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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Joshua Nelson’s ‘Moaning And Groaning’

The black and Jewish singer brings together two musical traditions that help define his people.

George Robinson, Special To The Jewish Week

Joshua Nelson could imagine the sound of the music he wanted to make. Growing up a Reform Jew and an African American, he imagined a music that would combine “the moaning and groaning” of two historically oppressed people in a form that would go straight to the heart.

“You heard that pentatonic scale,” he says wistfully, “that Dr. [Isaac] Watts metered hymn-singing, and the idea that Jewish music could sound like that always resonated in my head. And I would tell myself, ‘You just gotta get to it.’”

Nelson, who will be bringing his Kosher Gospel Choir to the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Dec. 25, has gotten to it admirably. On record, and even more emphatically on stage, he has created a breathtaking musical synthesis that unites the metered hymn tradition that grew from the 18th-century compositions of Englishman Isaac Watts and the African-inspired rhythms that black gospel singers used to underpin it, with Hebrew liturgy, Jewish theology and Yiddish soul.

“The Hebrew prayers really fit to the style of gospel music phrasing, all that melisma,” Nelson says of multiple notes to sing one syllable that is common to both traditions. “Then it’s just a matter of adding a certain syncopation from gospel music.”

When the syllables are stretched over many notes like that, the famous “krekhts,” the cry that is the heart of both classic hazanut and klezmer horn and reed playing jumps to the forefront. And when the krekhts are linked to the thrilling syncopations of African-American music, the result is a Jewish musical experience like no other.

Klezmer trumpet giant Frank London enthuses about Nelson and his musical synthesis: “Joshua is the loudest, baddest, funkiest singer I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with!”

Nelson grew up in Brooklyn and New Jersey. He was an avid member of a Reform synagogue at a time when what he heard in services was the rather German Protestant sounds of classical Reform. He was happy enough with that sound until he found a recording of Mahalia Jackson in his grandmother’s house. It was purely serendipitous.

“My family weren’t musical,” he says. “Even my discovery of Mahalia didn’t happen because I heard the record being played. I just happened to find it and put it on because I was curious. And I loved it. That was my first musical interest after the music I heard in synagogue.”

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Holocaust Christmas Carol Deserves Prosecution Says Romanian Foreign Minister

Song Contained Lyrics 'Holy God Would Not Leave the Kike Alive'

By JTA

Romania’s foreign minister has called on his country’s judiciary to prosecute the parties responsible for the airing of a Christmas carol about burning Jews.

Titus Corlatean made the statement Thursday following international uproar over the public broadcasters TVR3’s television transmission last week of a song by the Dor Transilvan ensemble, which celebrated the Holocaust.

“I publicly express my legitimate expectation that the relevant institutions, the National Audiovisual Council (CNA), the National Council against Discrimination (CNCD), the General Prosecutor’s Office, as well as the specialized committees of Parliament will take the necessary measures and investigate, punish and prevent” such situations, the foreign minister’s statement read.

The statement followed harsh condemnations of TVR3’s airing of the carol and over the station’s claims that it was not to blame because the musical selection was compiled by a cultural arm of the western Cluj County.

The Christmas carol by Dor Transilvan contained the lyrics: “The kikes, damn kikes, Holy God would not leave the kike alive, neither in heaven nor on earth, only in the chimney as smoke, this is what the kike is good for, to make kike smoke through the chimney on the street.”

The Israeli embassy in Bucharest called the carol and its broadcasting “reprehensible, worrisome” and “capable of boosting anti-Semitism in Romania” in a statement. The statement also expressed the hope that Romanian authorities take “appropriate measures so that such incidents do reoccur.”

In a statement sent to JTA by the Romanian embassy in Israel, Corlatean added: “I consider it utterly unacceptable that in the 21st century anti-Semitism should further be manifest in various forms.”

Romania, he added, “has a good legislative framework with respect to fighting anti-Semitism, the denial of the Holocaust and promotion of personalities guilty of war crimes” and “has undertaken, for over a decade now, a coherent and conscious effort at reconciliation with the past and recovering our own history.”

The Deep Jewish Roots of Kanye West’s Awesome ‘Blood on the Leaves’

Abel Meeropol’s ‘Strange Fruit’ gets remixed into Yeezus in a manner worthy of its creator, for song of the year

By David Meir Grossman for Tablet Magazine

Why did Kanye West sample “Strange Fruit” for his song “Blood on the Leaves”? It’s the biggest mystery of his troubled masterpiece Yeezus, which makes it by default the biggest mystery of music in 2013. No artist dared to even attempt to be as interesting as Kanye West this year—other AAA acts like Daft Punk and Justin Timberlake were content preening in mirrors, like parakeets in cages littered with press releases calling them visionaries. Yeezus is a bull and a bullfighter all in one, with destruction and celebration intermingling and often inseparable. Subtlety doesn’t exist in the world of Kanye West’s sixth album, which blasts through its 40 minutes without taking a second breath. Multitudes of samples and influences are present on Yeezus, from Chicago’s current no-adults-allowed drill rap scene to the industrial sounds of ’80s bands like Ministry to any other type of sound that settles for nothing less than the listener’s complete attention. But even with all the Roland TR-808s in the world, “Blood on the Leaves,” with Nina Simone’s voice singing Abel Meeropol’s lyrics, stands out above all else.

The story of “Strange Fruit” is an unexpected one, with roots in the Jewish-American socialism that was so common in the 1930s. Meeropol’s story is well-documented by now—a Bronx-born-and-raised schoolteacher, he wrote “Strange Fruit” not as a song but a poem, in response to Leonard Beitler’s horrifying 1930 photo of the of lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, In. Meeropol’s wife, as well as black vocalist Laura Duncan, performed the song a few times, and it soon found its way to Billie Holliday. The song would keep his family awash in royalties for his entire life and would play at his funeral. As David Margolick describes in his 2001 book, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, there remains a dispute over whether Holliday understood the song’s central metaphor—“Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”—at her first recording, but it hardly matters: Her voice describes such terrible pain that it’s easy to get a gut feeling that you’ve arrived at the aftermath of a terrible crime. Barney Josephson, who ran Cafe Society, where Holiday performed regularly, would say that “She sang it just as well when she didn’t know what it was about.” Josephson almost never took a special interest in what, precisely, Holiday was singing, but rules were drawn up over how and when “Strange Fruit” could be performed: All food and drink service stopped before its performance, the only light in the room would shine on Holliday’s face, and it would end the night.

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