Jewish Music Bulletin: September 2018
September 20, 2018
Shana tova! We hope your 5779 is off to a meaningful and joyous start!
Welcome to the second edition of the Jewish Music Bulletin: music and news from our world and beyond.
Music for Sukkot
This Sunday marks the start of Sukkot—a time to dedicate oneself to the heart and the body, and to learning and kindness, as symbolized by the etrog and lulav.
The holiday also celebrates the bounty of the harvest and God's sheltering of the Israelites on their way to the promised land. In the years leading up to Israel's independence, a renewed hope inspired new songs extolling a cultural and agricultural revival. Max Helfman's Ḥag habikkurim (Festival of the First Fruits) assembles many of these songs into a pageant that celebrates both Sukkot and the promise of Israel.
May this be a fruitful year of learning and good deeds… and music to inspire both!
Listen to Max Helfman's Ḥag habikkurim »
The Curious Case of Kol Nidre
The musical setting of one of Judaism’s most sacred texts has transformed musicians and thinkers for centuries. Exactly why, no one knows.
Andy Statman Gives Rare West Coast Performance at Pico Union Project
Photo Credit: Larry Eagle
NEA Heritage award winner Andy Statman’s recent performance at the Pico Union Project had Tom Teicholz “gobsmacked by his talent.” In a review of the concert for Forbes, he proclaimed, “There is probably no finer mandolin player working today than Statman.”:
The Jewish Opera Italy Couldn’t Bear to Hear
In The Atlantic, journalist Anna Momigliano reports on an Italian effort to right one of history’s wrongs by staging an opera whose 1938 premiere was aborted by “racial laws” that banned the performance of music composed by Jews. “Yet this is not just the story of a Jewish composer finally getting the recognition he deserves,” Momigliano writes. “It’s also the story of a country that still represses the memory of its racist past.”
Afro-Cuban Yiddish Opera Tells Story of Jewish Refugee
Frank London, a Klezmatics co-founder and collaborator of just about everyone is one of the busiest musicians on the scene. His latest project is a chamber opera based on an early twentieth-century epic Yiddish poem about a sixteenth-century Taino (indigenous Cuban) chief who led an uprising against Spanish colonial forces. The libretto is in Yiddish, English, and Spanish.
Spiritual Convergence
Photo Credit: Anthony Russell
On, “Convergence,” Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell teams up with Veretski Pass on a collection of Jewish songs and African American spirituals sung in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. “…not so much juxtaposing the two musical streams as playing matchmaker between tunes and words that, as it turns out, were already basheret,” writes Josh Parshall.
