Interview with Rapper Nissim -- formerly D-Black

It’s not often that a professional rapper who has performed with some of the best known artists in the secular world turns directions and decides to completely rehaul his life. But that’s what Nissim, formerly known as D-Black, has done. This gem of a man can be seen for who he is in this wonderful interview, where he talks about his conversion to Judaism and his re-entry into the world of music with his new identity. 

Meet Nissim!  (Watch Video)

German Klezmer by "The Talking Clarinet"

All it took was one klezmer improvisation workshop with Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman for German mathematician Helmut Eisel to change his career course and devote himself to Feidman's mentorship and music. Nearly 25 years later, Eisel’s mastery of his instrument has earned him the moniker "The Talking Clarinet." Through it, he sings, spits, wails, cackles, and flirts, all with a distinctive klezmer spirit.

Together with Feidman and others in Germany's klezmer revival scene, Eisel makes music that recalls everything from traditional klezmer to bossa nova to blues. Check out, for example, his album "Klezmer at the Cotton Club," on which tracks like "Der Rebbe Elymelekh" rubs elbows with good old "Minnie the Moocher."

Eisel, who is not Jewish, and Feidman, who is, teach summer improvisation workshops in Safed, and have performed at Yad Vashem to commemorate Jewish musicians killed in the Holocaust.

Feidman perhaps best sums up the uniqueness of Eisel's sound: "You only need to hear a few seconds and you immediately know: this is Helmut playing! And if not - it's not him!"

Chagall on the Ceiling

If there is an opera equivalent to the Sistine Chapel, then Marc Chagall is our Michelangelo.

In 1963, the ceiling of the Paris Opera needed a new paint job. André Malraux, France's then-Minister of Culture, tapped the internationally acclaimed artist. A maelstrom of anti-Semitism erupted, including articles expressing outrage over the idea of a Russian Jew decorating a French national monument. But Chagall, who had resettled in France after escaping Nazi persecution, was unfazed.
After one year, 440 pounds of paint, and 2,400 square feet worth of brushstrokes, the ceiling was completed. At the unveiling, swirling images of kaleidoscopic angels and animals mingled with composers like Mozart, Wagner, and Mussorgsky.
"Up there in my painting," Chagall told The New York Times, "I wanted to reflect, like a mirror in a bouquet, the dreams and creations of the singers and musicians."

Los Desterrrados

Music arouses strong emotions, whether it makes you nostalgic, teary, angry, or just completely blisses you out. But sometimes a song or album is so remarkable that it doesn't just touch you—it transports you to another place and time.  The London-based Sephardic Flamenco band Los Desterrados – "The Exiles" –  is making this kind of music.

Flash back to 1999, when guitarist and oud player Daniel Jonas had an ambitious musical idea: he wanted to make 21st-century interpretations of the medieval music of the Sephardic Jews. His studies of flamenco and Ladino (a language also known as Judeo-Spanish and spoken today by 100,000-200,000 people) coincided with his search for Jewish music other than klezmer. As he uncovered this music, he assembled a crew to play them with him, and so Los Desterrados was born.
To say that their music enables time travel isn't to say that Sephardic music is a thing of the past. But Jonas and friends are doing something specific by mining medieval Sephardic songs and performing them with contemporary flair – a sound that brings together jazz, folk, soul, and flamenco influences in a spirited celebration of both the heart and the timeless relevance of these songs.

Gilbert and Sullivan Go Yiddish

There's nothing inherently Yiddish-y about Gilbert and Sullivan's body of work. But that hasn't stopped Al Grand, a retired New York City schoolteacher, from making a name for himself by penning Yiddish interpretations of the pair's renowned operas.

Though Grand isn't the first to pair Yiddish with Gilbert and Sullivan, he is the first to translate an entire opera from start to finish, and is perhaps best known for Di Yam Gazlonim—that is, The Pirates of Penzance.

In his essay "Ikh Bin Der Major General," sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov, who loved Grand's work, wrote: "It is hard to think of differences more extreme than those between the Victorian British and the Jews of any time or place in the last 2,000 years… The music of Sullivan—cheerful, bouncy, busy! It is worlds different from the bittersweet minor mode of Jewish music."

And yet, as Asimov himself would be the first to admit, Grand has managed to artfully blend the two worlds. He retains the material's giddiness while peppering his interpretations with Jewish jokes and Yiddish cultural references. As anyone who's been lucky enough to catch one of his sporadically-staged productions can attest, the combination is irresistible—and rather strange.