Pharaoh's Daughter lead singer mines her ultra-Orthodox roots for melodies

"Generally when people do Hasidic music in any way, it's the Hasidic music that becomes the most dominant," says Moishe Rosenfield, a booker who has worked with Pharaoh's Daughter for years. "In Basya's case, and in the case of Pharaoh's Daughter, the Hasidic melodies are the starting point, but only the starting point – the styles come from a variety of backgrounds, and in the end, it's all projections of mood and emotion."

For Schechter, the path from regular old folk musician to purveyor of iconoclastic world music has been a long one, involving more than a few stumbles and setbacks. It began with a series of backpacking expeditions in the '90s – to Turkey, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Eastern Europe, and beyond.

In each far-flung locale, Schechter made it her mission to pick up the traditional instruments and to learn a few of the local tunes.

In Morocco, she played the oud, a stringed instrument popular in Arabic culture. In Zimbabwe, she pounded out a few tunes on a marimba. In Turkey, she gamely tried out the saz, a long-necked lute that emits a scratchy, high-pitched hum.

Schechter brought back the instruments to New York when she could, and when she couldn't, she attempted to evoke their sound, once even tuning her guitar so that it began to sound like what she describes as a "cross between a saz and an oud." Meanwhile, Schechter worked to incorporate a range of material from the ultra-Orthodox world – chants, prayers, ancient songs.

She switched from English to Aramaic and Hebrew, channeling the insistent warble of an extended prayer. One of the most beautiful songs on "Out of the Reeds," a Pharaoh's Daughter album released in 2000, is a modernized take on "Lecha Dodi," a haunting tune typically sung at sunset, to usher in Shabbat, the day of rest. Schechter's rendition begins with a stark and lonely vocal line, sung over a spare instrumentation; the song gains momentum slowly but steadily, finally closing with the soft rattle of a tambourine.

Around the time "Out of the Reeds" was released, Pharaoh's Daughter was the subject of a front-page profile in the influential paper The Jewish Week. It was a turning point for the band, which until then had toiled in semiobscurity.

"We were getting hired to play in all these different venues – Jewish community centers, Jewish festivals, synagogues," Schechter remembers. "And we started making money. We were actually getting paid. We got picked up by a booking agent, and the audiences were bigger – I felt like we had tapped into something."

Schechter credits the band's early successes in part to the realization that she had to return to the world she had grown up in. She had to mine the songs of her childhood. In short, she had to go home again.

Meg Okura, a classically trained violinist and a member of Pharaoh's Daughter, says she understands Schechter's decision to return to her roots – as a native of Japan, Okura has become used to audiences expecting her to bring some vital part of her heritage with her onto the stage.

"Basya had to find her niche," Okura says. "When you hear her earlier work, you realize it's quite different than what she does now. She's tapped into her environment and her history and circumstance in a way that she didn't used to, and it works incredibly well."

Okura, who has toured with Pharaoh's Daughter for years while maintaining her own solo career – she has just released a new album called "Naima" – says that the band gives all its members a place to play, to blend influences, to explore, to be themselves.

"Pharaoh's Daughter is ... unique in that you've got a group of musicians that wouldn't necessarily cross paths in any other situations," Okura says. "Most bands in New York work in a single genre, and there's not a lot of blending. Pharaoh's Daughter has a violinist and a drummer and recorder player, and not only is she a recorder player, but she's a specialist in the Baroque recorder. I find that fascinating."

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