Q: Which three words launched more musical careers in the frum world than any other?

A: Speak to Sheya

After more than three decades on the front lines, veteran Jewish music producer Sheya Mendlowitz is still at it — sniffing out new stars, genres, and styles for a most discerning crowd, and making sure there’s enough pizza to keep everyone happy when the work seems overwhelming. From Creating a young chassid named Avremel to finding a class act for HASC, he never ceased bringing freshness to an ever-changing, discriminating industry.

I keep clearing my throat but Sheya Mendlowitz doesn’t take the hint.

Here and there, over the course of our interview, I hum a few notes. “You never know,” an industry veteran told me. “Everyone else hears with their ears. He hears with all five senses. He might just see something in you.”

But Sheya doesn’t jump up and say, “Sign here.” I guess it’s not bashert — the magazine will just have to continue to be my stage. It’s not that I have a particularly good voice, but Sheya, I am told, is a magician: he doesn’t only discover stars — he can even invent them.

Veteran Jewish music producer Sheya Mendlowitz has been doing it for years, and he’s still doing it — identifying and cultivating genius and skill like some kind of expert gardener, smelling out genres, styles, events, even people. He plucked songs off obscure tapes and replanted them, watching them develop into hits. In an industry where competitors are friends and friends are competitors, he’s the sounding board, his musical haskamah as necessary as that of a respected posek to a new sefer.

It’s the singers who take center stage in this industry; the producers are somewhere off in the wings worrying about food, lighting, sound, and funding. But the recent chasunah of Sheya’s son was an impromptu celebration of his accomplishments, with friends and admirers pouring in to take part. The paparazzi might have captured the faces of attendees — Jewish music’s A-listers — but not the mood, the appreciation and acknowledgment of established stars who lined up to say mazel tov. They knew that the credit for their careers — and for the richness of today’s Jewish music scene — belongs in large part to the man whose place has always been behind the scenes.

I meet Sheya just days after the simchah for the first of several discussions. As acute as his happiness and pride are with his son’s good fortune, so also is his anguish during a subsequent conversation, just moments after receiving news of the passing of guitarist Yosi Piamenta.

“He was my friend. He was a tzaddik.” Sheya Mendlowitz’s voice is heavy with raw pain. “It’s what Hashem wanted, so it’s good.” (There is a video floating around, of Sheya, Mordechai Ben David and several others visiting Yosi, weeks before his passing. It’s spontaneous and beautiful and heartbreaking, the visitors singing the Baal HaTanya’s niggun for Avinu Malkeinu ein lanu melech ela Atah — as intense a chassidic teaching as any of his brilliant maamarim. They sing and pray and cry at once, the thin arms of the patient grasping a guitar strumming along with his visitors.)

All of this — hope, the joy of friendship, sadness of loss, and always, the faith — is the world of Jewish music, of Sheya Mendlowitz’s music.

One of the Guys

Sheya Mendlowitz looks like he might be a lawyer or maybe an accountant, impeccably dressed and well-spoken. You don’t pick up any of the affectation common to the industry, the funky glasses or strange hat that screams “artist”; you immediately get the sense that in yeshivah or camp, he was probably a great schmoozer, one of the guys. He enjoys the trivia of our conversations, following the trail of different name-drops, a meandering journey back in time heavy in relevance to the industry of today.

Which might well be what makes him unique. He does nostalgia, but without the old-man-sipping-tea-on-the-porch stance: he’s still creating. He likes remembering (“The young Avremel had this energy...”) but in the context of today (“kind of like Benny now”).

When I was in elementary school, I tell him, the minhag was that parents purchased a book or tape for the classroom in honor of their son’s birthday. The year I turned nine, it was a new tape called Something Yeshivish. The cover featured the image of thumbs, extended in a what’s-the-kasha fashion over open Gemaras. The term yeshivish, the thumbs, the choice of songs, was celebrating a culture that was just starting to happen.

“You know, you nailed it,” I say.

He enjoys the memory, but only for a moment. Then he purses his lips, his mind always one step ahead. “Here’s how we could do that now,” he says.

Production calls for a mix of diplomacy, efficiency, and salesmanship. Sheya Mendlowitz was in sixth grade at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath of Flatbush (later called Torah Temimah) when he produced his first event. Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum (Sheya’s face clouds over when he says the name — “I consider that man to be my rebbi and I miss him every day”) was getting married, and Sheya convinced the chassan to allow his elementary school students to host a sheva brachos.

Little Sheya persuaded one of the popular musicians of the time, Leib Koenig, to play for free. “I knew he would do it in honor of Reb Eli — everyone loved him and wanted to be part of it.” To the other Torah Vodaath sixth-graders, Sheya was a hero, because he earned a day off from classes as they celebrated.

“It was the perfect production.”

Reb Eli, Sheya recalls, would bring in a guitar every time his young charges finished learning a parshah. “He would play and we would sing. Those were the best times. He showed us the connection between the neshamah and music, how music can make us feel.”

Outside the classroom, the rebbi was an influence as well; the Sdei Chemed and Pirchei albums he produced opened the world of music for the young boy. “Besides the quality of the voices and the simple beauty of the songs, he was a pioneer in taking his audience seriously, using professionals to conduct and arrange the music.”

The Mendlowitz home was a musical place as well. His father Reb Abish Mendlowitz, (though not related, he was a close talmid of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz) was a gifted baal tefillah.

“We would sit by the record player, and the whole experience — not just the music, but the record jackets, the design, all of it — spoke to me. I loved the Chaim Berlin record, even though the colors were strange. I remember that Chabad had colored vinyl, not just black. There was Reb David Werdyger and Shlomo Carlebach and yibadel l’chayim Reb Benzion Shenker — but Pirchei was always special to me.”

The Vision

We’re sitting in a simchah hall on 18th Avenue, not far from Sheya’s childhood home, as he reflects on the music of his childhood. “I’ve heard a lot of music over the last 50 years, but there was something in that music of my childhood, the late 1960s, a certain naivete, maybe, that no one has ever recaptured.”

It was less about creative harmonies and intriguing arrangements, more about simplicity, a people relearning how to sing after being stilled.

“Elokim yisadeinu,” he starts to sing, tapping on the table until he switches to a slower tune. “Sheb’shifleinu zachar lanu...” He looks at me. “You know what I mean? Sure you do.”