The Latest From Our Favorite 11-Piece Afrobeat Jewish Avant-Garde Jazz Band

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

Zion80 is a big band with a big sound—a full horn section alongside multiple percussionists, keyboards, and guitars. They’re a combination of Jewish music, Afrobeat, and avant-garde jazz—late last year, during their residency at a jazz club in the Lower East Side, the band had sixteen players, plus a surprise guest sitting in. Their first album featured funky, super-danceable versions of traditional Jewish liturgical tunes by rabbi/songwriter Shlomo Carlebach.

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‘Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician,’ by Allen Shawn

In an excerpt from a new biography, the great showman asks, ‘What does music mean?’

By Yale University Press (Sponsored) by Tablet Magazine

In writing the text for I Hate Music in 1943, Bernstein had not only imagined a child’s impressions of concerts. He had also expressed some of his own impatience with the way classical music was presented and perceived. In his Young People’s Concerts in Carnegie Hall he was able to address children as an idealized father figure or older brother, while also communicating subliminally that he could still identify with them. An electric current of subversiveness ran through these concerts, as Bernstein seemed almost to reach inside the psyches of his listeners and unlock the barriers between them and music. The concerts created a sense of community, but they were also the exact opposite of “mass entertainment.” They addressed the individual, not the collective. Parents who brought their children to Carnegie Hall and later Philharmonic Hall, hoping that their child would receive an injection of “cultivation” and “fineness,” and somehow emerge more civilized as a result, were instead confronted by someone who was trying to communicate with a deeper, more philosophical, more emotional side of their children than perhaps they were.

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Quiet King of Orthodox Music

Yossi Green, the Satmar-raised composer who found inspiration in Roberta Flack, writes Jewish spirituals

By Joseph Winkler for Tablet Magazine

One evening last month, under a ceiling visibly weighed down by a library of over 10,000 books, Yossi Green, one of the most prolific and talented composers in the world of traditional Jewish music, performed a kumzitz. Part VH1 Storytellers episode and part campfire singalong, the performance was for a 40-strong gang of jittery, somewhat inattentive 18- to 21-year-old yeshiva bochurim. Green, who speaks in the style of Don Corleone and dresses in designer shoes and glasses, played with genuine spirituality and, ever the entertainer, molded his reactions and songs to the audience’s desire for a more jaunty experience. They wanted to sing and shout, and Green obliged them.

Though you might not know it, even a cursory look at the contemporary Jewish music scene reveals Green’s comprehensive influence. He is the composer behind the stars of contemporary Orthodox music, with its ecology of popular songs, including those of Mordechai Ben David (“Anavim, Anavim,” “Rashi’s Niggun,” “Da’agah Minayin”), Avraham Fried (“Aderaba,” “Tanya,” “Yerushalayim Oro Shel Olam,” “V’Zakeini”), Yaakov Shwekey (“Ata Shomer,” “Yedid,” “Ki Hatov”), Dudu Fisher (“Akeidat Yitzchak,” “Kaddish”), and Lipa Schmeltzer (“Wake up Leap of Faith,” “Kaveh”). Green also works closely with many of the rising talents of the current generation, including Shloime Daskal, Shimon Craimer, Shloime Gertner, Shloime Taussig, Shragee Gestetner, and Cantor Yitzchok Meir Helfgot. His eighth album was released this summer. Green’s acolytes treat him like a visionary genius, underappreciated in the wider Jewish community.







Yossi Green from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.


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“Lincoln’s Nigun—Yamin U’smol”: The Perfect Song to Usher in the Sabbath Queen

A lush take on the traditional Jewish hymn “Lecha Dodi.”

By Elissa Goldstein for Jewcy

Here’s a blissful way to usher in the Sabbath Queen: give a listen to “Lincoln’s Nigun—Yamin U’smol,” a new song from Brooklyn-based musician and composer Joey Weisenberg, with gorgeous lead vocals by Deborah Sacks. It’s a lovely take on Lecha Dodi, the traditional Sabbath eve hymn. (You’ll get why it’s called “Lincoln’s Nigun” when you start listening.)

This track comes from the recently-released album Brooklyn Spirituals, the fourth in a series of liturgical recordings composed and led by Weisenberg, whose mission is to “reinvigorate Jewish life through song,” according to a 2013 article in Tablet Magazine. The album was recorded in the choir loft of the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, which until recently was crowded “with what seemed like a century’s worth of accumulated shul accoutrements.” After decluttering the space, an intimate studio and performance space was born. And now we reap its luscious musical fruits!

Enjoy, and Shabbat shalom.

 

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Rocking The Cello, Fuzz Box Included

George Robinson; Special To The Jewish Week

Maya Beiser calls her eclectic and unpredictable musical career a “wild ride,” and her latest CD, “Uncovered” (Innova), certainly suggests that the brilliant cellist is up for any challenge.

The album, which was released this week, is a collection of rock and blues classics as reimagined for cello and rhythm section, with dense multi-tracking and fuzz-box distortion. Beiser will be performing the material live as well, kicking off a brief tour on Sept. 4 at Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker St., [212] 505-3474, lepoissonrouge.com).

Born in the late-1960s on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Beiser grew up surrounded by classical music and the Latin American music her family brought from Buenos Aires to Israel. But the rock and blues of “Uncovered” also come from the heart.

“Here I was, a 15-year-old classical music geek, growing up in an insular world of Western classical music,” Beiser recalls, her storytelling punctuated by chuckles. “One day I heard Janis Joplin on the radio, I think it was ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’ I was blown away by her approach to singing and performing: that raw, immediate engagement. I remember vowing, ‘This is how I want to play the cello, the way she sings.’”

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Let there be peace on earth; let it begin in me… for love is all we need.

Moved by a summer of pain and suffering in the Middle East, at home and around the world, Neshama Carlebach and Josh Nelson have responded in the form of a prayerful, riveting and emotionally raw music video, produced by Josh Nelson.

Musical artists with a lifelong commitment to Israel, trans-denominational appeal and a message of unity for the Jewish community and the world at large, Neshama Carlebach and Josh Nelson were compelled to record the legendary melody composed by the late, great Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach in the midst of the violence in Israel and Gaza…and in the face of the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world.

“As a Jew, as a mother and as a human being, I am terrified by the escalating hatred that I see in this world,” stated Neshama Carlebach, daughter of Shlomo Carlebach. “I grew up knowing that my father’s family ran from Nazi-occupied Europe and was aware of my deep blessing; that I was living securely and free of fear. I hear his voice in my head. This song is our prayer.”

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Leonard Bernstein Sculpture Unveiled at Tanglewood

(JTA) — A bronze sculpture of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), one of the last century’s towering musical figures, was unveiled last week at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Twitter

The sculpture, by artist Penelope Jencks, is the second in a series planned depicting Tanglewood’s most iconic music figures, according to a statement issued by by the BSO. The first sculpture, also by Jencks, is of Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s teacher and mentor, who in 1940 recommended the young Bernstein for Serge Koussevitzky’s conducting class at Tanglewood.

Over the next 50 years, Bernstein, who went on to lead the New York Philharmonic, and later conducted around the world, frequently in Israel, became a highly-anticipated presence at the renowned music center, known for its pastoral scenery. “Tanglewood has always been, and will continue to be, the spiritual home of Leonard Bernstein,” said composer and Academy Award winner John Williams, whose donation to the BSO is funding the sculpture series. A courtyard at the music center is named after Bernstein.

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