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In his 1969 novella “The Golem,” Isaac Bashevis-Singer took the medieval Jewish folktale, about a rabbi conjuring a supernatural clay creature to life to save the Jews, and recast it as a morally ambiguous tale with unexpected results.
Bashevis-Singer’s version was a “great discovery for me,” said Oakland pianist, accordionist and composer Sam Reider. Inspired by the novella, he composed a folk-jazz suite that seeks to track the storyline and its moral complexities.
“The golem is … a monster but also feels somehow taken advantage of,” said Reider, 35. “And the rabbi is trying to save his community.”
The San Francisco native will celebrate this summer’s release of his new album, “The Golem and Other Tales,” on Sept. 5 at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage with his band, the Human Hands.
The golem folktale — one of the sources that inspired the Jewish creators of Superman and possibly Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” — also provides a fertile field for musical invention. Reider conceived and designed the project for his all-star unplugged combo, reuniting one of the most exciting bands working in territory that encompasses jazz, new acoustic music and bluegrass.
The band originally coalesced playing bar gigs around Brooklyn back in 2016, but most of the players already had deep ties.
The current version of the band features Eddie Barbash, an alto saxophonist who plays with Jon Batiste; Duncan Wickel on violin, cello and bouzouki; Mark Shatz on bass; and Alex Hargreaves, a violinist who plays with Billy Strings.
Reider and Barbash were both 15 when they met at the Stanford Jazz Workshop in 2004, and they’ve been collaborating ever since. Meanwhile, Hargreaves and Wickel “grew up going to fiddle camps and bluegrass festivals together,” Reider said.
When he set out to compose the 22-minute, eight-part “Golem” suite, Reider knew he wanted to create themes “using the ‘Peter and the Wolf’ technique.”
With that technique, in which each character is played by a single instrument, Reider makes canny use of the musicians’ “totally distinctive improvisational voices,” he said.
“I tried to sketch out the story and reduce it to scenes that were focused on character and action, things that could be easily portrayed musically. I totally imagined it as a movie, which is how I compose in general, thinking of film or theater or dance.”
While Reider has often composed with a narrative in mind, “Golem” is his first work with a specifically Jewish theme. Born into a creatively charged San Francisco Jewish family, he grew up hearing his father, a theatrical composer, toiling away at the piano, refining a phrase by playing it over and over again.
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He absorbed jazz, classical music and American Songbook standards from Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, particularly classic movie musicals like “Guys and Dolls,” “Singing in the Rain,” “Cabaret” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”
His talent as a pianist manifested early. By high school, he had started winning jazz competitions and an array of awards. As a senior at Urban High School of San Francisco, he attracted the attention of piano legend Marian McPartland, who interviewed him on her popular public radio show “Piano Jazz.”
While he majored in American studies at Columbia University, Reider opened his musical heart to the wider world, launching a series of bands guided by jazz’s improvisational imperative and steeped in roots influences gleaned from travels around South Asia, the Caucasus region and beyond.
The new album doesn’t reference klezmer or other Ashkenazi music. But Reider, who grew up attending San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom, approached the project thinking of himself as an American Jewish artist in conversation with the masters who have long provided him inspiration, such as Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, David Amram and Bernard Herrmann.
“Identity has always played heavily into the creative choices I’ve made and guided my circuitous and meandering path,” Reider said. “Human Hands is about composing original music and threading together all the different strands.”
After the Freight show, Reider and Human Hands will perform Sept. 7 at the SandBox in Monterey County’s Sand City and Sept. 11 at the Arcata Playhouse in Humboldt County. On Sept. 21, he will play at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in a duo performance with Venezuelan cuatro virtuoso Jorge Glem as part of the Global Roots Sonoma festival.
After performing widely together, Reider and Glem recorded the 2022 album “Brooklyn Cumaná,” a project he followed up with 2023’s gorgeous solo piano album “Petrichor,” which includes pieces inspired by the Ethiopian pianist/composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and West African balafon scales.
In his own way, Reider casts a similarly wide net with “The Golem and Other Tales.” He sees Jewish identity as a living entity, always interacting with adjacent peoples and cultures.
“This record is a reflection of this process,” he said. “It’s a reflection of what it means to be Jewish in an assimilated community like the U.S.”