Jorma Kaukonen Finds Somebody To Love

The former Jefferson Airplane guitarist and Hot Tuna lead man comes home to his mother’s faith at his Fur Peace Ranch in Ohio

By Wayne Robins for Tablet Magazine

I. ‘Shalom, Brother’

At Fur Peace Ranch, hidden away on an unpaved road in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, one expects to hear the moo of cows, the rustling of corn. But Fur Peace doesn’t raise dairy cattle or crops. Its primary product is guitar players, mentored during numerous weekend retreats each year by owner Jorma Kaukonen. One of the most celebrated and influential rock guitar players of the last 50 years, Kaukonen was a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, the band whose very name represents the base camp of the 1960s counter-culture in all its striations: lysergic visions, political upheavals, feedback-fueled rock ’n’ roll, the San Francisco-born soundtrack to collective hallucinations, urban revolution, and pastoral pleasures.

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African-American Opera Singer Revives The Songs Of The Shtetl

By Kimberly Winston for The Jewish Daily Forward

Berkley, Calif. - Three years ago, when Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell took the stage at a Jewish vaudeville celebration and said he was going to sing in Yiddish, people laughed.

As a 6-foot-plus African-American with one golden earring, he just didn’t look like the typical Jew fluent in the language of the pre-World War II shtetl.

Then he opened his mouth. Out came a rich bass voice in a longing lament to the isolated villages and tiny homes left behind in places like Poland and Russia.

Think “Fiddler on the Roof”‘s “Anatevka” sung by a guy who looks more like Chris Rock than Zero Mostel.

No one is laughing now. Russell performs Yiddish songs from New York to Florida, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, to full houses and wide acclaim. On Sept. 6, he will sing at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

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Highway 61 Revisited: 50 years later

Harvey Brooks for The Times of Israel   

It was July 28, 1965. I was playing a gig at the Sniffin Court Inn on East 36th Street in Manhattan. During a break, I went next door to eat at the Burger Heaven, when I got a phone call from Al Kooper.

I’m playing on this album with Bob Dylan and they need a bass player – are you doing anything?

That phone call would change my life.

The next day — 50 years ago — I drove from Queens to Manhattan. After parking my car in a lot on 54th Street, I was soon in an elevator on the way to play for Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album at Columbia Studio A at 777 Seventh Avenue. I opened the door to the control room, took a deep breath and entered.

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Carmen at Masada

In the heart of the Judean Desert, at the foot of Masada, one of the most familiar and beloved operas of all times is coming to life - Carmen, by French composer Georges Bizet.

Watch the fascinating story of how the opera came to be performed at Masada.

The Amy Winehouse Tracks No One Will Ever Hear

By Avishay Artsy for Jewniverse
The new documentary Amy offers a heartbreaking look at the rise and fall of an extraordinarily gifted young singer. Amy Winehouse was a “Jewish girl from North London” (as she put it) who wanted nothing to do with fame. But life spiraled out of control as she battled drug addiction, eating disorders, paparazzi, a greedy father and boyfriend, and her own self-sabotage. She died in 2011 at the tragically young age of 27 from alcohol poisoning.

She only released two albums (the jazz-inspired Frank and the R&B-heavy Back to Black, which won five Grammys), and there was one posthumous outtakes collection, Lioness: Hidden Treasures. But fans will probably never get to hear a third studio album, because her label boss destroyed the demos.

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Mr. Sinatra Adored Israel, and Israel Adored Him Back

The Chairman of the Board died 17 years ago today. In his centennial year, a tour of his deep-seated Zionism.

By Shalom Goldman for Tablet

2015 is the year of the Frank Sinatra Centennial, and though the great singer’s 100th birthday won’t be marked until December, it seems only proper to remember the Chairman of the Board’s deep and abiding commitment to Israel, which he saw as an integral part of the chain of liberal causes that he supported throughout his career. His activities on behalf of the Jewish state started with smuggling money to the Haganah under the British Mandate. Starting in the 1950s, his records and films were banned in Arab counties because of his sympathies with Zionism. He performed for IDF troops, and in the 1970s and ’80s he raised millions of dollars for student centers in Nazareth and Jerusalem.

Sinatra’s initial visit to Israel came in 1962, as part of his first world tour. At the height of his popularity, his managers wanted him to embark on a series of concerts that would take him as far as Japan. Sinatra also had personal reasons for touring: His falling out with the recently elected JFK and the rest of the Kennedy clan, due to a combination of Sinatra’s volatile temper and allegations concerning the singer’s links to organized crime, hurt him deeply. Sinatra turned toward reviving his own career and stepped up his charitable work, which his managers hoped would “temper the image of the flip playboy.”

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Berlin Philharmonic Names First Jewish Music Director

Benjamin Ivry for The Jewish Daily Forward

On June 22, it was announced that the musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) have elected their first-ever Jewish music director, the Russian maestro Kirill Petrenko. Not only was this choice ground-breaking, it was an indirect response to another job candidate, the German conductor Christian Thielemann whose right-wing politics and anti-immigrant feelings seemed to grab as many headlines as his music-making of late. Petrenko himself is indubitably an immigrant; he was born in 1972 in Omsk and emigrated to Austria in 1990. He served as general music director at Berlin’s Komische Oper from 2002 to 2007 and has been director of the Bavarian state opera since 2013. His contract there runs until 2018, so he is expected to take over the BPO soon afterwards. The Berlin players already know him well, as he has worked as guest conductor there in 2006, 2009, and 2012. Compared to his immediate predecessors at the BPO, the Englishman Simon Rattle and Italian Claudio Abbado, he may well prove to be less of a fish out of water

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