Matisyahu - Live @ Lowlands

Matisyahu - King Without A Crown (Live @ Lowlands 2006)

Matisyahu Shirt

Matisyahu Shirt

I was looking for cool shirts online today and this is what I found; check out this very cool Matisyahu shirt. This must be the coolest Matisyahu shirt ever. Click on the image to go to the website that sells it:

Matisyahu talks about "Jerusalem"

Matisyahu talks about "Jerusalem"

"Jerusalem if I forget you, if I forget my heart, if I forget my goal, if the many winds which are blowing knock me off course, if the raging waters inundate me, if I forget to wake up and really be alive in this world, then how can I speak words of inspiration, how can I sing songs, how can I do my work. Fire nah gone come from my tongue!"

The name Jerusalem comes from the Hebrew words yira and shalom, meaning "awe," which is complete or whole. The word Awe is often mistakingly translated as fear which actually has the opposite affect. Fear has the affect of making a person retreat and hide, while awe is when the person opens himself up to truly being present in the world. He feels how every choice he makes has real affect, how his footsteps make real imprints, his words, thoughts, and deeds penetrate this world. This awe allows a person to be fully alive and to be affected by this world. He feels he is standing before G-d and feels the entirety of creation, and how he is exposed to it all: possibility for life and death at any moment. The word Zion another name for Jerusalem also means, the inner most point as it represents the innermost point of the heart, the core. There is a teaching from thesages the every person is a small world, therefore the place of Zion with in each person is that place at the core of their being. In Zion, man has the ability to rectify himself and the world, and bring completion to his creator. We believe that the darkness and pains we are facing today are the birth pangs of redemption, a time when as the prophet Isaha says, the people will beat their weapons into plow shares, nation will no longer go to war against nation, the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and the level of Zion will be reached in it's full potential with in every human being.

The opportunity to work with Reggae legends Sly and Robbie to re-record the track was one that couldn't be passed up. I hope the new version does it for you, until then, tune in and stay alive, and may G-d grant us success to bring the redemption immediately!

8/17/06


looks like the 70's :)

Click here to listen to the new version of "Jerusalem"

Matisyahu - Chop Em' Down - Live at the Greek theatre

Matisyahu - Chop Em' Down - Live at the Greek theatre

Matisyahu - Lord Raise Me Up - Live at the Greek theatre

Matisyahu - Lord Raise Me Up - Live at the Greek theatre

Matisyahu - Recently Reviewed

Recently Reviewed - Matisyahu; Michael Franti

Bands: (M) Matisyahu, Jonah David, Josh Werner, Aaron Dugan, Borahm Lee, Daniel Sadownick; (MF) Michael Franti, Carl Young, Dave Shul, Mannas Itiene, Raleigh Neal.

Posted: Thurs., Aug. 10, 2006 By JEFF MILLER

So here's something you don't see everyday: A Hasidic Jew, clad in traditional garments from head to toe, stands atop a speaker on the side of a huge stage, a band playing groove-based reggae rhythms under him as he's illuminated by a bright, overpowering spotlight. Matisyahu has become astoundingly popular due to his song "King Without a Crown" (from the JDub release "Youth"); the question now is whether he's got enough talent to bust out of the novelty-act ghetto.

There's plenty of evidence he will. Rapid-fire flow like his is not just unusual, it's virtually unheard of, and his onstage confidence is engaging even as the beats get repetitive. He's streamlined his show from earlier appearances this year at Coachella and Bonnaroo, leaving the proselytizing for temple instead of ranting onstage about the Torah; it leaves him plenty of time to connect through his music.

His crowd is one of the most diverse in recent memory: Full families with young children sat alongside twentysomething hip-hop fans, and all of them sang along. He smiles before unleashing a barrage of rhymes, about God, Jerusalem and love, spitting out reggae twills like a pure-bred Rastafari while his crack band stays on top of every complicated downbeat rhythm in the repertoire.

Opener Michael Franti and Spearhead were the perfect kickoff for this multicultural party. Their peace-and-unity yells of "How you feeling?" could be seen in some situations as corny, but here they came off as celebratory. Franti and Spearhead's new album, "Yell Fire" (Anti-), is a melange of folky, groovy antiwar cuts that beg for sing-alongs, and this enthusiastic audience was happy to oblige.

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Matisyahu - Exaltaion - Live at the Greek theatre

Matisyahu - Exaltaion - Live at the Greek theatre.

Previous post was a concert review, now here is a video from that concert. Now you can judge for yourself.





You know what is the best part of this song? the guitar play on the 1:45 minute.
More videos from that concert will be posted in the next few days.

Matisyahu Live in Los Angeles - Concert Review

Concert Review - Matisyahu Live at the Greek in Los Angeles – August 9th, 2006

From the opening bass and drum version of RastaMan Chant
“I hear the words of the higher man say
Babylon your throne gone down…
One bright morning when my work is done
I go fly away home
I say fly away home to Zion”
to the closing lines of King Without a Crown, Matisyahu is faithful to the cause. That cause is the cause of encouraging his listeners to stay on the narrow road of spiritual hope for the coming promised land.

Overall Impressions
I would like to give some overall impressions and some conclusions before I go through the set song by song. First, the band is fantastic. Drummer Johan David is simply top notch. He is very hard hitting and very precise. Together with Josh Werner on bass and Aaron Dugan on guitar, I think Matisyahu has a lot to be thankful for. The long term viability of Matisyahu as more than a pop star lies precisely in the musicianship of his band and Matisyahu’s ability to convey a spiritual message that resonates with people of faith. After seeing Matisyahu live I think it is possible that he and his band are further along than U2 was after two albums. I make this comparison in the hope that Matis and Co. can stay faithful to the message and take their own message to heart and keep on pressing toward the goal of the upward call. If they do, I believe we might see Matisyahu become a truly inspirational music in the vein of U2 or dare I say …no I don’t dare say it.

The Set
Overall, the first half of the show was better than the second. The first half was composed of a series of songs that thematically built upon the theme of the journey of the spiritual people in a land of illusion toward the promised land or holiness and reconciliation with God the Father.

The First Half of the Set
After Rasta Man Chant Matisyahu went into This is Your Song. From the start it is clear that the band likes to push the tempo a bit, and the grooves do sound a little too rock for such a groovy style of music. The music is more groovy when the music goes into the more sparse dub style. At the faster tempos, the swing in the lyrics is lost and it feels like Matisyahu has to rush the lyric to fit it all in. Nonetheless, the crowd was with the lyric every step of the way as was evident in “Fire of Heaven / Alter of Earth”. When the bridge came around the sold out crowd could be heard above the music.
Fires burning Flames are dancing Don't burn the house down, lo
Heavenly fire only resides On an altar made from the ground
The crowd most certainly is a key player in the overall mode of the evening. This is not your normal reggae or rap crowd. The crowd is brought to its height of participation and enthusiasm not when the music starts jumping but when the lyrics resonant with the Jewish experience.

Matisyahu and the band need to be confident in their real message because it is the praise and the encouragement that moves the crowd. As the set started to gather steam so did the clarity and momentum of the message. From where I am at spiritually it was this portion of the show that reveals the message of what can make Matisyahu more than just a rapper or a pop star.
Chop ‘em Down
Exaltation
Indestructible
Here was the meat of the show.
Chop ‘em Down tells the story of the journey of the people of Israel from Joseph to Moses and makes an analogy for today. The modern world is the new wilderness and the new Egypt and as the song saws,
Its from the forest itself comes the handle for the ax.
Chop ‘em down chop ‘em down.
Such lyrics are calling the people to keep up the fight and sustain day by day the progress through the wilderness into the promised land. Don’t turn back. Don’t get discouraged. Don’t turn your back on your heritage and become like the secular world but keep the hope alive. God is faithful. We shall be “re-united like the days of our youth”. (from Warrior)
Next came Exaltation with its very straight ahead praise
This was then followed by Indestructible which though a so so song on Youth was, I believe, the best song of the show.
Matisyahu sang the last verse a few times through. A picture of the hero’s of the faith from Daniel to David.
Release me from their schemes
My distress you will relieve
Shield me on the path that's dark and slippery
They seek deception and futility I stand with integrity
Sneak to the roof of that building
Don't want nobody here to see me
To say that I'm living in a fantasy
But I believe in find and keep
And I plead in sincerity
Wont you utterly remove the cloud hangin over me
Wont cha wave that decree in the shade of your wings
Shelter me from the wicked who have plundered me
From my mortal enemies wont cha shield me

The Second Half
The second half of the show had a string of forgettable jams and a, share the stage rap, with some body whose name I didn’t catch. This part of the show would have been perfect for Aish Tamid and What I’m Fighting For but no such luck…

Tto get the crowd back, the set turned to Youth. This version of Youth was noticeably light and joyful as opposed to the more aggressive and forceful album version. By this time, Matisyahu seemed a bit tired. Maturity will bring Matisyahu the confidence that intimacy or intensity are needed to really move a crowd the size of the Greek Theatre.

After Youth came a less than perfect version of Jerusalem. Placing Jerusalem here at the end of the set is a perfect fit, but the beauty of the rhythm and the lyrics was undermined by another rushed tempo. Again, I think Matisyahu needs to learn that his strength is not in making a song rock but in the inspiration of his syncopated vocal rhythms and the passionately felt and delivered lyrics. In many instances, rushing the tempo undermined the beauty and the groove and certainly did with this my personal favorite Matisyahu song.

After Jerusalem, Matisyahu attempted a beat box that lasted about 30 seconds. It appeared that he was just too tired to pull a full beat box off. So after this low light, the set ended.

Encores
The crowd brought Matisyahu and the band back out for a wonderful encore of “Lord lift me Up” and “King without a Crown”. As an intro to "Lord Lift me Up”, Matisyahu began with a blessing and some soulful chanting. Again, he needs to find his home in this aspect of the music. The chants are great. The dub plus chant plus freestyle prayers definitely work. It is when he is more spiritual and more traditional that the beauty of the music and the message shines. “King Without a Crown” was of course fantastic and awe inspiring but not quite as tight and inspiring as the ‘Live at Stubb’s” version.



Overall, I loved the show but wished that Matisyahu fully embraced his "yearning of a prophet" message of encouragement and prayer that is at the heart of his music. I plan on attending every show he gives for many years to come. The question still remains as to if indeed this new voice of inspiration finds the full manifestation of his calling to encourage people of faith to seek the promised land.

God Bless, brad

(Taken from http://21stcenturyreformation.blogspot.com)

Matisyahu and Roots Tonic - King Without A Crown

Matisyahu and Roots Tonic - King Without A Crown-Funk Box

Matisyahu Jerusalem live @ Coliseu Lisboa

Matisyahu Jerusalem live @ Coliseu Lisboa

G-d's Reggae Star

How Matisyahu became a pop phenomenon.

By Jody Rosen

When I first heard the Hasidic Jewish reggae vocalist Matisyahu, I assumed his was a novelty act with distinctly limited appeal, destined to cause a small sensation among Heeb magazine subscribers and other Jewish hipsters with an overdeveloped sense of irony and secret shtetl lust—the pangs of nostalgia that periodically cause assimilated Jews to yearn for the good old days of piety and poverty in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Anyway, silly me. Matisyahu is a hit with the goyim. The 26-year-old singer's 2005 album Live at Stubb's spent eight weeks at the top of Billboard's reggae chart, went gold, and continues to sell briskly. A single, "King Without a Crown," cracked the Top 40 and has made Matisyahu a mainstay on alternative-rock radio. Last week, Matisyahu released a new album, Youth, which seems likely to enter in the upper reaches of the Billboard 200.

In short, Matisyahu has become the most famous Hasid this side of the Baal Shem Tov, the movement's 18th-century founder. Whatever you think of the music, there's no denying the powerful novelty of the singer's shtick. The Top 40 has always been a pageant of excess, absurdity, and trans-ethnic pastiche, but there's not really a precedent for "Play MediaKing Without a Crown," which finds Matisyahu crooning, in a lilting pseudo-Caribbean patois, "I want Moshiach [the messiah] now," shouting out paeans to "Hashem" (Orthodox Jews' favorite term for God), and declaring "Me no want sensimilla …/ Torah food for my brain." The video for the new single, "Play MediaYouth," is like a bad Saturday Night Live skit come to life, with the tracksuit-clad young Hasid skanking across a Brooklyn rooftop, brown beard billowing beneath a homeboy's hoodie. What's next, an Amish boy band?

It all gets a little less surprising when you learn Matisyahu's back story. Turns out, he's a Baal Teshuvah, or penitent, a secular Jew who "returned" to the Orthodox fold—before he was Matisyahu, he was Matthew Miller, White Plains, N.Y., native and student at the New School University in Greenwich Village. Most tellingly, he was a dreadlocked Phish fanatic, from which we may infer that prior to discovering "Torah food," he had a rather different attitude toward sensimilla. His religious awakening occurred in college, after meeting a young Lubavitcher rabbi in Washington Square Park, where many impressionable young men have experienced spiritual epiphanies. Lubavitcher Hasidim are famous for their aggressive efforts to proselytize to non-Orthodox Jews, and Miller soon traded in jam-band fandom for 21st-century shtetl life in the Lubavitcher enclave of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Click Here!

Well, you can cut off the Phish follower's dreads, put him in 18th-century garb, and immerse him in Talmudic midrash—but the pull of post-hippie music is strong. Soon Matisyahu was performing his sub-Eek-A-Mouse-style dance-hall toasting for fellow yeshiva students, and, after securing the blessing of his rabbis, he put together a backing group and started playing the jam-band-club circuit. The sonic stamp of that musical subculture is all over Matisyahu's music. Roots reggae is one of the cornerstones of Deadhead musical taste, and Matisyahu's is a deeply old fashioned roots sound, miles away from the hip-hop-derived digital futurism of today's dance-hall reggae. His band is perfectly tight, but the aesthetic is white-boy-jam-band reggae, with lots of guitar filigree, frequent show-offy solos, and a far thinner bass sound than you'll hear on any Jamaican dance-hall record. On Youth, producer Bill Laswell tricks out the spartan rock-trio sound with some electronic touches, but it's just window dressing.

As for Matisyahu's vocals: They're adequate. He's got rhythm—he can chant-rap double-time rhymes—and if he sometimes sings off-key, so do most dance-hall artists. But there's no getting around the phony Jamaican accent; when, in "Play MediaJerusalem," he sings "In-a de ancient days, we will return with no delay/ Picking up de bounty and de spoils on our way," he sounds no less silly than Vanilla Ice did impersonating a gangsta.

The truth is, Matisyahu isn't really a novelty—his is the oldest act in the show-business book. Minstrelsy dates back to the very beginnings of American popular music, and Jews have been particularly zealous and successful practitioners of the art. From Irving Berlin's blackface ragtime numbers to Al Jolson's mammy songs—from jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, who passed as black, to Bob Dylan, who channeled the cadences of black bluesmen, to the Beastie Boys—successive generations of Jewish musicians have used the blackface mask to negotiate Jewish identity and have made some great art in the process.

Matisyahu is the latest in this line, and while his music is at best pedestrian, his minstrel routine may be the cleverest and most subtle yet. Matisyahu is like a thousand other white guys from the suburbs who've smoked a lot of dope, listened to some Burning Spear records, and decided to become reggae singers. But as a Hasid, he has a genuinely exotic look—that great big beard and the tzitzit fringes flying—and the spiritual bona fides to pull off songs steeped in Old Testament imagery. It's an ingenious variation on the archetypal Jewish blackface routine, immortalized in The Jazz Singer (1927), when the immigrant striver Jolson put on blackface to cast off his Jewish patrimony and become American. In 2006, Matisyahu wears Old World "Jewface," and in so doing, becomes "black."

And there are more layers to Matisyahu's act. Musically speaking, Jewish reggae is not such a far-fetched idea; as many critics have pointed out, the plaintive minor-key melodies for which Jewish liturgical music (and Hasidic folksongs) are renowned are also staples of reggae. What's more, Matisyahu's appropriation of Jamaican music is really no more brazen than Rastafarians' appropriation of Jewish religious tropes. If a Caribbean islander can plunder Jewish scripture and call himself a lost tribesman of Israel, why can't a Jew sing a song to a one-drop beat in a phony patois? Lubavitcher Hasidim even have their very own Hallie Selassie-like demigod, the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who many Lubavitchers regard as Moshiach himself.

And yet, despite the copious "Hashems" and what is undoubtedly the first reference to "treyf wine" ever to appear on a Top 40 album, there is very little distinctly Jewish content on Youth. The only invocation of the idea of Jewish nationhood—Judaism's organizing principle—comes in "Jerusalem," a nonsensical riff on the Bible's most beautiful poem of exile, the 137th Psalm. (Matisyahu sings: "Jerusalem, if I forget you/ Let my right hand forget what it's supposed to do." Huh?)

In fact, Youth has a lot more in common with a couple of other contemporary American religiosities. The album is soaked in therapeutic language: it's more Oprah than Torah. "Young man—the power's in your hands …/ Storm the halls of vanity, focus your energy," Matisyahu sings in the Play Mediatitle track. That emphasis on self-actualization and uplift, combined with Matisyahu's ceaseless diatribes about the moral impurity of secular life, is reminiscent of nothing so much as Christian rock. It's a reminder that Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists share a lot with their Christian counterparts, including political priorities—and that there's no one quite so beloved of the Left Behind crowd these days than Orthodox Jews, whose in-gathering in Israel is essential stage setting for the coming of the Rapture. (At which point, presumably, Jews will be cast into the hellfire.) As if to make explicit the burgeoning alliance, Matisyahu recently recorded "Play MediaRoots in Stereo," a duet with evangelical rap-rockers P.O.D. It's a cruddy piece of music and, as politics, it can't be good for the Jews.

Matisyahu Lisbon Interview

Matisyahu Interview at Hotel Shetaron Lisbon

Matisyahu - Mini Documentary

Matisyahu - Mini Documentary

This mini documentary is very good.
what Matisyahu thinks about stage dive? Here is a quote: ".... one of the funnest things in the world.... until you get dropped or fondled or something like that." fondled? :-)
check it out

Matisyahu - Jerusalem - Live

Matisyahu - Jerusalem - Live