You may not have heard of the band, but I assure you, you’ll love their sound!
A one-of-a-kind concert promises to bring good vibes to Newport this holiday season when Nefesh Mountain, a New Jersey-based Americana band, stops by Greenvale Vineyards for a show on Friday, December 13 as part of their “Love and Light” tour. Click here for tickets.
Nefesh Mountain tugs at the roots of American music, but goes even deeper into traditional sounds, blending in Jewish spiritual themes, arranged soulfully with banjo and mandolin – occasionally going full-on bluegrass. Talk about chutzpah!
“It’s a show for everybody; it’s a show about love and light,” said co-founder and lead singer Doni Zasloff on a recent phone call. “Our music is intended to bring people together. However you vote, whatever you feel, whatever your politics, whatever your beliefs, it’s about being a person, co-existing.”
The band is built around the wife/husband duo of Zasloff and Eric Lindberg, Jewish Americans who absorbed American roots music in an atmosphere of traditional Jewish music growing up. They formed Nefesh Mountain a decade ago and have since recorded with country/bluegrass greats, including Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, and Noam Pikelny. They’ve been busy since, recording and touring in front of audiences ranging from country music landmarks in Nashville to synagogues in New York City.
You’ll probably hear some holiday music at the Portsmouth show, somewhat unconventional for sure, including Woody Guthrie-penned Hanukkah ballads (Listen below). “We have one show that’s being filmed for a PBS Hanukkah special that is going to air next year,” said multi-instrumentalist Lindberg. “We’ll play some of those Woody Guthrie songs… but it’s also a big electric show with lots of jams, not all folky.”
“We have a new album coming out with a lot of new songs we’re excited to play,” he continued. “I think the theme is in the spirit of the holidays, bringing people together, about unity, about the state of the world, and about the divisiveness we’ve all felt. We are trying to bring people together through music and spread some radical love, as my wife calls it.”
Their previous release, 2021’s Songs for the Sparrow, was lauded by Rolling Stone as a “master class in string music.” The new album, Beacons, due out in January, certainly shows off their Americana chops.
The album came together as a response to world events, including the war in the Middle East that began after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. “We needed to somehow put all these emotions and all this distress we were feeling about the world into song,” Lindberg explained.
“This idea of beacons, and these little lights came up; it didn’t get fully formed until I was done writing,” he continued. “It’s not a depressing album; it’s very uplifting to me, but it’s also real. It goes through parenthood; we had a baby during COVID, and we have older kids in college, one still in diapers. We’ve got political divisiveness; we just talked about everything that was on our mind and tried to offer up something that we always do, trying to make the world a little better with music.”
Lindberg sees a clear trajectory from Jewish traditional music to bluegrass and early American music.
“We’ve been a band for about ten years,” he continued. “During that time, we’ve been exploring a world of questions we’ve had as Jewish-Americans – as people who are proud of our identity as Jews, whether we’re religious or not, proud of the holidays, and the traditions of family, values, morals, and ethics that we grow up with as Jewish Americans. But also, understanding that we are huge fans and players of American music, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and bluegrass.”
You go back, and it comes from the gospel tradition; it’s kind of the bedrock of Americana music, that organ sound, the banjo, it takes us to church. The function of this music at some point was spirituality through the church,” he explained. “For a Jewish kid who loved this music, but doesn’t believe this exactly, the question was, where do we belong in the patchwork of Americana music?
“On the first record, we put in a few liturgical songs, like a version of ‘He Nay Ma Tov,’ and ‘Mi Chamocha,” he continued. “There’s no Hebrew on the new album, it is more about our experience as people rather than just Jewish bluegrass musicians, but there are a lot of the same messages in there. There’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of talking about where we fit in. We’re always exploring this question of what it means to be Jewish and American.”
The show is expected to sell out, so get your tickets soon! Click here for details.
