Religious restrictions may have driven Basya Schechter away from her community, but it couldn’t take away her love of traditional music.
Schechter, frontwoman of the New York band Pharoah’s Daughter, joined First Coast Connect Friday for a live in-studio performance and discussed her background. The band will perform a free concert at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Jacksonville Jewish Center, 3662 Crown Point Rd.
Schechter was raised in New York as a Hasidic Jew, in an ultra Orthodox community, which she eventually left after deciding it wasn't right for her.
VIDEO | Watch an exclusive live performance below
“Once I left the community, I started hitchhiking and getting exposed to African music, Middle Eastern music,” Schechter said.
But Schechter maintained a love for the spiritual Jewish and Hasidic music she grew up with.
Blending a “psychedelic sensibility and a pan-Mediterranean sensuality,” Schechter leads her band through swirling Hasidic chants, Mizrachi and Sephardi folk-rock, and spiritual stylings filtered through percussion, flute, strings and electronica.
“It's a mashup of the worlds, and the influences that I got exposed to, and my background,” she said.
News Intern Joy Kader can be reached at newsteam@wjct.org or on Twitter at @joykader95.
