Benjamin Mertz and the Joyful Noise Gospel Choir raise money for the children of Gaza
Mertz hopes to rise above the politicization of the conflict in Gaza by raising money to feed the hungry, especially children, in Gaza
Benjamin Mertz is a busy person these days. We tracked him down a few days before he flew off to Africa to get married. Now that he’s back home, he and his Joyful Noise Gospel Choir will be holding a “Food for Gaza” fundraiser at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center on Sunday, June 16, from 4 pm to 5:30 pm.
Mertz says he was introduced to music in utero. His mother was a career musician, who sang with the Ridgewood Gilbert and Sullivan opera company for more than 10 years.
“The piano was the center of our home,” Mertz said. “My mother played when she was pregnant with me, and so I was in utero right up against the edge of the keyboard, listening to the sound of the piano—from the very first time I was listening to anything, while having ears to listen with. Playing the piano remains my first love as a musician. I was kind of born for the instrument. I’ve been playing it for as long as I’ve been able to, since I was small enough that I could barely reach up on my tiptoes and touch the keys. And I’ve played it almost every day since then. My journal entry at the end of the day is an improvised piece on the piano. That's been true since I was in early high school.”
Mertz said he learned to be a musician primarily through apprenticeship.
“I have had incredible musical mentors through my whole life and been around professional musicians, who were willing to bring me under their wing, since I was a child,” he said. “I very much learned by doing. By the time I was 12 or 13, I was performing. I was part of a youth jazz initiative where myself and a couple other young people were mentored by a bunch of East Coast studio musicians…I’d be looking over the shoulder of some jazz pianist who’d been a professional jazz pianist for 40 years and I would watch his hands on the instrument and ask him. ‘What are you doing? How did you do that? What was that piece? What was that part?’ There was a stretch of time where I wanted to be the best jazz piano player of my generation, and for three or four years that was my whole focus in late high school and early college.”
Ultimately, he chose not to go that direction.
“When you're an artist, creating art in order to be paid enough to eat—that has an influence on the art making,” he said. “I learned relatively early in my career that making my money performing music wasn’t necessarily what was going to feed me spiritually. I’ve always viewed music as collaborative, as community, as lifting others up, as being a mentor and being mentored. Music to me lives in that space more than in a market-driven space.”
That’s one of the reasons teaching music appealed to him. Mertz has taught music at several local schools, including Oak Grove in Graton and Sonoma Academy.
“Part of the reason that I taught music in schools for so long is because I learned how it can be the calm in the center of the storm,” he said. “How it can be the way to express the things you don’t have the words for yet. And so when I was teaching music at the high school, I was always hoping that at least one or two of my students would come to the end of the year and say, ‘You know what? I have something I can rely on that no one can take from me, and I have a voice that I can use that I couldn’t use before.’”
Mertz’s interest in using music to build community played a role in the founding of the Joyful Noise Gospel Choir, which started as a community sing at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sebastopol. Although Mertz is a Christian, the gospel choir is decidedly non-denominational, drawing from a typically spiritually eclectic West County group of singers— Jewish, Sufi, Buddhist, agnostic—who were nonetheless interested, as the choir’s website says, in using “the transformative power of black spiritual music to create community, lift people up, and raise money and awareness around social justice issues at home and abroad.”
Mertz practices this creed himself. He’s on the board of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, an immigration rights and anti-incarceration organization that, as he says, “is made up of a multifaith community of people who approach the question of ‘How do we treat the stranger?’ How do we treat the foreigner in our land from a faith perspective, and really work on protecting, accompanying, and liberating people from ICE detention, immigration enforcement and from other carceral systems. I have been involved in that group—which includes vigils outside of detention centers and pilgrimages between prison locations and advocacy work—for a number of years now. That work to me is deeply connected with the movement of black spiritual and civil rights movement music, which is my primary study. My love language is the music of the Civil Rights Movement and the music of the black spiritual tradition.”
This weekend Mertz and the Joyful Noise Gospel Choir will be putting that love language to work in the service of a new cause: feeding the children of Gaza.
“We try to be responsive to what the community needs and what the world needs,” Mertz said. “This is something that there’s so much pain, so much heartbreak and grief around, the devastation in Gaza. And it’s so politically charged. We believe that we can bring in a perspective of common shared humanity, of commitment to the dignity and sacredness of human life, especially the lives of children. Actually singing the songs gives one an embodied experience of inclusion, of being part of a movement and of being part of the same team. So it’s not enough to talk about it—even talking about it nonviolently—but when we actually sing about it, it allows us to embody something in a new way.”
Mertz said he’s inviting participants from a range of backgrounds and belief systems to bea part of the event. “We may have people who are on different sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict, who have completely different opinions about what it is and what it means and what matters, but we really believe in putting together a peace event to raise money for food supplies for the most injured, the most harmed, especially the children in Gaza.”
This event will raise funds for World Central Kitchen, in support of nonprofit organizations providing food and survival essentials to the people of war-torn Gaza.
The Food for Gaza Benefit Concert with Benjamin Mertz, Melanie DeMore and Joyful Noise is Sunday, June 16, at 4 pm to 5:30 pm at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, 390 Morris St., Sebastopol. $10-$30. Get tickets.
