Personnel:
Brian Schachter-Brooks- Keyboards, Voice, Composition
Brian Schachter-Brooks became fascinated by all things holy at age four when his grandmother played him the sound track to "Jesus Christ Superstar". Despite the obvious Christian association, Brian saw the drama of Divinity played out to a greater degree at his Uncle Howard's Passover Seders than the Catholic Church. The Seders began a modest annual dip into the ocean of Torah- mere foreplay for what was to come.
After some prepubescent dabbling in various occult practices and some training in Transcendental Meditation, Brian was struck one summer while procrastinating from piano practice in music camp by the writings of Martin Buber. Buber spoke of the essence of Judaism and Hassidism as a lived reality, beyond the dogmas and legalities of codified Judaism. In 1987, Brian suffered a "spiritual awakening" in which the question mark of life seemed to be transformed into an exclamation point, the personal struggles of life all dropped away, and it became obvious that the answer was to "live for G-d". The experience only lasted a few weeks, however, and so began a journey to recover the simplicity and directness of that perception.
Through the nineties, Brian explored traditional Orthodox Judaism as a path back to the truth of his awakening, but the dogmatic ideology and complex legalities prevented him from surrendering to it completely. In a last effort to connect with truth, Brian made a vow in 1998 to "absolutely stand in relation to everything that arises without identification"- an old trick he learned from Zen. This precipitated a second awakening process which lasted for about a week. This second awakening allowed him to see through the mental problem-creating mechanism which prevented him from fully engaging with Judaism in the past, and so he immediately began offering himself (with a little reluctance) as a symbiotic host the noospheric organism of Torah as it presented itself.
During the next few years, Brian became involved with Chochmat HaLev, where he became certified as a Jewish Meditation teacher and where he teaches “Torah of Awakening” sessions on Monday nights at 7 PM. He also serves as Music Director and Rabbinic Assistant. He holds a Bachelor of Musical Composition from the Eastman School of Music and teaches children piano and Torah in various combinations throughout the Bay Area.
He currently lives with wife Lisa and two year old son Eidan, to whom he owes constant gratitude for helping him stay on a true path and keep far from cheap egocentric and hedonistic substitutes for G-d.
Sam Markewich- Drums
Sam "Shmully" Markewich has performed in many diverse groupings of musicians, ranging from New Music Theatrico-politcal troops to Experimental Free Jazz Ensembles to Big Bands to Straight-ahead Rock bands to the Jewish Mystical Klezmer/Neo-Classical-Indian Chochmat HaLev Band to a progressive Rock and Fusion Trio to Captain Zohar (A little of all of this thrown into the vast and profoundly intricate blender of Judaism ala Brian Schachter's head). Mentored by world renowned teacher and drummer, John Hvasta, and also studying with former Count Basie drummer Butch Miles and many others along the way, Sam went on to create an undergraduate major in Music and the Politics of Aesthetics.
Following this, Sam was a teacher at and co-creator of the School for
Designing a Society, which is a grass roots school that teaches people how to use the arts as a spring board for designing their ideal societies. Sam has also designed and taught courses on art and politics in Unit One, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana's honors school. Additionally, he has given private drum lessons and designed and presented workshops in many other contexts that offer people new ways to conceive of themselves in relation to music. Sam is also a writer of critical essays, poems, radio theater and short stories, as well as a marriage and family therapist. He has also cooked a vegetarian version of his grandmother's (G-d bless her sole!) matzaball soup for 20 to 40 people every Passover for the past 7 years.
Josh Miele- Bass
Zohar bass player Miele, also known as Dr. Isaap the Blind, has been a devoted disciple of the nascent, dormant and extant Captain Zohar for over 25 years. His abiding obsession with polyrhythms and the music of the spheres has been fed on physics, psychoacoustics, and generous portions of 60's/70's art rock. Miele's spiritual practice of Ahavat Tzar, "loving the irritant," includes a daily commute to San Francisco from his home in Berkeley, raising two small children, and an apparently unbreakable bond with Zoharian drummer Sam Markewich.
Naomi Robinson- Fiddle
Naomi started violin at age five and too many years later had “first contact” with traditional fiddle at an Irish pub. Before joining Captain Zohar she misunderstood Brian as a composer of silence. Now, following two years of amplification, she'll play anything so long as it exists first on paper. Her aspirations to be an environmental educator have been replaced by serious nonprofit work, though she still uses organic, locally grown, fair trade rosin for her bow and encourages you to do the same.
Captain Zohar
Polyrhythmic Trickery and Avant-Hassidism
Captain Zohar began in the early nineties as an experimental improvisation project, using Kabbalistic number/letter permutations as a basis for musical structures. By the late nineties, it had evolved into a progressive rock band which blended Klezmer and Jewish theatrics with high energy, polyrhythmic and sometimes quite atonal composition. Think Frank Zappa meets Martin Buber. This incarnation of the Captain played around the Bay Area between 1998 and 2001.
In 1999, Captain Zohar founder Brian Schachter-Brooks began working with Jewish Meditation Center Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley. By February of 2000, Brian became Chochmat’s musical director and helped launch the popular musical services which have been happening regularly ever since. In 2005, Brian ganged up with original Zohar bassist Josh Miele, drummer Sam Markewich and fiddler Naomi Robinson to resurrect the present incarnation of Captain Zohar: A “tree of life” with it’s roots in Klezmer and Jewish devotional music, a trunk of progressive rock and it’s branches reaching toward the heights of Indian Classical music.
Captain Zohar is currently available to play concerts and other events, as well as weddings and other festive occasions calling for Jewish dance music.
