Vampire Weekend’s Latest Album Is Ezra Koenig’s Guide for the Perplexed

On ‘Modern Vampires of the City,’ the frontman wrestles with Jewish questions, calling to mind a personal Kol Nidre

By Wayne Robins for Tablet Magazine

Remembrances of holy days in Tarrytown and Rye
I don’t wanna live like this, I don’t wanna die — “Finger Back”

Three years ago I was seeking tickets for one of three sold-out Vampire Weekend concerts at Radio City Music Hall. The tickets were a kind of early Sweet Sixteen gift for my youngest daughter. I was looking for three good seats—for Jackie, her girlfriend, and myself—and I suspect that among the three of us, I was the most dedicated fan.

Having worked as a pop music critic for 40 years, I knew someone to call for the favor of buying “house” seats without going the scalper route. But there was an awkward aspect to the request. I could only use tickets for Sept. 15 or 16. The third show, Sept. 17, was erev Yom Kippur, and the only song in my heart that night would be “Kol Nidre.”

But I was curious how Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer, guitarist, and primary lyricist, felt about performing on the holiest night of the Jewish year. So, I asked his mother, Bobby Bass. I had known Bass, a New Jersey psychotherapist, since we attended Bard College together in the late 1960s; in the early 1970s, we lived on the same street in Chelsea at a time when one could rent a Manhattan apartment for under $200 a month.

She told me that Ezra had gone to Hebrew school and been bar mitzvahed in their suburban, predominantly gentile New Jersey town. He decided that organized religion was not for him. That was his choice. Koenig played that Yom Kippur show at Radio City on Sept. 17, 2010, and I respect that choice.

But I do wonder if Koenig even had second thoughts about that Yom Kippur show. Vampire Weekend’s third album, Modern Vampires of the City, was released this May. Like its 2010 predecessor, Contra, it made its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The band has been playing the North American and European festival circuit during the summer and headlined the Ottawa Folk Festival on Rosh Hashanah and the Boston Calling Festival last weekend. It begins its North American arena tour Sept. 19 in Philadelphia and will play the Barclays Center in Brooklyn Sept. 20.

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New Yiddish Music Debuts in New York City

Young musicians take the stage at Sveta Kundish’s first U.S. concert

By Abigail Miller for Tablet

Tonight’s concert at the Center for Jewish History marks the American debut of Berlin-based singer Sveta Kundish, who has been celebrated in Europe and Israel as one of the great new Yiddish voices. The concert features a virtuosic group of musicians: Patrick Farrell, Benjy Fox-Rosen, and Michael Winograd, who have been performing as the Yiddish Art Trio, along with Deborah Strauss and Joshua Waletzky.

Yet just as exciting as who is performing is what is being performed: an incredible body of new work, songs composed by the musicians themselves. The songs are all in Yiddish and show an engagement with the language that is both literary and visceral; some of the lyrics are Yiddish poems, from poets like Shike Driz, Avrom Sutzkever, and Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, and some are original compositions, from as long ago as 5753 and as far away as Brooklyn. The concert is the result, in Joshua Waletzky’s words, of several “fruits ripening at the same time.”

Waletzky is talking about some very specific timing—Kundish’s arrival in New York, Fox-Rosen’s return after a year abroad—but he could also be talking about how, over the thirty-odd years that separate him in age from the younger musicians he’ll be performing with tonight, a rich and growing community of people who are deeply engaged with Yiddish music has set root. They are taking their musical training, their Yiddish literacy, and their connection to traditional music, and moving beyond reviving a repertoire to creating new songs about our lives now.

“I have to say,” Waletzky told me, “it’s been a real thrill for me because I’ve been writing new Yiddish music for a very long time, and the growth of this community of wonderful musicians who have mastered Yiddish music… az men lebt, derlebt, if you live long enough…”

Stravinsky the Anti-Semite

Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is an odd piece that's also oddly well-known, in part because it was featured in Disney's Fantasia. But less well-known about the ballet and orchestral piece Rite of Spring is that its composer was an admitted anti-Semite—though how concerned we should be is still a matter of debate.
In 1989, in the august pages of the New York Review of Bookstwo Stravinsky scholars engaged in a heated exchange on the subject. They agreed that a young Stravinsky wrote to his publisher saying, "I am surprised to have received no proposals from Germany for next season, since my negative attitude toward communism and Judaism—not to put it in stronger terms—is a matter of common knowledge."
One of the writers, Robert Craft, was not shocked by Stravinsky's bigotry because "anti-Semitic remarks between White Russians, like anti-goy remarks between Jews, are not invariably, or even usually… expressions of deep hatreds." The other, Richard F. Taruskin, argued that Stravinsky's anti-Semitism ran much deeper and survived his 1939 immigration to America.

Regardless, Stravinsky's intriguing music is worth celebrating. His bigotry – not so much.

- Marc Davis for Jewniverse

The Original Yiddish Girl Band

A girl group that got its start on a local radio show, and eventually made it big, appearing on late-night talk shows, and touring all over the world. The Spice Girls? The Supremes? Nope. Try the Barry Sisters, whose big hits were all Yiddish covers of popular English songs.
Born Clara and Merna, the 2 sisters were originally billed as the Bagelman Sisters, and achieved some success as Yiddish jazz singers. But when the Andrews Sisters' "Bei Mir Bist Du Schein" became a big hit, the Bagelmans changed their last name to Barry, and joined a radio show out of New York called "Yiddish Melodies in Swing."
As the Barry Sisters, their success grew, particularly with their hit, "Trop'ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop," which you may know as "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." The sisters traveled, performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, toured in the Borscht Belt and the Soviet Union, and performed for Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War.
You can find lots of Barry Sisters songs online, from the expected (a particularly excellent version of "Hava Nagila") to the truly weird ("Makin Whoopee" and "Cabaret" come to mind).

- Tamar Fox for Jewniverse

Urban Jazz Metal Like The Rebbe Sang It

The Alter Rebbe was the founding father of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He was also a prolific composer, who—in spite of not owning (and not knowing how to play) any instruments—composed several hundred nigunim, or wordless songs. These songs were meant to induce a trancelike, elevated spiritual state.

One wonders what the Alter Rebbe would have thought—or how he would have participated in—a concert of the jazz/metal band Deveykus, who covers the Alter Rebbe's most famous (and eponymous) nigun with simmering cymbals, edge-of-your-seat guitars, and a sickeningly adept trombone on their first album, the just-released Pillar Without Mercy.

At 6 songs and nearly 60 minutes, the album is a brooding, rhythm-intensive monster, an unexpected but seamless potential companion to meditation or shuckeling, that silent swaying that accompanies prayer in many traditional circles. Front man and trombonist Dan Blacksberg calls his music "Hasidic doom metal." He himself might not be a hasid—at least, not on the outside—but his music is deep, loud, hard, and unexpectedly enlightening.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse