The Sway Machinery have long been the bridge between a few different worlds. Founded by Jeremiah Lockwood, the grandson of a famous cantor who also spent his formative years working with the great bluesman Carolina Slim, the New York-based ensemble has helped bring traditional Jewish heritage music into the 21^st century through their inspired original music. Feeling a natural kinship to the various roots and world music scenes flourishing around his native city, Lockwood has also used The Sway Machinery as a vehicle for cultural connection and dialogue, working with renowned musicians around the world to offer a fresh spin on a form of traditional heritage music.       

The Dream Past, the first Sway Machinery record in over a decade, was recorded in Poland last year, featuring the lineup of Lockwood on guitar and vocals, Yuli Yael Be’eri on bass and vocals, John Bollinger on drums, Stuart Bogie on saxophone and Kenny Warren on trumpet. (Sway co-founder Jordan McLean participated in the piece’s live debut but was unable to join the sessions as he prepared for the birth of his son). The record is also a rare peek into the cantorial music world’s improvisational roots and history with Grateful Dead/Alan Lomax-like bootlegging.

“There’s a whole prehistory of The Sway Machinery,” Lockwood says of the band’s roots. “When I was a teenager, I was already using the name The Sway Machinery at the age of 16, 17. I had a trio that was more of a punk-rock band. When I met Stuart, we started the formal history of the band. Colin Stetson and Jordan were part of that history early on, and our original drummer was named Tomer Tzur and then Brian Chase [of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs] came in. So it is blurry and dizzying to think back on these different experiences that I’ve had with people who have been very close friends and musical collaborators and different ones over the years.”

On December 23, The Sway Machinery will celebrate the release of The Dream Past with a concert at New York’s Hebrew Union College Chapel as part of the Yiddish New York Festival and on December 25, Lockwood will discuss his new label Khazones Underground as part of the Yiddish New York Symposium. Then, on January 1, he will kick off the year by playing a set of blues music with noted drummer Ricky Gordan at New York’s Terra Blues.

Below, Lockwood discusses the roots of the new Sway Machinery record, a seminal trip to Africa, and one reason why so many Jewish music fans gravitate toward the jamband scene.

It’s been several years since The Sway Machinery released an album. What was the original impetus for getting back into the studio for The Dream Past? 

Maintaining a band like The Sway Machinery started getting really hard around 2014. I moved to the West Coast, and though we continued to do some projects, when the pandemic hit, that felt like it was maybe the end—a lot of things in life felt like that back then. But then I moved back to New York, and we started playing together more regularly again, in large part due to [the High Holiday services that Lockwood serves as the musical director for at Brooklyn Bowl and elsewhere in New York].

A big part of the band has always been taking concepts from different parts of the world and bringing them together, and an important collaboration we’ve had is with the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival. The Sway Machinery has played there three times, and I’ve also been there a bunch of times with other projects as well. And in 2024, we got invited to come and present this song cycle that I’d composed for the band called “The Dream Past.” We did the show and it was a very exciting moment of triumph for a band that was on the cusp of not existing anymore to be back at a major international festival and presenting music in this really beautiful way. It was really lovely and, while we were there, we had a couple of days off between our two shows, so we recorded in Krakow. We did the record with this gentleman named Marcin Gągola, who has this studio in the basement of a mechanical testing facility. During the day, they’re doing regulations testing and seeing if cars will blow up—it’s a very noisy, insane industrial setting—and then they close for the day at 5 p.m., and he works into the evening. He does a lot of hip-hop production and electronic music in this very unassuming-looking space. And the recording we made sounds like it was recorded in an Eastern European basement. It’s got a gritty quality to it, which I love. It felt parallel to these DIY spaces that we were working in when I got started as a musician in New York.

The Sway Machinery has had all these different chapters. Our first record, Hidden Melodies Revealed, was recorded outside of Montreal in a place that was owned by Arcade Fire—they built a recording studio in an old church space. Our second album, The House of Friendly Ghosts, was recorded in Mali in a recording studio that was built by Ali Farka Touré and our third album, Purity and Danger, was recorded in this mansion owned by an eccentric millionaire out in the suburbs of Jersey. We basically had a patron who let us record in this studio he built at his house as a passion project. And now our fourth album was recorded in an industrial space right across from where Schindler’s factory was. The record deals with Jewish heritage music, so it felt good to be working in that space, bringing life to a place which is marred by this tortured history of violence and death. All these things are symbolic of the mission of the band, but they are also productive features of the work—we’re finding new ways to speak about all of this. 

You mentioned that this was The Sway Machinery’s third time performing at Krakow Jewish Culture Festival and you’ve toured Europe extensively. How popular is this form of music in Poland currently?

Poland is a very interesting site for Jewish music right now. They’re in their post-communist period and have become really interested in reclaiming their history as a site of Jewish life. The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is one of the prime examples of that. Marcin doesn’t specifically work with Jewish music per se, but Jewish music is also not an unknown quantity either. Klezmer, for instance, is a popular form of music in Poland and in other parts of Europe, though maybe somewhat less right now. 

Things are changing all the time, and we’re in an unusual moment of transition politically. It’s hard to say what the impact of that will be on the overall picture, but the story of the Polish people having a curiosity and an openness to Jewish musical expression is a big part of the scene over there. There are more concerts of cantorial music in Europe than in the United States, which is rather strange given the size of the Jewish population in the U.S. But American Jewish musicians go over there to perform this heritage music. And patrons of the arts in Europe see music as being a form of this art, and they support it, but they also see it as being theirs. So, while there is a complicated and tortured history, but one of shared patrimony, people are trying to figure out how to claim that history. The ethics of that are complicated, of course, but the actual music-making is a site of great joy. The Krakow festival is a very ecstatic, beautiful experience.

You debuted “The Dream Past” in New York a few years ago and have performed the music in a variety of contexts since then. And the project is dedicated, in part, to the “live davening bootleggers whose audacity in smuggling recording devices into houses of worship produced one of the single most important sources for knowledge of Jewish musical culture.” What was the inspiration for writing this suite of music, which brings classic cantorial music into a modern, electric setting?

This song cycle is based on a very specific body of music. Cantorial music has two lives. One is as a form of recorded pop music from the Jewish records made in the early 20^th century. And the other is as a liturgical music that’s performed by cantors in the synagogue. And these two expressions of the music are related to each other but also very different.

With the synagogue performances of the old-school cantors, it was a durational experience where you’d go there, and the cantor would be singing for hours and hours. There’d be a choir and there would be different styles of music that would be presented, and there was lots of improvisation. And for people who are fans of the music, while they may have also loved the records, the records were distilled versions of the music that was turned into these three-and-a-half-minute long recordings. It’s akin to how jazz has to be tailored to the mediums of recorded sound. But, in the synagogue, you would hear the deep digging of these artists, hour after hour, calling upon their physical resources to create all kinds of different sounds and channeling the energy that only accrues by listening to this music over a long period of time.

Fans of this music understood that this art form was dying out—there were a lot of changes in American Judaism and the old-school cantors who did this style of meditative, long-form improvisatory cantorial music were fading out and the young cantors were not interested in continuing in that style. So in the 1960s, when the handheld tape recorder came on the market as a consumer product, people started making bootlegs of different cantors singing in the synagogue. They’d go to these hour-long services and—breaking Jewish law, of course, because you’re not supposed to do that—they recorded these cantors. They saw this form of art as being part of the holiness of the tradition. They wanted to be able to capture that, and they believed that doing that was more important than obeying the law. I have a lot of respect, and amusement, for what they were doing. It’s totally eccentric and insane that people did this radical thing and captured that sound. It’s an incredible document and, for people who are into this music, it is an incredible resource to learn about how these cantors actually sounded.

The music that I wrote is an exploration of turning this longform ritual process back into little nuggets of recorded sound, so the process is about creating new records based on these ritual performances. It relates to the old history of how cantors created their records back in the day but from my perspective, which is based on the music that I make and the feeling of living in New York today. My collaborators are all heavily influenced by improvisational music and the music being made in New York as well. There’s a cycle of time, a cycle of history that’s part of the process of making this music.

It’s interesting that you mention how important improvisation was to the early cantorial movements and that future generations bootlegged their performances Deadhead/Alan Lomax style. There is always the abstract question as to why so many Jews gravitate toward the jam, jazz and other improvisational music scenes. Do you think that has something to do with the historical connection between traditional Jewish music and these extended, meditative performances?

From a scientific perspective, I don’t have any answers about that, but my feeling is that the process of Americanization left Jews missing a lot of their traditional resources for healing and for cultural productivity. Also, it’s no secret that Jews are involved in show business and cantorial music is a form of show business. It has an ambiguous relationship to show business, but nevertheless cantors were popular performers. And so, as those Jewish musical professions from Europe lost their commercial viability, the children of cantors, or of other kinds of Jewish musicians, went into different creative fields. And many of them gravitated toward other art forms, toward playing rock-and-roll, jazz or blues. Each artist has their own story, but an overall picture appears of an immigrant group—Yiddish speaking Jews from Europe who were very involved in music, whether it was cantorial, klezmer or classical—fleeing for their lives and coming over here. The famous examples are the German composers who were doing work on an extremely high level in the music industry in Europe feeling for their lives. And they came to America to become Hollywood film score composers and important instrumental soloists in orchestras and so forth. And on more of the street level, the children of these cantors became singers, sometimes in opera but also in American popular music.

It’s a story that has a lot of different meanings, and it’s not always perfect. American Jews get sucked into some of the problems of everyday American life in general, in terms of trying to figure out racial dynamics and how that all fits in the divide of race in America.  But overall, there’s a picture of an immigrant group striving to find a way to be expressive in a context in which your native language is no longer comprehended. That’s a big picture philosophical problem of American Jewish life that musicians are very active in trying to work it out and offer different possibilities around.

In addition to The Dream Past, you have a few other records coming out, including a cantorial compilation that you recorded at Daptone studios in 2019 and had Gabe Roth mix at Penrose Studios. Can you give us a little insight into those recordings?

The Sway Machinery record is coming out on Khazones Underground, the label that I founded with my colleague and friend Judith Berkson. We are also putting out two other records, one that I produced and one that I co-produced with Judith. One of them, Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today, is a document of Hasidic cantors that I’ve been working on for many years now and that I wrote my book about. There is a scene of young artists coming out of the Hasidic community for whom exploration of cantorial music has this feeling of an underground art music scene. It’s not necessarily something that they learned about from their families, although sometimes they did—it’s something that’s not really supported by the community. It has this DIY aesthetic. People are learning from old records, creating their own networks for learning and performing the music when there aren’t actual gigs where they can do it professionally. And from this scene there are a few stars who have emerged, sing on the international circuit and are doing concerts in Europe.

It’s a world that has been very important to me and helps me understand my own work as not being so isolated. The Sway Machinery is coming out of this world music scene in New York. And there are a lot of bands in New York that take hold of heritage music in some form and then do something new with it—that’s a kind of a known quantity of New York music. I always felt way more akin to that world than, say, bands like Slavic Soul Party! or something like that because, in the Jewish music world, Khazones were kind of alienated. There’s a lot of energy around playing klezmer music and there’s a lot of energy around new synagogue music, but new synagogue music typically doesn’t have a lot to do with the old-school cantorial sound.

So meeting these Hasidic singers made me feel less isolated, and I realized that there were other people who respect and love this old sound and wanted to do something new with it—who understood it as being a vital option that they can draw from to create their own worlds of music. So that was really inspiring for me, and these were also just insanely talented singers who were doing this beautiful work. Producing that record and getting these singers into Daptone to record that was a major milestone for me.

The other record is called The Return of the Immortal Khazntes, and that has to do with this story about women cantors in the early 20^th century. Famously, women are prohibited from singing religious music in synagogues in the Orthodox scene. And that’s a big problem. So during the past 50 years, in the United States, there’s been a major shift where liberal Jewish movements have embraced women as cantors and as rabbis, and now, actually, the majority of rabbis and cantors in the liberal movements are women. But if you go back to the period of cantorial popular records back in the 1910s and 1920s, there were women who were singing Hazzans, who were singing the old-time Yiddish inflected Jewish liturgical music, and some of them were huge stars. It was a whole thing. I’ve done a lot of research about this, and I have an article that I wrote that’s coming out about it. I also work with contemporary musicians, of course, and Judith is successful in that world, and we had the idea of trying to document contemporary women artists who are interested in this form of heritage spiritual music. They are doing important work, and we produced a record that has four different singers, each of whom has a radically different personal story, but they all are united by their passion for this form of heritage music and the belief in its potential to say something to the current moment.

You mentioned The House of Friendly Ghosts, which was recorded in Mali and features the powerful vocals of the local female singer Khaira Arby. When you performed in Mali, it was also the first time that Hebrew had been sung on stage in areas of this historically Muslim country. It is a beautiful cross-cultural project that also features some improv-ready electric guitar work. How did you and Khaira first cross paths?

It’s a project that couldn’t really happen today, but maybe it will return and those possibilities will be available once again. But, in 2010, the American representative of the Festival of the Desert, which took place in Timbuktu, Mali, asked us to participate. It was an annual celebration of peace between the different linguistic groups in the region, who had been fighting for years, and an attempt to show solidarity between the people who share the nation state of Mali.

In my opinion, at the time, the art and music scenes coming out of the Northern Mali region were the most vital and important in the world—bands like Tinariwen and Bambino, as well as Tamasheq guitar groups that have come out on the heels of them, and people like Ali Farka Touréwere really exciting to me and inspired my work with The Sway Machinery. So I wanted to check out the scene there and bring what we’d been doing—which was inspired by their music—to Mali and show these musicians how they had helped inspire other heritage reclamation projects like The Sway Machinery. I just felt that it would be a profound experience for me and possibly a point of dialogue between different parts of the world.

Christopher Nolan, the American representative for this festival, was excited about what we were doing, and he invited us to come and play at the festival. And that was the seed for the idea to try to make a record while we were there. I got really excited about this singer named Khaira Arby, who at the time was not particularly well known outside of Mali, and we asked her if she would be interested in doing something with the band. We met her in Timbuktu, and she sang with us when we did our festival concert there. And then she came and spent a few days with us in the studio in Bamako. And that life-altering, incredibly beautiful learning experience making music together led to us spending a couple of years, on and off, touring together. We worked in Europe together. We did several tours of the United States together. And it was a wonderful moment in the band’s life. It’s almost a naivete about the possibilities of music speaking across political boundaries. I’m not sure that an American band would try to do something like that today. I think the political climate would not be as favorable toward it, but at that moment, it felt like what I needed to do and what I wanted to do. It was about the possibilities of having an incredible experience of interaction with, and learning about, a musical scene that I thought was the most important in the world at the time.

It opened up a lot of possibilities for us as well, and we got to help Khaira and her band tour in the United States several times, which was great. I was very proud to be able to help support her work. She passed away a few years ago, and, sadly, in 2012, the Malian civil war broke out, and the region has been gripped by a lot of instability ever since. I hope to get back there again someday, though it would be a lot harder for an American band to do something like that right now.

Bringing things back to your current Sway Machinery record, can you talk about some of the musicians who accompanied you to Poland to make this album? As you noted earlier, most of them have a long history of playing this music, even if they are also focusing on other styles of music currently.

Certainly, Stuart [Bogie] has always been a very important force in the band’s history. He is less active with the band these days, but that’s for positive reasons. He’s developing so many different projects and doing amazing work. Jordan [McLean] is still closely associated with the band, but he recently became a dad, so he wasn’t on the Krakow tour that we did last year so we had our dear friend Kenny Warren playing trumpet. Kenny has also played with the band for many years, during different periods, along the way. So it’s incredible having him on it—he plays beautifully on the record. This album is also our first record since Yula [singer/bassist Yuli Yael Be’eri] joined the band, and she is an incredible addition. She has one of the finest voices in the world—she is just such a stunning singer—and she’s become a composing collaborator for me. So that’s also new—she co-composed several of the pieces on the record, and it was really amazing collaborating with her on that. Of course, John [drummer John Bollinger] is one of the long-running backbones of the project. One of the reasons why I still want to do this work is to get to play with John. He’s an amazing human being and musician.

We’re collaborating with the Yiddish New York Festival, which happens every year, and they’re producing our Khazones Underground record label launch show, where we are going to play The Dream Past in its entirety. And then we are also, amazingly, going to have all four of the singers from the Khazntes record there, too. Everybody is coming in from different places—Rachel Weston from London, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon from Wisconsin, Judith from Los Angeles and Riki Rose from Brooklyn. Riki is a Brooklyn-based artist, so I’ve been working with her a lot this last year. Each of them is a total star. There’s gonna be a lot of high-octane vocal performances at the show and I’m really excited about it.

Throughout the year, you balance your academic work with your original music projects and other curatorial endeavors. Do you have any other archival recording projects in the work for next year? 

At the moment, I’m producing the posthumous album of Cantor Benzion Miller. He’s a legendary artist who passed away earlier this year, and I’m working with his family to produce his last album. Very fortuitously, I produced a recording session with him in 2024—he was already ill, but his voice was still beautiful. I got him into the studio with some of his family members and some of his old friends, and we recorded a bunch of his music. He was largely improvising, which was pretty incredible. And now we’re overdubbing more choral parts to thicken the sound and get a presentation of this work that’s gonna be really profound and beautiful. I have hopes that the record will come out early in ‘26.

I also just wrote a piece called “Selichos/Transformation,” which is a cantorial piece for the Selichos services we did this year, and there are plans in the works to do another performance of that next year. I have a bunch of different projects that are in early stages of brainstorming as well.  

In addition, you have been performing with the Black string band The Ebony Hillbillies. That group shows off another side of your playing, including your banjo skills.

I came from a musical family. My dad’s a composer. My grandfather was a well-known cantor [Jacob Konigsberg]—being a cantor is an intergenerational profession in my family. I always wanted to be a musician as a kid, but the music that really inspired me was what I heard on these old blues records—my dad had all of these beautiful blues records, and they went into my brain and inflamed it. And at the age of 14, I met an elder blues musician who was active in New York in those days, Carolina Slim of blessed memory. I worked with him on and off for the next 20 years, but especially as a youngster, I played with him every week and spent hours talking to him and learning about old-time blues music and about the philosophy of being a musician in general. So, as much as my family legacy influenced me, Carolina Slim’s influence is what made me wanna become a musician.

I always try to keep a foot in that world. I decided, fairly early on, that I wasn’t gonna try to primarily establish myself as a blues artist, even though it might have made sense for me to do that. That’s my strongest skill set as a performer and, certainly, as a guitarist, but I just had other things that I wanted to do that were harder and have motivated me to keep going.

But, especially after Carolina Slim passed away in 2014, I’ve wanted to play that music as much as I can. I started a memorial project with some other fellows who played with him. And, after the pandemic, me and [drummer and Wynton Marsalis collaborator] Ricky Gordon—who’s a very close friend from that I’ve known since I was a kid playing with Carolina Slim—started the duo Gordon Lockwood, and we play blues songs at clubs around New York. It’s been a joy to keep having that in my life.

Ricky is the person who recommended me to the Ebony Hillbillies, whom I have known since I was a kid. They were on the same circuit of playing blues and Americana old-time music. When one of the founders sadly passed away, they were looking for a guitarist/banjo player, so I’ve been out on the road with them for the last couple of years. We did a tour in Kentucky in October, and I’ve been inviting them each year to come and be our guests at our annual High Holiday services. That’s been a really lovely moment in the services each year, and I love getting to highlight that part of my musical life.

Given that it’s the holiday season, it feels appropriate to loop back to your 2021 album, A Great Miracle: Jeremiah Lockwood’s Guitar Soli Chanukah Record. You also recorded a version of “Dreidel” with Luther Dickinson and Howlin Rain’s Ethan Miller a few years before that. What were your goals for those releases?

I’m not quite Mariah Carey, but I get a little winter holiday bump with my guitar instrumental Hanukkah album each year. I had this idea—I love the John Faye Christmas album, it’s a go-to seasonal album for me. And also, like everybody else, I slightly bemoan the absence of American Jewish pop culture or Hanukkah records that are actually something you’d want to listen to. So I thought, with that in mind, I should put together a set of instrumental Hanukkah songs in that John Faye style. I think it’s my most listened to record on digital formats. It was a fun project to do and, for people who don’t know it, if you put it on at your holiday party, it’s a crowd-pleasing one as well.

Great Miracle was a totally solo record, but Luther and I did track together for ‘Twas the night before Hanukkah, this compilation of Christmas and Hanukkah music that came out on the Reboot Stereophonic label [in 2012].  That record’s already rather old, but that’s another one that people like and it gets a bump every year.