people go to clubs, and they go out and they party, and they're totally open to Jewish content and Jewish culture and all things Jewish, if it's presented to them in a way that feels comfortable and safe in places that they're already going.
"(Young Jews) don't affiliate Jewish in the same way as our parents did, and the generations before. We don't look to join a synagogue to meet all of our Jewish needs. We can read Heeb magazine, or we can stop by Shabbat services or holiday services when we need, or we pick up a Jewish CD."
As Bisman and Harris innovate on the other side of the country, they still remember their Phoenix roots.
"We came up through the Academy. We have families that have always been Jewishly committed," Bisman says.
Harris adds, "Arizona was hugely influential."
Visit www.jdubrecords.org.
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