WINNIPEG — Basya Schechter, right, who was born into a haredi family of seven children in Borough Park, Brooklyn, taught herself to play guitar when she was 19 years old.

“I was never taught to read or write music, and I still can’t,” says
Schechter, but that hasn’t stopped her from making music that is rich,
innovative and highly original.

Today, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist performs a unique blend of world music. With her band Pharaoh’s Daughter, which she formed in the mid-1990s, she fuses Middle Eastern and Jewish chassidic sounds, giving it a hip, modern edge.

Last month, Schechter performed for the first time in Canada at a sold-out concert presented by the Rady Jewish Community Centre in Winnipeg.

As a child, Schechter grew up singing zmirot at the Shabbat table with her family and was surrounded by Hebrew music that her father played at home. She went to an all-girls yeshiva, and there spent her time inventing six-part harmonies with her friends. The prayer-filled cadences of those childhood years are weaved into her music, which is layered and complex, and frequently has a chanting quality to it.

“As children in yeshiva, we translated texts from Hebrew to Yiddish, from one language that we didn’t know into another language we didn’t know. Even though I didn’t really understand what I was doing, I liked it. I liked the chanting, and it has never left me,” Shechter says.

She eventually widened her horizons when as a teenager she went on a tour of Israel, Africa and Turkey with her guitar in hand.  The rhythms of her inspirational journey, to Egypt, Central Africa, Kurdistan and Greece, resonate in her music, and her extensive travels have produced music with a scintillating world beat vibe.

Pharaoh’s Daughter is good-sized band. Schechter plays oud (a Middle East string instrument), guitar and percussion, as well as singing; her bandmates include keyboardist Jason Lindner; accordion player and vocalist Uri Sharlin; and drummer Yuval Lion. Daphna Mor plays recorders and other instruments, along with contributing vocals. A bassist, a violinist and others round out the band.

The name Pharaoh’s Daughter is an English translation of Schechter’s first name, Basya.

“Basya means daughter of God, and is the name that was given to Pharaoh’s daughter in the Bible when she rescued Moses as a baby in the river in Egypt,” she says.

The title of Schechter’s latest album, her fifth, is Haran, a place she visited in Turkey. “Haran is where Abraham first started his journey in the Bible, and that’s why I was drawn to the name,” she says.

In Haran, Schechter sings in biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and the influence of her Sephardi upbringing is evident in many of her selections.

For example, her soulful rendition of Kah Ribon, sung in Aramaic, is a prayer titled Ya Ribon (Master of the Universe), written by a Sephardi rabbi. It was a zmira that was sung around her Shabbat table.

In another innovative selection, she uses passages from Shir Hashirim, which Schechter says she chose “because both the male and female appear to be equal.” At other times, the words in her music appear to be a collage of Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

One of Schechter’s personal favourites from Haran is the Hebrew Yonati. “I like it because it feels round. I feel like I can float on the music. It’s new and it’s different,” she says.

In an earlier album, titled Exile, the songs Schechter wrote are in English. The title track of the album is about giving birth. It has a particularly beautiful melody that sounds like folk music mixed with “dye, dye, dye” sounds that are typical of chassidic niggunim.

Pharaoh’s Daughter has performed in New York, at Central Park’s Summer Stage Series and at the Lincoln Center; in London, England’s prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall; and this past December the band toured Israel and was featured at the Sephardic Music Festival.

 Schechter expects to be back performing in Israel this summer. “All of my siblings live in Yerushalayim, and my parents are also making aliyah,” she says. She considers herself the “rebel” in the family because she is not Orthodox and prefers to live in the heart of the New York, where she’s close to the music scene, rather than in Jerusalem. But, she says, “my family listens to my music.”

When she’s not touring or performing, Schechter plays in the ensemble that accompanies Friday night services in New York at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun.