The Boston Festival of New Jewish Music is a free monthly concert series presenting original music drawing from the Jewish cultural experience and highlights the best in Jewish-influenced music by composers and performers who live right here in our own backyard.

Season 1. Concert 1. Live Album Release Concert: Zach Mayer’s  Zamru

Singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Zach Mayer is a rising star in the international Jewish music world. Channeling his lineage of the four generations of chazzanim (cantors) before him, Zach brings communities together through the power of nigunim, spiritual wordless melodies rooted in Jewish tradition.

Zamru is Zach’s second solo album. It was recorded entirely during quarantine in his own living room (and coat closet) in Boston, Massachusetts. This album is a full rendering of his inner musical mind, as each note on every instrument was played by him alone, including soprano and baritone saxophones, piano, kanjira drum, harmonium, keyboard and vocal harmonies.

Zach composed each of Zamru’s melodies in the morning, during his daily outdoor meditation practice in the park by his home. He felt a unique connective spark while channeling these songs into their current form, and can feel that same spark again whenever he sings them.

For his debut concert at the Boston Festival of New Jewish Music, Zach will perform  Zamru  for the first time with his live band. May you too, feel the joyous spark of calm delight that is embedded in each of these melodies.

With over 20 million hits on YouTube for his “Subway Sax Battle,” Zach Mayer has performed with Bobby McFerrin, John Zorn, Questlove, Jamie Cullum, Big Boi (OutKast) Cyro Baptista, Frank London, Michael Alpert, Joey Weisenberg, and many more musicians you might recognize. He performs internationally with Zion80, a 10-piece Jewish Afrobeat band inspired by the music of Shlomo Carlebach, and his folk sextet, Night Tree, has toured internationally and has released two albums produced by Seamus Egan of SOLAS. He has been on the faculty at the Brandeis Institute of Music and Art and Laguardia Arts High School in Manhattan, and teaches workshops around the US and Canada. Zach is the musical director of Kahal B’raira, a humanistic Jewish congregation in Cambridge. He received his Masters of Music from the New England Conservatory in Boston, and is a member of Hadar’s 2020-2022 Rising Song Fellowship.

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