| When Sam Glaser began his professional career in music, he never expected that he’d end up a Jewish music performer, let alone embracing the path with such passion.
Glaser, who grew up with a pianist mother and a trumpet-playing father in the tiny Brentwood neighborhood, has been on a musical and spiritual journey since recording his first Jewish song to help Soviet émigrés fifteen years ago. With more than a dozen CDs under his belt, Sam Glaser’s life is a busy one, including regular tours of venues from amphitheaters to synagogues to summer camps in the Diaspora and summertime concerts in Israel.
Despite an upbringing in a very musical and Zionist home, his parents wanted him to be more than just a musician. As a result, this Jewish pop singer who was ranked by Moment Magazine as one of the top-ten Jewish performers, left home seeking to become a Renaissance man. And it’s that very ideology that has driven him to create such diverse music. While never content to stick with one particular style, Sam Glaser is best known for his Jewish music.
Sam Glaser began his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1980. Despite the school’s renowned jazz program, Glaser said its profound lack of female students inspired him to transfer to the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in music and business in 1984. “If I studied business, then my father kept the credit card open for skiing. That was the deal,” he said.
Glaser, who was raised in the Conservative Jewish denomination and had his bar mitzvah at Sinai Temple in Westwood and in Israel, said one of the most profound and meaningful moments came in 1985, when he took a trip to Israel with Aish HaTorah and decided to stay on for another three months to study in an Orthodox yeshiva.
Sam Glaser says that every person in their adult life has the opportunity to have a “Hineni” moment, where they feel called upon and feel a deep sense of responsibility to the Jewish people. For Glaser, it was the moment when he performed this song at The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education conference with an eight-piece band in front of 2,000 rabbis and educators. “I had this incredibly fulfilling night and I started getting booked. Before you know it I was on the Jewish music circuit,” he said. “My venues changed from smoky clubs where people would be talking through a set to 500 people in a synagogue listening with rapped attention.” |
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