Hal Aqua, front man for the klezmer fusion group The Lost Tribe, is always on the lookout for diverse musical traditions that merge inside a singular “sweet spot.”
Despite his wild popularity with fans of klezmer, the Ashkenazi folk art wafting through generations of Jews, Aqua’s passions accommodate a vast repertoire of Jewish world music.
Aqua may well be a melodic force of nature onstage, but in person he’s just a laid-back, delightfully regular guy — an unpretentious breath of fresh air.
His soft voice is a guided mediation on the culture of the 1960s, detours in his own Jewish path, his discovery of Jewish music and klezmer, and their inevitable overlap.
Aqua wears lots of professional hats in Denver (including the trademark one on his head today). Prior to founding The Lost Tribe in 2010, he headed the Jewish world music group Los Lantzmun from 1998 to 2008.
He’s the musical director at B’nai Havurah; teaches classes and seminars on Jewish world music; and facilitates distinctive Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations with his wife, artist Risa Aqua.
Aqua also has an alter ego known as Cowboy Hersh, “the silliest singing cowboy in the West.”
Quite a portfolio. Where to start?
How about his unusual last name?
“Aqua is my family’s actual name, although my dad’s father came from Minsk in Russia,” he says. “Aqua isn’t a Russian word but this has been our name since forever.
“I have a romantic suspicion that I have Italian roots,” he smiles. “I know some of the early Ashkenazim migrated from Rome and northern Italy. And of course Roman Jews go back thousands of years, so . . .”
Drawn to Sephardi culture, he jokingly calls himself a “wannabe Sephardi. I don’t think I have a direct claim, but I love the music, Ladino, everything.
“One of my emerging goals is to see the connections between all the sources that make up Jewish world music,” he says. “We must respect and honor all the cultural milieus in which we find ourselves — especially in the Diaspora.”
Master of the guitar, mandolin, Middle Eastern lute and hand drums, Aqua also sings. “I’m a vocalist, not a chazzan. I enjoy using my voice in expressive ways.”
Aqua, who’s 70, came of age in the 1960s, when Judaism had little merit in America’s counter-culture and a few choice guitar chords might take you further down the road.
The guitar was the first instrument Aqua picked up, at 15. He was a “nerdy, skinny, brainy kid” in search of popularity, the ultimate teen prize. It worked. “The guitar is still my instrument of choice.”
Aqua, who says his Jewish training “was kind of minimal,” grew up outside Wilkes-Barre, Pa. His father was raised Orthodox and his mom, now 95, didn’t speak Hebrew.
Observance centered around the major holidays.
“I was a Bar Mitzvah, learned how to speed-daven and attended Hebrew school,” he says. “But I didn’t know what the words meant. It was a bare bones Hebrew education.”
The Aquas were culturally Jewish in a small town with hardly any Jews.
“I had an outsider status from a very early age — and my Jewish identity was a bit defensive. Fortunately my parents were not Holocaust survivors, but their world view was, ‘Don’t trust the goyim.’”
Although Aqua’s family was not musical, his love of the art form continued unabated throughout the decades.
In the late 1960s, Aqua enrolled as a graphic design student at Carnegie Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and sang in coffee houses at night. The folk music revival, the British Invasion and Leonard Cohen were his musical guides.
“I never thought of music as part of my profession then, but it was certainly a creative social outlet as opposed to cerebral, like design,” he says. “Music was my passion and design was my career. I had a dual identity.”
After living in Boston for a couple of years, Aqua moved to Denver in 1973 and quickly found a job at a design studio.
He also joined the local music scene, which stimulated his senses beyond all imagining. “I discovered the Denver Folklore Center, which was in an old, ramshackle building on 17th Ave. It was a really warm environment.”
His two major comfort zones were the folklore center (later Swallow Hill Music), where he was part of the original folkie crowd; and the University of Denver.
“I started a Sunday night coffee house called Sweet Loretta’s, named after a lyric in the Beatles song ‘Get Back,’ at DU,” he smiles. “It was quite a place.”
Aqua spent his daylight hours as a graphic designer at Rocky Mountain School of Art in Capitol Hill and his evenings practicing with other folkies or busking on the Denver streets.
“Jewish music was still totally outside my realm, so I learned reggae and Caribbean music and Irish folk songs,” he says. “I really loved those ethnic sounds. But I was totally clueless about my own culture.”
His exile from Judaism, and his personal life, were about to undergo a dramatic change.
Aqua met Risa Towbin at the Capitol Hill chavurah in the 1980s. The group, which did not affiliate with a synagogue, embodied the spirit of the 1960s.
“A young married couple that later moved to DC led the chavurah,” he says. “They were young, engaging, very knowledgeable and full of Yiddishkeit.”
As his relationship with Risa deepened, Aqua decided it was time to “learn who I was as a Jew. I knew reaching back to my past wasn’t enough, because I wasn’t comfortable in an Orthodox setting and my family wasn’t Orthodox anyway.”
Risa introduced him to her parents and the Colorado Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, now B’nai Havurah. “My feeling was, ‘Where has this kind of Judaism been all my life?’”
Aqua began studying synagogue music with Rabbis Brant Rosen and later Stephen Booth-Nadav, who both encouraged him to become a prayer leader.
“B’nai Havurah had a Sunday School, which offered me the chance to step up and teach music,” he says. “I would literally learn the songs from Risa Saturday night and teach them to the kids on Sunday.
“I was totally faking it,” he laughs.
A mind-blowing event occurs once, maybe twice in a lifetime.
Aqua has experienced a few of them — always in relation to music.
For example, his discovery of Sephardi and Mizrahi music (which combines European, North African and Arab elements) was revelatory.
Aqua heard the Klezmatics, the most famous klezmer band of its time, perform at B’nai Havurah in 1987. “I had never heard anything like it,” he marvels.
The epiphanies made him realize that the ethnic music he adored had always flourished in his own cultural backyard. “It was time to catch up musically,” he adds.
Booth-Nadav introduced him to Jewish Renewal, which Aqua saw as an extension of Reconstructionism due its integration of the arts in prayer. He studied at the Davennen’ Leadership Training Institute at the Elat Chayyim Center of Jewish Spirituality for two years.
Aqua has never attempted to land in one Jewish place. “I try to get an overview and a familiarity with most kinds of Judaism, and The Lost Tribe is a huge outlet for this.”
The Aquas were married in 1987. Their daughters Zoe and Annie are both klezmer artists: Zoe in New York, and Annie with The Lost Tribe.
The term klezmorim, Aqua says, is defined as the person who performs klezmer music and the genre itself. The artist and his or her art are indivisible.
Many associate klezmer with weddings, but its ties to synagogue worship date to Biblical times. “All the modes of Ashkenazi prayer, like the Ahavoh Rabboh, were picked up in klezmer music,” he says.
Aqua visualizes klezmorim of the 1700s or even earlier as “wandering itinerant ne’er do wells that couldn’t keep a job,” he laughs. “They weren’t classically trained but were incredibly improvisational; musically fast on their feet.”
As klezmer groups scoured villages for Jewish populations, they absorbed new styles from Polish, Gypsy, Romanian, Baltic and Turkish sources and shared them in the next town or village.
“Something that might have originated in Romania or Transylvania would spread to the Balkans and the Black Sea,” Aqua says. “It’s another romantic notion I have, but I think the original klezmorim were ambassadors of blending cultures.”
Prior to the 19th century, klezmer groups used the violin (to mimic a chazzan’s emotional fluctuation), cimbalon (Eastern European version of the hammer dulcimer), flute and oboe — all knapsack friendly.
The wave of Jewish immigration to the US (1881-1922) resulted in the addition of the clarinet, accordion, trombone and trumpet.
These instruments would gradually enable klezmorim to integrate the blues and jazz rhythms permeating their new country.
“A two-way street sprang up between American jazz and klezmer,” Aqua says. “Band leader Benny Goodman was familiar with klezmer before he ever started playing jazz.”
Aqua attributes the clarinet’s ascendancy in klezmer to recording studios’ technical infancy in the 1920s.
“The studios couldn’t pick up the subtleties of the violin,” he says. “The clarinet attacked; it was louder, more powerful.”
In America, the clarinet became the centerpiece of klezmer music while the violin’s human cry took a back seat. “They have since reestablished equal footing,” Aqua says.
Klezmer fell out of favor around the 1950s. Regarded as old people’s music, it couldn’t compete with Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis.
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, young Jewish musicians in folk and bluegrass bands started listening to klezmer recordings from the 1920s and ‘30s.
“By the 1980s, when the klezmer revival was in full swing, the Klezmatics did not want to play klezmer note by note,” Aqua says.
“They knew the guys in the 1920s had radically changed klezmer from the 1800s, just as the guys in the 1800s evolved from the preceding generation.
“Contemporary klezmer players asked the same questions: ‘What’s the attitude of klezmer? What’s the feeling? And how can we express it through rock ‘n roll, rap and other musical forms?’”
Aqua would draw Venn diagrams, which outline all possible logical connections between a finite group of different sets, to explain Jewish world music to students in his classes.
“I’d draw three circles for the three main cultural spheres of Jewish music — Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardi.
“Israel is the sweet spot where they all mix.”
For Aqua, Israel embodies the perfect confluence of contrarian musical cultures. His goal has been realized, at least in one country.
“Israeli music is so blended that you can’t pick out individual sounds anymore,” he says. “A lot of it is Middle Eastern-based. You’ll hear a klezmer instrumental in an Arabic melody.
“And you’ll say, ‘Of course, they are all related!’ There’s a real melting pot feel to it.”
Aqua mentions a group of three Yemenite sisters who grew up in southern Israel and have attained super stardom.
“The group is called A-WA,” he says, his laid-back personality shifting higher. “Israeli vocalists, they learned all these folk songs. Their hip-hop music is so Arabic!
“Today there’s amazing excitement about all these roots that make up Jewish music, and less of a need to categorize them. It’s either good music or bad music.”
Aqua is asked whether factional political camps like the Israelis and Palestinians can unite under this multi-sourced symphony.
His eyes radiate the answer before a single word is uttered.
“I think music is life-saving. It’s one of the ways we can get ourselves out of the jam we’re in today.
“A cultural anthropologist will tell you that Jewish music from the Middle East and Arab music from the Middle East are the same thing. We both use oud. We both use doumbek. We have similar vocal ornamentations.”
Aqua describes the Israelis and Palestinians as “cultural cousins dating back thousands of years. I truly believe they will find common ground in the arts.”
He grins.
“Besides, music is just so visceral — ‘Shut up and dance!’”
Andrea Jacobs may be reached at andrea@ijn.com.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News