Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Photo by Angela Jimenez. At a July 26 concert at 92YTribeca in celebration of New York’s first legal same-sex marriages, the singer-guitarist Nedra Johnson struggled to find the words to describe the relationships between love, politics and the blues. In an age in which sex and marriage are subjects of legislative debate, she reasoned, performing…
Photo by Spencer Ritenour In his 2006 study “Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture,” Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Shandler noted the strange phenomenon in which musicians have become some of the most well-known authorities on Yiddish culture. “Marginal figures in East European Jewish society before World War II, klezmorim are now prominent cultural spokespeople,…
Courtesy of Daniel Kahn We all know people who seem to have been born in the wrong decade — or even in the wrong century. Only very few of them, however, attempting to connect their society with that of another world, stretch across eras, and become giants — artists and thinkers like Sun Ra, Walter…
Maybe it was only a matter of time before Socalled, the frizzy-haired, klezmer hip-hop hipster, tried to sidestep his ever-expanding identity as a “Jewish artist.” The arbiters of Jewish cultural identity go to great lengths to rope in the eclectic and the original, and a klezmer hip-hopper is a no-brainer. But no one wants to…
In the late 1960s the term jazz fusion became a popular way of referencing music that borrowed heavily from both jazz and funk, or jazz and rock, or really any two genres that musicians troubled to smash together. If you hadn’t already noticed, fusion has been a dominant mode of expression in Jewish music over…
Klezmer legend clarinetist David Tarras will be center stage for the first time in decades on May 5, thanks to the efforts of klezmer violinist and ethnographic field researcher Yale Strom. Strom and his band, Hot Pstromi, will be giving a special performance of Tarras’s music — including some pieces that have never been published…
Photo by Frank Vena Like many of his klezmer contemporaries, Geoff Berner, the Vancouver-born accordionist and songwriter, has a lyrical flair for pairing social commentary with the comically absurd. And he’s been able to do it with tongue-in-cheek storytelling and a Tom Waits-ian sense of balladry. Two of his most recent studio releases, “The Wedding…
A new radio drama titled “The Witches of Lublin” is being offered to public radio stations as a Passover special. Written by Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom, the hour-long production features original klezmer music by Strom and the handiwork of Long Island-based audio drama producer Sue Zizza. The cast includes the prolific audiobook…
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