When Linda Yelnick was the booking agent for RebbeSoul, the rock musician known for his modern interpretations of traditional Jewish songs, she’d occasionally go on the road with him.
On one trip, she recalls, “He played ‘Avinu’ three nights in a row. And every night I heard it, I’d cry because it’s so beautiful.”
Part devoted fan, part giant Rolodex of important contacts in the Jewish entertainment world, Yelnick is one of a handful of people who specifically handles Jewish artists. As RebbeSoul’s agent for three years, she handled more than 100 bookings at venues across the country, including synagogues, nightclubs and last year’s Palo Alto Jewish street fair, To Life!
“Linda was very conscientious and hard-working,” says Bruce Berger, who is RebbeSoul. “She gets so absorbed. She’d be buzzing around the club — like a bee, constantly moving around — and she’d run into me standing there and it was like watching Kramer [from TV’s “Seinfeld”] fall through the door.”
Based in San Mateo, Yelnick’s business, GIGZ, is absorbed in the careers of a dozen Jewish artists, both in the Bay Area and in other parts of the country. They include Neshama Carlebach, who continues the tradition of singing and storytelling of her father, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach; Sam Glaser, known for his mix of pop, rock and jazz; and Consuelo Luz, a Chilean-Cuban singer who sings in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardim.
More recently, Yelnick has signed up Visions, a pop trio of teenage girls. She calls them “the hottest thing in Jewish music now.”
Yelnick would know. She keeps up with the latest trends. On this day, she is wearing a very hip T-shirt, showing a girl grooving on a guitar in blue glitter. Though Yelnick has two children in their 20s, she also has a blow-up plastic electric guitar with rainbow-colored keys on the door of her office. A Motown clock marks the hour by playing “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” The entire wall of her home-office, in fact, is covered with posters: RebbeSoul and Barbra Streisand share space with the Doors and Jimi Hendrix.
“I love working with the artists, these people who feel who they are through their songwriting and their voices,” she says. Yelnick uses words like “depth” and “soul” and “inspirational” to describe the music of those she represents, rather than drier, more technical terms like “classic rock” or “pop.”
Sounding more like a mother than a business agent, she says, “There’s a Yiddish term, ‘kvell.’ I’m so proud of them, watching as they bring happiness, ruach [spirit] of being Jewish to people.”
Yelnick stumbled into the booking-agent business. Previously, she was involved in the Jewish community for years as an educator. As the religious school coordinator for her synagogue, Peninsula Temple Sholom in Burlingame, she arranged for popular family entertainer Craig Taubman to perform there. Then in 1998, while serving on the board of The Jewish Day School of the North Peninsula in Foster City, she suggested getting RebbeSoul for a big fund raiser.
Berger had already recorded an album featuring “Avinu,” his guitar version of the High Holy Days’ “Avinu Malkeinu” melody, and other Jewish songs in Hebrew and English.
After the event, she and Berger “talked and we got along really well, and he just said, ‘Would you like to book gigs for me and be my agent?’
“And I said, ‘Sure!’ It was an opportunity to network with people all over the country, and Israel and Canada.”
Since January, when RebbeSoul signed with a label (33rd Street, the independent label started by Tower Records), Yelnick has been developing a new roster of artists. She recently booked Cantor Doron Shapira, of Peninsula Sinai Congregation in Foster City, for the educational conference Limmud, which takes place in England in December.
Much of her job involves networking — convincing rabbis and heads of Jewish organizations to consider her artists for their programming as they’re planning their budgets for the year. “Things are tough right now in the Jewish world,” she says. “Money is going to Israel — as it should.
“But I also think people should remember to celebrate, to just keep going.” Besides booking large public events, Yelnick also books entertainment for private events such as parties, weddings and b’nai mitzvah. Yelnick, who has an unlisted number, can be reached at [email protected]
As a woman in the booking business, she has had to learn how to be more assertive. “I’m very nice but I’m firm. When things go wrong and you get ‘Sorry, Mr. So-and-So is in a meeting,’ I’ve learned to say, ‘I will hold, I need to speak to him now.'”
Yelnick has been speaking up quite loudly for Jewish music, launching a grassroots effort to get a Jewish music category in the Grammy Awards. “I was watching the Grammys on TV,” she says, “and I suddenly realized they have Celtic and gospel and salsa and polka and every kind of music, but there’s no Jewish music.”
For the last two years she has sent a big packet of CDs and letters (including contributions from actor Theodore Bikel of “Fiddler on the Roof” and Mayim Bialik of “Blossom”) to the academy but so far, no dice. Yelnick’s resigned to a long haul.
“There’s a Native American category, and the Native Americans told me it took seven years for them to get it — it’s a real struggle. But I think we’ll get there. There are hundreds of Jewish artists, and our music has been around for thousands of years.”