Featured Artist: Erik Greenberg Anjou

CD Title: A Cantor's Tale

Year: 2007

Record Label: Ergo Media

Style: Jazz DVD / Video

Musicians: Jack Mendelson (cantor), Frank London (trumpet), David Chevan (bass) 

Review:

The Cantor’s Tale is a moving documentary featuring the amazing life of cantor Jacob Mendelson. The composer’s score is by the unmatchable trumpeter Frank London. Director Erik Greenberg Anjou gives here a scenery to Jewish liturgical music. In this work Anjou makes his point of expressing a highly uneartly missive in a very successful way. His documentary has played indeed in over 90 international film festivals and won six top prizes.

Erik Anjou drives us in a journey which begins at Borough Park in Brooklyn passing through Israel. He achieves to capture the beauty and relevancy of the subject. The footage includes interviews with Jackie Mason and Alan Dershowitz. We learn about the importance of the withering of hazzanut tradition and how Mendelson is upholding to preserve it as a life’s mission which shoulders East European cantorial music.

Jacob Mendelson is definitely a character who deploys magnitude and an overall blessed gift. The film features spontaneous performances of Mendelson, and in each one, there is an eagerness for peace and preservation of ancientness. Frank London’s score conflates uninhibitedly here, crossing soundscapes with recognized bounteousness. In the music of Frank London, cohabitation, resourceful Jewish Klezmerism, and Hasidic New Wave forms are related by ways of meritorious skills, which place him certainly as an important figure in the world ethnic jazz scene and explains his spiraling popularity. The last part of this documentary displays a very touching performance of Mendelson with his son, accompanied by trumpeter London and bassist David Chevan.

This movie furnishes an all-panoramic view of Mendelson’s mega-genius musical persona. Influent and applauded, the artist cantor´s fiery life is cohesively portrayed here. Mendelson has been a cavalryman who never gave up hazzanut; his life and artistry conveys holyness, joy and the triumphal, melted into Mendelson’s complex and extraordinary music legacy.

Faith often speaks the language of hope. Essentially, Erik Anjou’s structured work on A Cantor’s Tale sustains film-making knack and a singular spiritual message that gives to him his own mark of distinction.

Record Label Website: http://www.ergomedia.com

Reviewed by: Dr. Ana Isabel Ordonez

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