A Yiddish Poet's Musical Second Wind

When composer Benjy Fox-Rosen was a kid, his grandmother sang him the songs of her favorite Yiddish poet, Mordechai Gebirtig (1877-1942). "Wait a little longer, dear," goes one of the Krakow songwriter's most famous songs, "Reyzele." But she wasn't much of a singer, so, like the gentleman courting his pious lover in "Reyzele," Fox-Rosen had to wait a while to discover Gebirtig on his own terms. In his new album, Tsvey Veltn/ Two Worlds, Fox-Rosen sets lesser-known Gebirtig poems to music, honoring the sounds and rhythms of the Yiddish while still making them feel current.

Just like Gebirtig's early songs, the first tracks on Fox-Rosen's record are "in the folk style": songs for lovers, lullabies. But as pogroms swept Poland, and Gebirtig was interned in the Krakow ghetto, his songs darkened. Tsvey Veltn follows suit: "A Day for Revenge" imagines Gebirtig's tormentors suffering as his family did, and songs like "Sunbeam" insert a note of irony—and, possibly, hope—into the plight of Jews under the Nazi occupation.

Part history lesson, part act of musical translation, Tsvey Veltn carefully but inventively lends a contemporary voice to an artist who wasn't allowed to finish speaking for himself.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Israeli Apocalypse Rock Breaks Big Stateside

By Michael Kaminer for The Jewish Daily Forward

The fuzzy guitars, pulsating bass,and incomprehensible lyrics intrigued me. So I looked up the song that was streaming on KEXP, the Seattle indie-rock station I broadcast at home. The band’s name seemed Finnish or Icelandic, until I realized the words were actually phonetic Hebrew.

Vaadat Chirigim, it turns out, is that rarest of musical animals — an Israeli rock band poised to break big stateside. The Tel Aviv noise trio is having a huge year. Along with an album release on California-based Burger Records for “The World Is Well Lost” — a slightly awkward translation of [“Haolam Avad Mizman”] — Vaadat Chirigim have become darlings of trendspotting media like Spin, Paste, and Filter. KEXP, a hugely influential station, even made Haolam Avad Mizman’s title track its song of the day — a bullseye for a new band. The Forward caught up with drummer Yuval Guttman from Tel Aviv.

Michael Kaminer: Your songs have Hebrew names. Is there anything inherently Jewish or Israeli about the music you write and play?

Our songs are completely in Hebrew, not just the names. We sing about the end of the world. The end of Tel Aviv bohemia. About apocalypse. About not being able to let go of the past. It is nostalgic. It is about hopelessness and at the same time it is about moving forward. It is about everything that Israeli youth today is concerned with (and I mean the youth that I’m surrounded by; not everyone, of course). The fact that there is no future in sight that isn’t controlled by fat pinkish rich politicians who are only concerned with old-school ethics and maintaining financial face.

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A 21st-Century Yiddish Pop Hit Straight from Azerbaijan

In the 20th century, the Andrews Sisters made the Yiddish-ish song "Bei Mir Bist Du Shein" a hit (it was even successful in Germany before the Nazis realized the song was Yiddish, and not a southern German dialect). In the 21st century it was an Azerbaijani non-Jewish singer named Ilhama Gasimova who brought it to the top of the charts, with her electronic-infused cover, made with DJ OGB.

Gasimova was a student of philology living in Baku who rocketed to stardom when she made it to the final round of a televised singing competition seeking the next Azerbaijani submission to the Eurovision Song Contest. Eventually she moved to Germany and signed with a major record label, who had her release "Bei Mir Bist Du Scheen" in 2011. The black-and-white music video—featuring Gasimova in period costume, lots of dancing girls in flapper dresses, and clips of Laurel and Hardy boogieing—was a smash hit, and for a time was in the top ten most bought music videos on iTunes.

Gasimova's sensuous voice is perfect for the song, but we can’t help but wonder what its ripped-off writer, Shalom Secunda, would have thought.

- Tamar Fox for Jewniverse

Mambo, From Miami To The Mountains

New release from Idelsohn Society traces the roots of the Latin-Jewish musical story.

George Robinson; Special To The Jewish Week

Although it flourished most brightly in the post-World War II era, the Jewish-Latin connection in American pop music probably goes back as far as the history of recordings will take us. Even the authors of the entertaining liner notes for “It’s a Scream How Levine Does the Rhumba: The Latin-Jewish Musical Story: 1940-1980s” admit that the origins of this musical marriage are shrouded in mystery. But as the two-CD set, issued this month by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, richly documents, it has been a fruitful, if occasionally dopey relationship. (As if none of us have been in one of those, right?)

As the dates of the set suggest, the high-water mark of the intermingling of Jewish and Latino music takes place with the suburb-bound Jews ceding their old ghettos, soon to be barrios, first to Puerto Ricans, then later to more variegated Hispanic-American waves of immigration. That literally common ground — think East Harlem — undoubtedly was one source of the linkage. Another, amply documented in set by Xavier Cugat’s “Miami Beach Mambo” and the Barry Sisters “Channah from Havanna [sic],” was the steady trickle of Cubans to Miami, which turned into a small tsunami when the 1960 revolution deposed Fulgencio Batista.

The Idelsohn Society mavens cheerfully acknowledge that this river flowed both ways, with the Catskills hotels becoming a genial nesting ground for Latin bands, producing such little delights as Machito’s “Mambo La Concord” and Tito Puente’s “Grossinger’s Cha Cha Cha.” The presence of Machito and a cut that pairs Candido with tenor sax great Al Cohn (on Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” no less), underlines another shared heritage — the advent of Afro-Cuban jazz as one of the streams of the bebop revolution.

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