Nostalgia For A Hipper New York

With a black and Jewish heritage and a classical musical pedigree, cellist-singer Marika Hughes mixes it all together.

Sandee Brawarsky, Culture Editor, for The Jewish Week   

City breezes and nightlights infuse a lot of Marika Hughes’ songs, and so does love and its longings. Born of classical musical royalty, she’s an urban poet who writes music and lyrics, plays the cello, sings and fronts a band. Her latest CD, “New York Nostalgia,” is a love song to this city.

“A lot of the songs are about an ‘almost love,’” she says in an interview near Lincoln Center, close to where she studied at Juilliard and visited her “tantes,” or aunts, on Central Park West. The nostalgia is for an earlier New York City, one that was grittier, friendlier and more racially integrated, when many artists and musicians lived on the Upper West Side. Her New York of the 1970s and ’80s was a city “with everything not so precious, a little dirtier in a beautiful way.” During high school, her string quartet would play at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 73rd Street, but as things shifted in the city, the police would chase them away.

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How This Ex-Orthodox Yeshiva Student Became a Star In the Arab Music World

Lior Zaltzman for The Jewish Daily Forward   

Ziv Yehezkel is a man full of contradictions. He is at once a deeply religious Jewish man, but also a zealous lover of Arabic music.

The soloist of Arab Orchestra of Nazareth, the 31 year-old was born in Kiryat Ono, a town in central of Israel, in an area called “Little Baghdad.”

But Yehezkel did not grow up speaking Arabic. “Part of Israeli culture is leaving your former identity behind,” he tells Channel 10 News, for his parents, that meant not teaching their children their mother tongue. They spoke Iraqi at home when they didn’t want the children to understand, he says.

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International Potpourri for Purim

If you want to hear songs beyond Ani Purim and A Wicked, Wicked Man, you've come to the right place. Listen to Purim sounds from Yemen, Greece, Georgia (the country), Italy, Tunis, and more, from the Jewish National and University Library-National Sound Archive

For more Purim news, check out our    page.

When Carole King Made the Earth Move

Jane Eisner for The Jewish Daily Forward   

One of the early scenes in “Carole King: Natural Woman,” a new PBS “American Masters” documentary directed by George Scott, features grainy footage from King’s wedding to Gerry Goffin in August 1959. She’s 17 years old, pregnant, adorned in that unmistakable 1950s way, with puffy hair piled high and lipstick as bright as her smile.

It looks like the small Jewish ceremony took place in a suburban backyard, in the kind of cookie-cutter housing development where an aspiring middle class family would want to live. By then, Carole had changed her name from Klein to King, formed a band and sold a few songs, but she was still unavoidably a child of her conventional times.

“We were all brought up to be cute [and] to marry the nice boy who’s gonna make a lot of money,” she recalls.

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