Rabbi James Stone Goodman announces the release of “Dressed for Class” a collection of songs, poetry, and music produced by Brothers Lazaroff. Stone Goodman has been teaching, recording and performing in the St. Louis area for close to forty years, his approach stretches back centuries to integrate “source” music and texts with more contemporary styles of sounds and literature. He gets most excited when discovering new forms of combining music and words, something he has done often throughout his career.

Stone Goodman has been collaborating with St. Louis sibling songwriting, producing and band leading duo Brothers Lazaroff since first connecting for what has become their much-celebrated eclectic and eccentric annual Hanukkah Hullabaloo. The brothers and Stone Goodman have been putting on experimental performances and releasing unlikely collaborations since their fateful meeting when they were both working a country wedding, the Rabbi as rabbi and the brothers as band.

Almost weekly since their meeting Stone Goodman can be found in Brothers Lazaroff’s home studio “Room 18” reading poetry over sound design, playing oud on top of drum machines, singing jazz standards with the band, and working out various forms of original material, with “tape” always rolling.

Stone Goodman might send the brothers a rough sketch of something from his iphone and forget all about it, only to show up to work in the studio to find the idea has been flushed out by some of St. Louis’s finest musicians in Grover Stewart, Teddy Brookins, Mark Hochberg, Sam Golden, Andrew Warshauer, and Adam Hucke, among others who might be drifting in and out of the studio. On days like these the Rabbi never flinches, opening up his computer or pulling out some poetry from a folder to retrace his steps, to find the seed and grow the tune.

“Dressed for Class” is a collection of songs, poems, and meditations that come from this process. Born out of ecstatic joy and devastating pain, this album is the gathering and working of years’ of material started and stopped by life’s events.

During a particularly hard period when they weren’t able to be together as often, Brothers Lazaroff found little treasures throughout the files, gigabytes of inspiration that presented a sense of urgency and need to be worked. The first time the brothers played the basis of this album for Stone Goodman, it felt like something he had never heard before, and in many cases he hadn’t. One take recordings of songs written in the months and years prior that had not been mixed or edited until then felt like a surprise. But Stone Goodman, who is constantly writing, editing and moving on, loves surprises. After that initial listen, the team got to work flushing out older pieces and recording new ones inspired by the energy around the project.

Stone Goodman elaborates.

“Some of these pieces began as poetry, they all began in the mystery of creation when I might have thought I did not have a Source for such creativity.

All of the pieces are real collaborations. The pieces kind of fell out of me and my friends were there with a recording device.

My friends were there. That is the most true statement for all these pieces and so this effort was sweated out of responses to hard challenges. If nothing else, I thought it’s always good to do more. I wasn’t sure for a time if there was something else.

This became a something else for me. I am grateful to my master jammers for helping me draw this down.

You will hear a lot about teachers, inspirations, influences. Also beloveds. All my beloveds I am carrying them, they are carrying me.”