Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
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The Schmooze Top-Notch Music Festival Comes to Leo Baeck
When I found out that an ambitious new music festival in New York, the Chelsea Music Festival, was honoring the 150th birthday of Claude Debussy, I was intrigued to learn that the celebration would feature a performance at the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Debussy — his high-strung, artistic,…
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The Schmooze Jewish Music Comes to Tatarstan
We can now add Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan Republic in the Russian Federation, to the list of cities that host international Jewish music festivals. Early in June, the city was the site of Tatarstan’s first-ever Jewish music festival, which featured performances by artists from the U.S., Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Austria and Cuba. Tatarstan…
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The Schmooze German University Gets Liturgical Collection
A German University is set to receive an important collection of Jewish liturgical music. The donation of the collection of Robert Singer, a Viennese cantor, will make the University of Augsburg home to one of the main collections of Jewish liturgical manuscripts and recordings in Europe. The acquisition was formally presented June 25 in a…
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The Schmooze My Lipa Schmeltzer Problem, and Ours
When Lipa Schmeltzer’s new music video, “Hang Up the Phone,” hit the Internet last week, I didn’t know what to think. What on God’s green earth was this? The video is a study in contradictions. So much so that, as Josh Nathan-Kazis observes, it enters into the Uncanny Valley between Hasidic and mainstream culture. With…
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The Schmooze Klezmer Musician Awarded Highest Folk Honor
The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that klezmer clarinetist Andy Statman is among the recipients of its 2012 National Heritage Fellowships. The Brooklyn-based musician will be awarded the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts during a ceremony in the fall. Reached at his home in Midwood, the 61-year-old bluegrass and klezmer…
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The Schmooze Ladino East Meets American West
Though she has been involved in the Ladino music scene since Neil Armstrong strode the moon, Ljuba Davis’s new release, “East and West,” is her debut album. The 43 years Davis has spent kicking these songs around orally before committing them to permanence rings throughout the album. “East and West,” unlike comparable recent ladino records…
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Culture The Silver Age of Rock and Roll
Call it the “Mad Men” syndrome: These days, we’re nostalgic for other people’s youth. The symptoms present themselves most clearly when it comes to music. Since the world went digital, the recording industry has spent a lot of time in the vaults, coming up with packages that are meant to appeal to the completist in…
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The Schmooze Chana Mlotek, Grande Dame of Yiddish Song
Tonight, renowned Yiddish music anthologist Chana Gordon Mlotek will be honored at The National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene’s annual gala for her life’s work preserving Yiddish folklore. Mlotek, the author of nine books on Yiddish music, has an encyclopedic knowledge of her subject. Now 90, she grew up in the Bronx immersed in Yiddish culture. In 1944,…
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