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Noah Budin - News & Reviews

Review of Metaphor by Cantor Ilana Wolpert

A Review of Noah Budin's "Metaphor"
By Cantor Ilana Wolpert, Ph.D.

It's not often that a person gets to review a CD released by her own cousins. I consider myself lucky to be related to Noah and David Budin, singers, songwriters, and performers extraordinaire. Oh, and they both happen to be very funny guys, the kind that have me falling off my chair laughing whenever we are together. But what really stands out about them is their unique, unconventional approach to the life of the spirit through music.

David began writing songs (and put out an album of those songs) when he was still in high school. He went on to perform with rock bands in New York, but then decided to come back to Cleveland and, in between his assignments as a free-lance writer and editor of various local monthlies like "Northern Ohio Live," began playing back-up for his younger brother, Noah. Noah had also been writing his own songs and performing them for quite a while, finally forming "The Promised Band," which included David, Norm Tischler, Mark Freiman and then Ed Ridley, Jr., Celia Hollander Lewis and Rob Ticherich.

Watching Noah grow as a songwriter has been quite an experience for me. I remember sitting around various holiday or Shabbat dinner tables after the meal was over and being treated to a musical "dessert," Noah playing his latest inspiration for family and friends. We all recognized the special spirit of a young poet impassioned about social justice with a lovely voice and great guitar style. But as the years passed, I began sitting up straighter and listening with a more attentive ear. Suddenly, what I was hearing was not just a young guy strumming away on songs that went on for a bit too long, important as the message may have been, or repeating verse after identical verse with no break for variation, but the voice of a true artist who had hit his stride. Noah had grown up to combine his natural passion with true artistic integrity and craftsmanship, without a trace of clumsiness or banality.

Noah's recent CD release, "Metaphor," offers the best fruit of Noah's long labors as a songwriter. The lyrics are well-crafted and meaningful and the melodies find a place in your heart, with the result that you find yourself singing the songs as you go about your daily business. Noah's guitar style is clean and striking. Ed Ridley, another musician of great passion, provides inspired keyboard accompaniment that, with a light yet substantive touch, takes you to the top of the mountain. David, a talented bass player as well as arranger, has taken this CD, as opposed to "Halleluyaland," Noah's previous release, to a new height as well. When you buy the CD, which you should hurry to do, listen carefully to the string and horn arrangements-they are exquisite. Rob Ticherich wastes no time pulling you into the first track with his compelling percussion introduction, and he continues throughout the CD to provide the heartbeat that supports Noah's lyrics and strong baritone. Other musicians make wonderful contributions as well: Charlie Lewis on mandolin and autoharp, Walt Mahovlich on accordion, Sam Getz on electric guitar, Norm Tischler on saxophone. Celia Hollander Lewis offers her sweet voice as backup and also her banjo, and David plays bass.

The title of the collection is "Metaphor," which itself stands as a metaphor for those elemental images that serve as Noah's muses: fire, water, "ruach"-the Hebrew for both wind and spirit. The title song picks up on the incredible dialogue between God and Moses in the third chapter of Exodus. Moses asks God what he should say when, in confronting the Israelites and telling them who sent him, they ask, as they surely will, "What is His name?" God's answer: "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh"-I am what I am, or I will be what I will be. The Hebrew consonants that form this name, Ehyeh, are full of breath, or being, the essence of life itself (i.e., wind/spirit)-as are all of Noah's songs. Think for a moment about the word "inspiration." It has breath right at its heart, and the root of the word "spirit" as well. "IN-SPIRE" might well mean to take the spirit into oneself, allowing oneself to breathe in and to then express the air, the wind, or the spirit, back out again.

Surely this is what Noah Budin does so very well. He begins by drawing a breath from something powerful in Jewish history, a moment in which a
towering figure heard a divine word and moved to make something happen: Abraham heeding God's call, Nachshon ben Aminadav setting one toe into the Red Sea to make it part, the Maccabee's lighting the oil lamp in the Holy Temple, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama. Then out come the words in a windrush: "A voice on the shore calling your name;/A hand outstretched lighting the flame;/Water at the dam waiting to burst;/Water in the desert quenching your thirst…" Can you not hear the very elements of life here, those elements without which both the body and the spirit would perish? One song on the CD is entitled simply "Haruach," or "the wind", another "Fire." Yet another is called "Let It Burn." The entire collection is a metaphor for the wind, the fire, and the water that inspire a Jewish songwriter to recreate artistically those moments in our collective life and history that have moved us to perform feats of great meaning, acts that have helped us breathe new life into the world and make it a better place. "Are we standing at the edge of the ocean just to keep our feet upon the land?" asks Noah in my favorite song of all on the CD ("Edge of the Ocean"). "We've marched the streets of Selma, Alabama/Have we walked those many miles just to stop?" If Abraham could not find even one righteous man in Sodom and Gomorra to prevent God from wiping out the whole place, Noah asks, "should we then stop the search?" And the refrain answers these questions: "El emunah, hineni, I am ready/I know not what may lie ahead upon the road, but I am ready."

Noah's faith in humankind, his conviction that the elements of life, God's gifts to us, are there within our reach to be used to increase good and decrease evil in the world-these are what stand out in "Metaphor," his most recent CD, produced by his brother David and dedicated to the memory of his father, Joseph M. Budin. The second track on the CD, a beautiful and poignant wedding song, is called "Blessing." Each song in this collection is itself a blessing, and a metaphor for tikkun olam.

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