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May 11, 2012 by Herzl Camp Admin, under General Posts, Letters from Staff, Music, Shabbat.
By: Flip Frisch, 2012 Shira Coach
I’m so old school that I still think recordings of song session are a novelty. In my day, once those songs were played and the lights went back on, they were over for good. A sweet but vague memory filed away with all the other ones from your shabbat, your summer, your childhood. Now with the press of a button you can bring back each song, exactly as it sounded at that point in time. Last summer as I sat with some campers eating their last breakfast before getting on the bus for home, Andrew Grone put on a “Leaving on a Jet Plane” compilation. He smiled at me and said that one track might sound familiar. Soon we were listening to a version of the song Bryan Grone and I recorded in that very spot nine years earlier. It was amazing. It was weird.
Thanks to modern technology, you can plan a summer from different places around the world. Louie Sloven, Yonatan Dotan and I recently had a meeting via 3-way Skype call. The hardest part was trying to schedule it for our three time-zones. Yonatan and I are so excited for the summer, we’ve been emailing each other songs since last August.
So we decided to take it one step further. What if we recorded a song together, 6000 miles apart?
First, using a laptop, Yonatan recorded himself singing and playing piano in Jerusalem. He may or may not have climbed through a window to reach the piano…I’ll never tell. Then he emailed tracks to me, and I took them to my brother’s house in Portland, Oregon (Tom Frisch, Kadimah ‘89). In his basement recording studio we played around with the tracks, added guitar and then more vocals. Thanks to a little studio magic we were able to make it sound (almost exactly) like we were playing together. When Yonatan wrote back to say he liked it, he was already in India. Now we’ve sent it to Anna Simon in Minneapolis, and you’re reading this wherever you are. The whole process took 4 days.
Simply by sending bits of information across the world we were able to be together, in song.
So light some candles, sit across from someone you like, and click here to listen to our version of Debbie Friedman’s z”l: T’filat Haderech. Wherever you find yourself tonight, see if you can meet us in the Chadar one last time.
Shabbat Shalom.
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Camp Music in the Real World
December 19, 2010 by Herzl Camp Admin, under Herzl, Beyond Webster.
By Lois Amdurski Butwin
From Day 1, Herzl Camp welcomes music to the daily life of our campers.
Over the years, whatever your age, aren’t there certain songs that automatically bring you back to some event, some person, some activity at camp? When I was a camper back in the “60’s ( I know, how I could I be that old??!!), Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I had a Hammer” was popular. Camp announcements and wake up were done on a speaker system called the “ramkol(sp?).” Music was often played as a wake up call and sometimes the words were changed to camp words. For instance, the Beatle’s “Yellow Submarine” was sung as “We all live in an orange machaneh, an orange machaneh, an orange machaneh….” To this day, I still think of the camp words whenever I hear that song.
Whenever I am at our synagogue or any other one for that matter, I love when the congregation sings a Hebrew song which I know from my Herzl Days. It can be “Oseh Shalom” or “Ani Maamin” and I always feel proud that I know the song and more importantly that I learned it at Herzl.
Another Peter, Paul and Mary song that has only recently stopped bringing a lump to my throat is “Jet Plane.” My friend, Barb Gutkin” played it for me one year before camp was almost over and I have always loved hearing it. (Todah Rabah to my son, Andy, for giving me the 4 disc set of “The Best of P,P & M, so that I can listen whenever I choose!)
As a counselor, I was once one of the planners of Bikkurim which way back then was a 3 day program with a theme. That year, the names of the teams were from a “Fiddler on the Roof” tune and I still do not know the real words to that song- only the ones we made up for our theme song.
The music industry has undoubtedly benefited over the years, from all of us purchasing the music we loved from our camp days as soon as we returned home to the real world. I know I did that and so did my kids, especially when they were campers. If the music didn’t come from a special camp program then it was the music the counselor played to help wake them up, go to sleep, during minucha, or whenever.
So……………..over the next week, think about the songs that bring back special Herzl memories for you and let the rest of us know what they are. Your memories may help someone else think of that certain friend or experience that was special to them. Shavua Tov!
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Who is Your Herzl Legend?
November 8, 2010 by Herzl Camp Admin, under Letters from Alumni.
By Zoe Stern
Last Friday night I went to see a local junior high play and then out for pizza with a few families. At 28 I’ve finally reached the age where I’m allowed to sit at the “adults” end of the table. So there I was sitting with the adults when one of the 12 year old boys made his way down towards me. I didn’t really know him and he had barley spoken 5 words to me all night. Somehow though he had just heard that I was Herzl die-hard. This excited him enough to get him out of his sports-watching-seated-safely-among-other-12-year-old-boys-spot.
He didn’t seem to care so much that I went to camp or when or how I felt about it. The first thing out of his mouth was, “Do you know Louie Sloven???” Followed by, “Did you know that he has gone to Herzl for 20 years??” And then “Did you know he invented _________?” (fill in the blank…because at this point he was so excited and talking so fast I had no idea what he was saying.) The answer to the first question was “Of course I know Louie Sloven! He was in my Kadimah in 2002!” And then, “But I’m not sure he’s been at Herzl for 20 years and I have no idea what he has invented!” It was a fun and funny conversation and it got me thinking about Louie as this kids Herzl legend. There are many of them, and everyone has one. They are both timely and timeless in their impact of campers lives, and most probably don’t even know the moment they become one.
A Herzl legend might have created some crazy game, starred in 12 Gates, told the scariest version of Rosemary, brought Ultimate Frisbee to Ozo Park, became your Papa Ozo, had a crazy nickname or a signature song, talked you through a homeless moment, cued you in on Herzl lingo…The list goes on. So, who is your Herzl legend?