Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
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The Schmooze Amy Winehouse’s Last Song
This week, in honor of what would have been Amy Winehouse’s 28th birthday, her duet with the legendary crooner Tony Bennett was released. The two recorded the jazz standard “Body and Soul” last March, just four months before Winehouse’s untimely death, to which no definitive cause has been attributed. In a video about the recording…
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The Schmooze In Song: Ki Tavo
Photo by Jim Summaria, via Wiki Commons Each week The Arty Semite connects the Torah reading — however tenuously — with a classic work of rock ‘n’ roll. In this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo, the Israelites are commanded to bring their first fruits to the Temple and present them along with a recitation (which is…
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The Schmooze Black Metal for the Sonderkommandos
British black metal band The Meads of Asphodel are beginning work on an album about the Sonderkommandos, Jewish inmates who operated the gas chambers and crematoria in the concentration camps. According to metal news website blabbermouth, the band’s lead singer, Metatron (whose moniker comes from the name of a Jewish angel), is traveling to Krakow…
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The Schmooze Israel’s Leading Film Composer in France
Crossposted from Haaretz Armand Amar’s name can be found on ads in the Paris metro, on round billboard signs throughout the capital, and on movie house posters. But the Israeli-born French musician and composer is listed at the bottom, in small print, underneath the films’ leading actors and directors. As a film composer, Amar is…
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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 The Arty Semite Guide to Fall’s Classical Music Lineup
One poet called autumn the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” but some New York concerts redolent with Yiddishkeit focus on the pleasant shock of the new, not misty mellowness. On September 16 at The Austrian Cultural Forum, a new arrangement of the Adagio movement from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth symphony will be conducted in two…
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The Schmooze Bar Mitzvah Boy Serenades Tornado Victims
Thirteen-year-old Eli Clarke was so moved by the plight of Joplin, Mo. tornado victims, that he took to his string instruments. The Montclair, New Jersey native and Bnai Keshet synagogue member will be a bar mitzvah in November, and for his tikkun olam service requirement, he wrote a song to raise funds to rebuild Joplin….
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The Schmooze Drought Year for Israeli Music?
Crossposted from Haaretz If there are no thunderbolts in the three weeks remaining until the end of the Hebrew calendar year, this year will be remembered as pretty much a drought year in the history of Israeli music. No new and interesting message has come from the major and semi-major vocalists of what in better…
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