What happened to the classic songs of the 1930’s and ‘40s? The standards of the Great American Songbook crooned by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee or Ella Fitzgerald (and later made unforgettable by Star Trek‘s Data)?
“The B-Side” by Ben Yagoda reads like a detective story sniffing out a homicide, and the deceased is Tin Pan Alley, New York’s epicenter of songwriting and music publishing for decades. A surprising number of its authors and composers – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen – were Jewish. In fact, Yagoda points out, they were almost all the same age, raised in middle-class New York families, and attended Columbia University.
Minimalist Composer Had a Lot in Common With Uncle Harry
By Eileen Reynolds at The Jewish Daily Forward
Channeling the good Jewish son he never quite was, Philip Glass gives the first line of his new memoir to his mother: “If you go to New York City to study music,” she warns her youngest on the occasion of his graduation from the University of Chicago in 1957, “you’ll end up like your uncle Harry, spending your life traveling from city to city and living in hotels.”
Arriving in the quiet that followed the hoopla surrounding his 75th birthday in 2012 (an occasion marked by the premiere of his Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, a grand international tour of the five-hour modern classic “Einstein on the Beach,” a slew of interviews, and the requisite grumbling by critics insisting he’d long since lost his edge), Glass’s memoir “Words Without Music” is less a told-you-so victory lap (“Look, Ma — I’m the world’s most famous living composer!”) than an exploration of the many ways in which his mother’s prediction rings true.
If you ask Brooklyn-based musician Yoshie Fruchter, the great cantors of the 20th century –Yossele Rosenblatt, Leib Glantz, and Fruchter’s own grandfather — were actually laying the groundwork for a new brand of rock. If these names don’t ring a bell, don’t worry: Fruchter’s album Schizophonia, which reinterprets great cantorial recordings with the help of the electric guitar and plenty of reverb, makes its own way through the most awe-inducing Jewish prayers.
Jewish band’s new album evokes the haunting of the past
By Gabriela Geselowitz for Tablet Magazine
The Sway Machinery is back with their latest album, Purity and Danger, and we’re premiering the music video for their new song, “My Angel’s House.”
The Sway Machinery is the project of Jeremiah Lockwood, musician and grandson of the legendary cantor Jacob Konigsberg. The band’s genre is hard to pinpoint, as it incorporates everything from rock to blues, to traditional Ashkenazi music.
“This new record, I would say that there’s a strong recurring theme having to do with ghosts,” Lockwood told me. “Ghosts are a collaborative element in creativity, and they’re not really to be afraid of—and they’re part of the band, so to speak—they’re members of the wedding.”
“My Angel’s House,” one of the two English songs on the new album, certainly fits that category. The eerie release, directed by Tatiana McCabe, is a departure from the band’s music video for “My Dead Lover’s Wedding.” In the new video, Lockwood sings about his love, interspersed predominantly with images of trains and the art of Amadeo Modigliani (also Jewish). Lockwood explained that the video may tell the story of a lover who’s dead, literally or metaphorically, and the distance that creates. Taking the train poses its own sort of danger.
“Here’s the collapsing of the train story with something that’s impossible to obtain, and there’s the fear of violence,” Lockwood said. There’s an “incredible familiarity and other-worldliness.”
The largest team of Jewish music writers on the web
Are you looking for the latest in Jewish music from the frum world? the Jewish Music Report carries all the latest news, music, videos, audio samplers, articles, concert news and more.
Where else can you get a video of Hava Nagilah in France...
...and watch the serious, The Marvelous Midos Machine?
On March 8, a music video uploaded to YouTube flew from the Israeli desert to Yemen and through the Middle East. Its three stars, sisters Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim (not to be confused with L.A.’s three-sister rock band Haim) became immediate celebrities.
Going by the name A-WA (pronounced Ay-wa, Arabic for “yes”), the young women sing in Arabic, wear bright pink dresses and head scarves, and tear through the desert in a Yemeni jeep. Then they dance-battle three guys (potential suitors?) wearing matching blue Adidas tracksuits.
Rising composer Jonas Tarm’s ‘March to Oblivion,’ featuring quotation from ‘Horst Wessel,’ was to be performed in Carnegie Hall
By Lazar Berman, The Times of Israel
A composition from a budding young composer set to be performed Sunday at New York’s Carnegie Hall was pulled because it contained a musical quotation from the Nazi anthem.
Estonian-born composer Jonas Tarm, 21, won a commission to write the piece from the prestigious New York Youth Symphony’s First Music composer’s contest. But Tarm’s nine-minute composition, entitled “Marsh u Nebuttya,” or “March to Oblivion” in Ukrainian, contained a 45-second musical quotation from “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem still banned in Germany and Austria.
The composition also featured a 45-second quotation from the anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
NYYS Executive Director Shauna Quill told The New York Times that the move was “highly unusual,” but was undertaken “thoughtfully, but firmly, as soon as we learned the piece incorporated significant portions of music written by others that we determined were problematic for an orchestra such as ours to be asked to perform.”
