Mordechai Shinefield
By Mordechai Shinefield
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Starting From Flamenco
“Ride,” the debut album from New York City-based band Caramelo, has global ambitions worthy of its name. The opening track, “The Girl is Gone,” sets the tone for the rest of the album when Jewish singer Sara Erde trades smooth fly-girl R&B vocals with flamenco artist Alfonso Cid. While Erde’s voice is immediate, alternating rapidly…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: The Face of Ladino Dream-Pop
Any artist working in “World Music” (likely the vaguest genre for which Billboard tracks sales) has to determine the role traditional sounds play in their compositions. They hang suspended between the present and the past; too much fealty to the canon and the recordings become academic exercises in evoking a world long gone. Update your…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Opera in the Steampunk Age
Ben Z. Mund Photography Over the last few years a number of bands, ranging from Brooklyn-based punk rock outfit Golem to indie stalwart Beirut, have found inspiration in the diverse sounds of Eastern European music. Just as 19-century Romani lăutari musicians mixed peasant songs with ceremonial Byzantine church songs, Turkish folk songs and klezmer, these…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Where Klezmer Ends and Jazz Begins
Tzadik Records’ Radical Jewish Culture releases often split the difference between jazz and klezmer. Both genres drag long canonical histories behind them like the train on a wedding dress. Both are easily innovated upon, prone to flights of improvisation, and adept at locating individual musicians in the midst of a vast history. Joel Rubin and…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Fool’s Gold’s ‘Leave No Trace’
Fool’s Gold’s new album, the sophomore effort “Leave No Trace,” keeps the sun-touched Afropop sound from its critically successful debut and mostly jettisons the Hebrew language lyrics that helped that first album stand out. The new album is a bid for a wider audience but it’s missing the combo that made their self-titled so special….
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The Schmooze Mourning Amy Winehouse’s Lost Jewish Future
On July 23, London police were called to Amy Winehouse’s Camden apartment where they found the bluesy singer-songwriter dead. In addition to the sadness of losing such a talented musician early in her career, there’s a more prosaic tragedy as well. Talking to a Perth newspaper in 2007, the troubled Winehouse said that she dreamed…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Furious Hip-Hop for Comp. Lit. Majors
Courtesy of Yitz Jordan/Shemspeed Records. Photo by Jonathan Hunter. Y-Love, also known as Yitz Jordan, is a black Jewish convert from Baltimore who feels just as comfortable at underground freestyles as he does at the Sabbath table. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and an Ethiopian-American father, Y-Love converted in 2000 at Brooklyn’s Conversion…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: The Girls Are in Trouble, but Not This Album
It is hard to believe we are only five years from klezmer-punk band Golem’s 2006 debut album, “Fresh Off Boat,” and the first time (most of us) heard Alicia Jo Rabins on a record. Since then we have gotten a follow-up from Golem (2009’s tremendous “Citizen Boris”) and a solo debut from Rabin’s new project,…
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