Before his two piano trio recordings for Tzadik, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and conceptualist Jamie Saft was well known for his wide-ranging musical vision on that label and others, where he has quite liberally utilized hard dub, heavy metal, and electronic music in contexts that sometimes combined these genres with vanguard jazz. On his fifth offering for John Zorn's imprint, Saft returns to one of his earliest loves on Black Shabbis, part of the imprint's Radical Jewish Culture Series. Saft has composed a series of visceral, musically challenging songs about anti-Semitism in history and popular culture with at least one meditation (Army Girl) on the tolerance Semetic peoples must practice toward one another in this dangerous time. But, it seems, Saft seems to be saying -- quite rightly -- that every era has been dangerous for Jews. Saft plays guitars, bass, organs, Mellotron, and synthesizer, and gets help from bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Mike Pride on five tracks with Dmitriy Shnaydman and Bobby Previte on skins on two others. Vanessa Saft and Mr. Dorgon (Gordon Knauer) offer vocals on a couple of cuts as well. To say that Saft "gets" metal would be an absurdity. There is no irony on this set, intentional or otherwise: it is as much a part of his musical identity as jazz and his formal improv studies with Joe Maneri. The set begins with the title cut, a soft (Ghost) Riders in the Sky- style melody that's actually a resonant take on a Jewish folk song, with lots of reverbed guitars and rubbery basslines and some organ and synth painting a warm dubby atmosphere.

1		Black Shabbis - The Trail of Libels
2		Blood
3		Serpent Seed
4		Der Judenstein (The Jewry Stone)
5		Army Girl
6		King of King of Kings
7		Kielce
8		Remember
9		The Ballad of Leo Frank

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