BRAND NEW JULY 2020 RELEASE!

Never-Before-Released New Song Included.

Here for the first time ever is an audio EP (in Apple™ AAC format) of the trailblazing live performance of Bruce Cohen & John Rose at the 1994 MJAA Annual International “Messiah” Conference.

The EP is FREE. There is no purchase price. But – do feel free USE THIS LINK TO DONATE! Standard price for an EP or Album is usually US$10 to $20.

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“Jacket Copy” Notes & Info Are Below The Tracks. – Enjoy!

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COHEN & ROSE • LIVE AT MESSIAH 1994 • ALBUM TRACKS

1. It Is Time

 

2. I Will Call

 

3. Who Do You Know

 

4. Anachnu

 

5. You, You, Yeshua (NEW, never before released)

 

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BACKGROUND “JACKET” COPY

Cohen & Rose was the first Messianic Jewish “super-group” ever to form.

Bruce Cohen, with over a decade as the popular lead instrumentalist, composer, and producer from the veteran band-driven choral ensemble, Kol Simcha – and John Rose, for many years the lead vocalist from the accomplished performing and recording group, Shivat Tzion – fused into a duo, creating a new and exciting presence in the Messianic Jewish worship music world.

Their 10-song debut studio album, “Holy” released in 1991 was created in Philadelphia’s famed Studio 4 and Victory Studio, and co-produced by Lamb’s Rick “Levi” Coghill – the “Quincy Jones” of the 1970s-1990s Messianic Jewish music scene. Holy’s new classically-derived rock n’ roll and balladeering personality opened to rave reviews in the USA, Europe, and Russia – and even inspired original dance choreography from Los Angeles to Moscow.

Holy realized for a 2nd time in Bruce Cohen’s composing, arranging, performing, and producing career the creation of an utterly new, original Messianic Jewish sound.

His first creative season with Kol Simcha brought The Movement music ranging from intimate duets to Beethoven-sized choral arrangements, fusing Klezmer-derived rock and with Broadway-styling and dances or mid-song music-backgrounds playing under live readings from Scripture: all this was what earned Kol Simcha its 1978-1990 reputation for “bringing it” to worship.

As was said to a 2005 gathering at The King David Hotel in Jerusalem, by an Israeli cantor & worship leader of long international experience speaking about Kol Simcha‘s impact at conferences when leading worship, “… everyone knew the real creative force, the engine behind Kol Simcha, was Bruce Cohen.“

Holy merged spiritual vibrancy with vocal and musical skills hard to believe could be packed into only two musicians, Cohen & Rose concerts ranged from soft, intimate ballads to blazing keyboard solos and lead-guitar driven rock-anthems that shook the very ground. You never really knew what was coming next: John & Bruce could be duetting voice-and-solo-guitar in pieces like, “The Power of God” … or John might be resurrecting his theatrical training to juggle & kibbitz with the audience as Bruce fixed a broken guitar string onstage. Laughter to tears to thunder – it was all there.

The Holy album’s final song, It Is Time, was chosen as the opening and closing theme song for the Messianic Judaism Today tv show, broadcast throughout America via the Sonshine Network based in American music capital, Nashville, Tennessee –– and Cohen & Rose quickly became “headliners” at regional and national/international conferences across the United States – and for nine years – until the duo went separate ways in 1999.

This new live EP at “The Conference” captures the live impact Cohen & Rose’s music had on the audience at this main event on the main stage, and allows you to “be there” as you listen and worship along.

This EP also contains a song new in 1994, never released until now on public recording: Bruce Cohen’s confession-of-faith anthem, You, You, Yeshua – that got a reaction from the crowd seeming to “lift the room off the ground” as the closing song of their 5-song  Conference-closing concert: one of the two main concerts of the week-long gathering of Two Testament Jews from all over the world.

The lyrics for these 5 songs are embedded in the Apple™ AAC file Lyrics function.

This 2020 LIVE EP is provided FREE of charge.

We also invite and encourage you, in line with the Biblical precept that “the worker is worthy of his wages (Matthew 10:10)” and the fact that worship musicians have bills to pay like anyone else …

Please feel free USE THIS LINK TO DONATE!

Standard price for an  EP or Album is usually US$10 to $20 (or its non-USA equivalent) – or more, if you wish :-). However generously you might feel is appropriate.

Such support is what enables Music Ministers to keep ministering music to our Movement and beyond!

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FYI ––– Digital tracks for the 1991 Cohen & Rose studio album, Holy, can be found on iTunes as the 2nd CD in a 2CD set “Fall Upon Us Now: Greatest Hits 1978-1999” – along with the 1st CD of. Bruce Cohen’s 12 years of his original songs and arrangements for Kol Simcha.

Please also note – the hard-copy Holy CD is now only available as the 2nd CD in the 2-CD “greatest hits collection” mentioned above. It can be purchased at this link. ]

The full 2CD set can be also heard on “Spotify” by subscribers to that service.

Thank you for your support over decades of Bruce Cohen’s music ministry.

Here’s looking forward from 2020 – God willing – to many more! !

קדימה Kadima!

 

 

 

IMPROMPTUS: A Casual Piano Album

FREE OF CHARGE – (Donations Welcome Here)

By

Bruce Louis Cohen, pianist & arranger

im•promp•tú (from French): done by impulse, on the spur of the moment, without preparation or forethought

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Play each of the songs by tapping the title.

1. Take A Pebble Keith Emerson, arranged & performed by Bruce L. Cohen
2. Rhapsody In Blue Variations  George Gershwin, arranged & performed by Bruce L. Cohen
3. You Are My Rest Bruce Louis Cohen, composer and pianist

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ALBUM NOTES BY THE PIANIST/COMPOSER

In late 2015, I found myself arriving early to a meeting in which I was to lead worship music, study, and prayer. The meeting was held in the spacious and audio-gorgeous sanctuary in Manhattan on Park Avenue my synagogue is privileged to call home every Wednesday and Friday evening.

I was so early, literally no one was there – yet. I sat down at the beautiful seven-foot Steinway grand piano I played publicly twice every week, and an impromptu thought crossed my mind: record some spontaneous piano playing. On impulse, I pulled out my trusty iPhone, hit “record” – and got busy. Who knows when someone might arrive, and one casual “Hi, Rabbi!” would spoil whatever was being recorded at the time.

Happily, no one else arrived early, and I had the sanctuary to myself for around twenty minutes. That gave me time to dash off three pieces from memory, without warm up or rehearsal; and these three homages, very dear to my piano-playing heart, were what rushed to the front of the line, so to speak. 

The 1970 piece Take A Pebble by Keith Emerson is what started my piano-playing style when I began learning piano/keyboards in 1971. My own variations on George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue had cemented my sense of the keyboard for modern music, and were also what got me noticed in college as a pianist and composer: the chairman of the Fine Arts Department wandered by the studio in which I was playing this quasi-statement of Gershwin, and shortly afterwards, invited me to do a summer fellowship in composition: thank you, Professor Hugh Allen Wilson. You Are My Rest is from among my own original compositions from the mid-1980’s: a piano-forward piece with piano as one voice in a duet with a tenor or soprano vocalist.

No warm up. No rehearsal. Completely, genuinely “impromptu.”

Why publish such a burst of impulse?

A few reasons.

Firstly, I run into people from former places in which I was an often presence at the piano, and hear them say fairly early into the conversation, “We really miss you at the piano.” I have the hubris to believe they are being sincere. 😉 These pieces are for you all, out there wherever you may be. If you ever get a yen to hear Bruce Cohen at the piano as you have said you do, these are the “warm up” pieces you would usually be hearing me playing as I readied to perform in a concert or service. They will probably sound familiar.

Secondly, I am sincerely proud, in the positive sense, of what I could and can “do to a room” on a piano. In 1999 my wife and I became “whistleblowers” in our former sphere, and we have faced attempted erasure of all traces of my work in music and other arenas, as if I had never existed. These piano pieces are a reminder of what Noah Webster said so eloquently: “I do not propose to allow myself to be buried until I am actually dead.” 😉 I am still very much alive, and still playing piano and guitar in the center of Manhattan’s Park Avenue twice a week, every week. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Lastly, many of my family and friends from early in life through high school, college and our adult lives have never had the chance to hear me perform. While a good deal of my works are on professionally recorded albums, I have never had the chance to sit down and play the piano for them as if we were all just at a party, and someone said, “Hey, Bruce – why not play a few tunes for us?” Also, since every note of my original music and every word of my original lyrics since 1978 is in some way about faith – at such a party, I would want to be polite, and play music that would be comfortable for my listeners. So – friends and family, from across the years and miles – these three are for you.   

Recording into my iPhone in that vast, empty sanctuary on that huge, magnificent instrument I had all to myself for a few minutes harkened back to my experiences at my alma mater, Union College, between 1975-1978, when I would several times a week seize any opportunity to get into the Arts Building Dance Rehearsal Studio and play the nine-foot Bösendorfer 290 grand piano in there.

There is something ethereal and nourishing about playing a grand instrument alone into a grand space.

It had a great deal to do with all I became musically – all I performed, composed, and recorded.

I hope the nature of it comes across, even in a rushed recording into an iPhone.

I am seldom more myself than I am when I am doing this – even more so, when doing it impromptu.

Enjoy. 

Bruce Louis Cohen

New York City • 15 August 2018

Recordings • September 2015

FREE ONLINE ALBUM !

From 1978 to 1990 the majority of the original music in the live performances and most of the studio-album recordings of the band-driven choral ensemble, Kol Simcha (Sound of Joy) were written, arranged, and co-produced by Bruce Cohen – and most of the time, with his uniquely-branded piano-playing driving it, during what Kol Simcha soprano Kathy Shooster called, “Kol Simcha’s ‘golden era.'”

Each song is playable directly from the links below. Enjoy! (Released Early April 2017)

“What I love about this raw, non-studio collection is that the separate and distinct qualities of the vocal and instrumental performances, and harmony-arrangements can each be clearly heard for what they were truly back then, without studio correction or masking – despite often tremulous analog recording, and a decidedly honkey-tonk sounding old piano in one of the live venues. This collection captures how it all really was – live.” 

– Bruce L. Cohen, Composer/Pianist/Arranger

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This 14-song EP is FREE. There is no purchase price.

But – do feel free USE THIS LINK TO DONATE!

Standard price for an EP or Album is usually US$10 to $20.

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1. Sing Hallelujah (Live At Mt. Holly) – Music & Lyrics: Rick Coghill & Joel Chernoff, Vocal Arrangement: J. Finkelstein, Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein. Piano Arrangement: Bruce Cohen ©Messianic Music & Messianic Publishing & Bruce Cohen respectively.

2. Shomer Yisrael (Live At Mt. Holly) – Song & Vocal Arrangement: Hasidic Folk Festival, Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein Piano Arrangement: Bruce Cohen ©1979 Hasidic Folk Festival, Kol Simcha & Bruce Cohen respectively.

3. Who Do You Know (Live Mt. Holly) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

4.  Eli, Eli  (Live Mt. Holly) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocaal Direction: J. Finkelstein

5. Revival Has Come (Live Mt. Holly) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements:  ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

6. All Of Us (Isaiah 53)  (Live Mt. Holly) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements:  ©Bruce Cohen Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

7. Upon Your Walls –  (Live Mt. Holly) Music, Lyrics, Vocal Arrangements: Richard Serody, Original Piano Arrangement: Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

 8. Shema – (Live Mt. Holly) Music, Lyrics, Vocal Arrangements: Hasidic Folk Festival, Original Piano Arrangement ©Bruce L. Cohen: song ©1984 Hasidic Folk Festival. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

9. Fall Upon Us Now –  (Live Mt. Holly)  Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

10. Give God The Glory (Live in Philadelphia) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

11. Your Gentleness  (Tascam4 Recording) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

12. Who Do You Know (Tascam4 Recording) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

13. Great Is The Lord (Tascam4 Recording) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal & Piano Arrangements: ©Bruce Cohen. Vocal Direction: J. Finkelstein

14. V’Ahavtah (Live in Philadelphia) – Original Music, Lyrics, Vocal Arrangement Composed & Conducted (Vocal Direction) by ©Bruce Cohen

CREDITS:     Mt. Holly Recording Engineer: Wayne Eisenberg.

Tascam (PA) Recording Engineers: J.P. Shelkin & Mitchell Fox.

Starting in the 1960’s and for a time eclipsing even The Beatles, Jewish British songstress HELEN SHAPIRO was a pop sensation with numerous hits and best-selling albums.

Helen became a woman of Jewish Two-Testament faith in the 1980’s, and turned her talents toward music expressive of her faith.

Early on in her faith life, she encountered the work of composer, Bruce Cohen as performed by Cohen with the band, Kol Simcha, his songs also populating the worship music programs at all the major Messianic conferences. Shapiro sought Cohen out to begin “covering” his songs. Across the next several years, she sang five Bruce Cohen songs onto three separate albums, and performed those songs all over the UK, Europe, Russia and the USA – see one such performance by clicking this link).

Those albums featuring her Bruce Cohen “covers” are now available on iTunes for digital download, either in whole or in part.

The active links below take you right to where they can be sampled. To listen to the entire song, simply purchase it via iTunes. It is with great satisfaction that Bruce Cohen provides linkage to this seminal vocalist’s performances of his works. Enjoy!

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THE PEARL (1990) 

Sample PLAYABLE HERE: “Lev Tahor” + “Hallelu” (2-song medley)

Sample PLAYABLE HERE:: “In The End Of Days“

KADOSH (1992)

Sample PLAYABLE HERE: “I Will Call“

 NOTHING BUT THE BEST (1995)

Sample PLAYABLE HERE: “Fall Upon Us Now“