By Gavi Tropper, Staff Writer
One of the last people I would have expected to see on the grass outside Rubin Hall is a bagpipe performer. Yet when the instrument began booming across the sidewalk one Friday afternoon, I seemed to be the only one frazzled. I was told “the Bagpipe Man” is a common sight on the Wilf campus, randomly appearing every so often in the middle of the day to play for a few minutes.
“I used to live in the MTA [Yeshiva University High School for Boys] dorms,” Tzvi Bromberg (YC ‘27) told the YU Observer, “and when you would hear him playing outside, and you’d leave your window open, it just made the whole building such a vibe because the music is super chill.”
“It’s just fun that there’s someone who spontaneously plays the bagpipe[s] in the Heights,” Yisrael-Dovid Rosenberg (YC ‘27) said.
This bagpiper certainly stands out among the passing YU students, with his faded jeans and a t-shirt with a Scottish beer company’s logo. A dark gray durag is tied around his head, and his bushy gray beard has metal beads attached at the bottom. But as I listened to his music, I was surprised to hear him playing a common tune for the end of Hallel. It turns out that YU’s bagpiper is actually a Chabad chasid named Gevaryah Dickson.
Gevaryah, whose birth name is Gerald, was born in the ‘60s in Paterson, New Jersey, to a non-religious Jewish family that also has Irish, Scottish and Italian roots. Music has always been a major part of his life — “my grandfather taught me to play the banjo when I was four,” he explained to the YU Observer. Gevaryah later expanded to other instruments such as piano and brass instruments, and he has been playing music professionally for decades.
At the age of 30, after he was already a well-established musician, Gevaryah decided to take up the bagpipes. “This is the kind of instrument you have to practice all the time,” Gevaryah said. “It’s a physical instrument; you have to keep the endurance.”
He discovered that the only way to keep up his skill was to squeeze in practices whenever he could. Fortunately, one of his side hustles — installing internet across the city — often left him in Upper Manhattan during his lunch break. So, Gevaryah began coming to YU, a friendly spot to practice the bagpipes when he was in the area.
Gevaryah’s religious journey began earlier, in his twenties, when he moved to Crown Heights to be closer to his job in Manhattan. It was there, while setting up sound systems for weddings, that he first encountered Chabad chassidim. There was no single jolt of inspiration that made him want to become religious himself. It simply dawned on him over time that “there had to be something more than this.” He described it as “coming back to your own and you know it.”
Today, Gevaryah lives in Forest Hills, Queens, with his wife and two daughters. He frequently plays music at Jewish weddings and can sometimes be found performing outside “770,” the world headquarters of Chabad in Brooklyn. He believes that God’s presence can be felt in every occurrence in this world. The only obstacle, he said, is that “even though we have eyes we don’t really see, [and] even though we have ears we don’t really hear.”
Even his beard carries mystical connotations; he separates the hairs at the bottom into thirteen different strands, each neatly threaded through a tight metal bead. The thirteen strands, he explained, correspond to the 13 Attributes of Mercy (Shemot 34:6–7) and 13 Principles of Faith of the Rambam.
For Gevaryah, music plays a special role in bringing the Divine to this world. “The music,” he said, “comes from Hashem into my head. Then it goes to my mouth, and then to the listener.”
Gevaryah’s original music expresses this striving to incorporate God into everything he does. Much of his work focuses on blending traditional niggunim (melodies) with a modern sound that includes heavy electric guitars, drums and — of course — the bagpipes. This may not be the usual instrumentation or style of these songs, but the way Gevaryah sees it, “it doesn’t desecrate the tunes. If anything, it adds power to it.”
In “The Shofar of Moshiach,” for instance, Gevaryah takes on a classic Chabad tune known as “The Alter Rebbe’s Niggun,” a melody meant to evoke yearning for Moshiach (the Messiah) and greater closeness to God. In that vein, Gevaryah starts the track with a reading of verses in Shemot describing the Revelation on Mount Sinai followed by the sound of an actual shofar blast. The primary instrument of the niggun itself is the bagpipes, along with background drums that add a strong beat.
Although it follows an unusual style for Jewish music, “it does sound epic,” Yonatan Simkovich (YC ‘28) told the YU Observer. “Jewish music could use more creativity. I mean, have you ever heard a Jewish song with bagpipes before?”
Gevaryah’s music can be found on SoundCloud under the name “Gevaryah,” and it is definitely worth checking out. Alternatively, you can pass by the grass in front of Rubin Hall around midday– if you’re lucky, you can catch Gavrayah live. The unexpected bagpipes performance breathes some playfulness into any drab or stressful afternoon, and as Ezra Cohen (YC ‘26) told the YU Observer, “it’s just a nice, refreshing sound to hear in the middle of the day.”
“The avira (environment) of campus life is majorly improved by the experience of the bagpipes,” Aryeh Klein (YC ‘27) told the YU Observer. “I wish he would come more often.”
Photo Credit: Gevaryah Dickson