Denigrators of the blues used to call it the “devil’s music”. For Eduard Shyfrin, businessman, Kabbalist and musician, the opposite is true. The blues has a deep spiritual vein that reflects the imprint of the divine.
Now in his mid-60s, a few weeks ago he released his second album of blues, In the Shadow of Time, delivering his mystically infused lyrics over a strong rock orchestration in a soft growl. More recently he and his band, the Shyfrin Alliance, have recorded some new compositions in the studio made famous by the Beatles, Abbey Road. Considering he only wrote his first blues song barely three years ago, the music has flowed out of him.
But as he explains, “Kabbalah is my first priority. I consider my music an alternative expression of my kabbalistic research.”
Rabbi Mendel Cohen, the rabbi of the Saatchi Shul in St John’s Wood, with whom Shyfrin regularly discusses Kabbalah and who will be in conversation with him in Jewish Book Week – said: “I’m struck by how deeply Jewish the blues can be: a cry, a question, and a refusal to give up. Eduard’s work reminds us that sacred wisdom is not only found in books, but can also be heard in music.”
Born in Ukraine, Shyfrin made his money in metal before branching out to other areas but it was a personal crisis some 20 years ago that led him to the study of Kabbalah. A strong supporter of Chabad, he now lives in France although remains a frequent visitor to London. In 2019, he published his book From Infinity to Man where he sought to harmonise kabbalistic conceptions of the universe and modern scientific theory.
When he was seven, he was sent to study classical music after regular school hours. “I didn’t want to go but my late parents pushed me,” he says. “Now I am very grateful to them.” His passion for the blues must have come from hearing some of the jazz greats such as Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington that his parents played at home,
Traditionally, the form is believed to have emerged from the West African melodies that Black slaves brought them to the USA. “But nobody has proved that,” he says. “We have never heard the West African melodies that which sound similar to blues. I decided to investigate.”
The origin, he suggests, may be different. The music of the Temple may have been lost but traces may remain in the modes of Jewish prayer chanting passed down the ages and that in turn influenced Christian traditions. The slaves were converted to Protestantism and it is what they heard in church that shaped the evolution of spirituals and latterly the blues.
Thematically, the Israelites oppressed in Egypt resonated with the slaves forced to work on the plantations. But Shyfrin detects another connection with the Bible encoded in the very musical form of the blues.
He analysed the intervals between the notes on the pentatonic scale that forms the spine of the blues. “If you take the interval between C and E flat, this is one and a half tones. C to F is two and a half… Then take the second part of the pentatonic. G to B-flat is again one and a half, and G to C is again two and a half.”
The ratio between the two halves is around 1.6 and that, for Shyfrin, is no ordinary number. It matches what became known as the “golden ratio”, first uncovered by Euclid (1.618) that was subsequently found to recur through art and nature.
Greek philosophers, he says, like Plato “discussed why is something beautiful to us – and their idea was there is some idea of beauty in our soul. What matches this model is beautiful to us, what doesn’t match is not beautiful to us.”
The number is “a symbol of beauty… it is in paintings, sculptures everywhere”.
Examples of the golden ratio, he says, can be found in different parts of the composition of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
But, he argues, it is also found in the Bible in the construction of Noah’s Ark (50 cubits high and 30 wide) ; the Ark of the Covenant. (2.5 cubits high and 1.5 wide) ; and the altar (5 cubits wide and 3 high). It also appears too in the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable Divine Name. If you take the two hehs, that compose the second and fourth letters, they add up to 10: while the first and third letters, yud and vav, have a numerical value of 16 – leaving a ratio of 10:16, that is 1:1.6.
The Ark of the Covenant actually inspired one song G-d’s Number Blues, on his first album, Upside Down Blues, released in 2024.
In the kabbalistic mind, all Creation is intimately connected, emanating from its divine source: the golden ratio signifies a principle of order embedded in its structure.
Which helps to explain, he believes, why blues can touch our soul.
Eduard Shfyrin and Rabbi Mendel Cohen will be in conversation at Jewish Book Week on March 8 at 8pm
Top image: the Shyfrin Alliance – its founder and vocalist is third from the left
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