Reggae’s Unorthodox Hero

Only one Orthodox Jew from Los Angeles has had to convince a crowd of Jamaican music fans that he’s not Bob Marley’s son.

Then again, only one Jewish vocalist has toured the world as frontman for the Wailers and been told by everyone from Carlos Santana to David Crosby that his rich, haunting voice is the living embodiment of Marley’s.

And only one artist is quick to quote Rastas and rabbis in the same breath or write a reggae track that praises God in Jamaican patois, Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish.

He is Elan, and at 26 he’s eager to embark on the solo-artist journey he’s been eyeing since leaving the Wailers in 1999. Given the singer-songwriter’s resume, you might expect that transition to come off without a hitch.

He’s recorded on two Wailers releases, opened shows for India. Arie and been written up in Vibe magazine. His version of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine” is featured on two recent reggae compilations, while his recording of Gregory Isaacs’ “Dreams Come True” is on the “Sex and the City” soundtrack.

“All Souls,” a roots reggae album inflected with dance hall, rock, hip-hop and Middle Eastern flavors, features collaborations with the Neptunes and Sly & Robbie.

But that album, started in 1999 and completed a year ago, hasn’t come out yet, thanks to the vagaries of the record business.

Elan signed to the London-Sire label, but that company folded in December. So Elan remains in limbo while its parent company, the Warner Music Group, decides whether to release the artist or assign him to one of its other labels. Elan’s manager, Suzanne Hilleary, says that the singer will perform a live showcase next week for executives from Warner Bros. Records, which has shown interest in signing him.

Elan, meanwhile, has long put his faith in powers higher than record execs. “God has given me a talent and wants me to share it,” he declares, eating a bagel in a park near his parents’ Beverly Hills home.

“I’d wake up every morning and say, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’” Elan recalls of his early days with the Wailers. “It’s every kid’s fantasy: You love a band all your life and then you’re its lead singer. I’d think, ‘How on earth did I get here?’”

The son of an Israeli father of Moroccan descent and a Jewish Native American mother, Elan grew up singing Sephardic niggunim (melodies) in temple. Moving from the Fairfax district to Beverly Hills after his father “made it in the shmatta [clothing] industry,” Elan, like so many talented Beverly Hills High School students, began acting and landed small commercial roles.

But as an adolescent reggae fanatic whose favorite vacation spots were Israel and Jamaica, he had another agenda.

“I was angry at the world because I felt that no one was keeping Bob Marley’s spirit alive,” he says. “I wanted to do something about it.”

What the 19-year-old Elan did, at the suggestion of a Virgin Records exec he met at a nightclub, was produce his own reggae album. For the project, Elan hired Wailers guitarist Al Anderson, who happened to live two blocks from Elan’s North Hollywood studio.

Elan hand-delivered the 12-song demo to the same encouraging record exec and was met with a response he’s now become accustomed to.

“He looked at my bass player, a black man, and said, ‘That’s you singing, right?’” Elan says. “He was expecting some white kid music--Sublime, Sugar Ray--but I gave him straight-up reggae and dance hall that sounded like Maxi Priest or Shabba Ranks. I don’t think he knew what to do with it.”

At 20, Elan Went on World Tour

Before anyone could figure it out, Elan was oceans away. Anderson and original Wailers bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett had invited a thrilled 20-year-old Elan to join the Wailers’ world tour.

Without experience, rehearsals or even a sound check, Elan was officially fronting the Wailers, performing before thousands with the world’s most famous reggae band.

If the three-year world tour was, as Elan says, “my college,” his classrooms were in Africa and Asia and South America, and his professors ranged from Shaggy to Santana to Algerian singer Cheb Mami, with whom he’s shared the stage.

At the same time, Elan became immersed in Judaism, putting on a prayer shawl to praise God every morning while his Jamaican bandmates hailed Selassie I. He invoked Jewish and Arabic influences to write songs about love and God, then performed them on stage with the Wailers.

“The biggest blessing,” he remarks, “was when people would come up to me after the show and ask when I’d be performing new material. I’d say, ‘Didn’t you hear those five new songs I just sang?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I thought those were just unreleased Bob songs!”

As bracing as the experience was, Elan decided to leave the Wailers in 1999 to pursue his own musical course.

Elan’s voice on the unreleased album evokes Marley on one track, Shabba Ranks on another, Bono or Sting on yet another, reflecting tastes ranging from hip-hop to drum-and-bass, rock to salsa.

“Record labels--they see me and think, ‘He’s a nice American kid, a Jewish boy from L.A. Let’s clean him up and turn him into one of those boys from ‘N Sync,’” Elan says with a laugh. “That’s not what I’m about. I can sell records without becoming pop, without giving up my edge.”