Alexander Gelfand
By Alexander Gelfand
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Culture Piano Man
Listening to “Her First Dance,” pianist Misha Alperin’s latest recording for the ECM label, I was reminded of an old story about the late jazz trombonist Vic Dickenson. Dickenson was a veteran of the swing era who at some point found himself playing in a band led by Don Ellis, an experimental composer and trumpeter….
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Culture Following a Musical Silk Road to Central Asia
A series of happy accidents. That, in a nutshell, is how 32-year-old saxophonist and scholar Evan Rapport describes the arc of his career — a career that began in the nightclubs of Maryland and ultimately carried him to the Bukharian Jewish enclaves of New York City. It’s hogwash, of course. I’m willing to believe that…
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News Bending Traditions in Ghana
Though you’d never guess it by looking at my pale Canadian Jewish face, I was once an African drummer. My transformation began 15 years ago, when I joined a West African drum ensemble in Toronto. My fellow drummers, all immigrants from Ghana, dressed me in a traditional Ghanaian toga, fed me peanut soup and homemade…
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Culture Chance Meeting Yields Harmonious Collaboration
As a young man working in his family’s textile business, Gerard Edery once traveled the world looking for raw material that could be assembled into new and attractive shapes. It’s been more than 15 years since Edery left textiles for a career in music, but in some ways, his life hasn’t changed that much. He…
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Culture A Jewish Pop Band Worth the Wait
On most evenings, the lower Manhattan venue Drom, where I recently caught a live set by the Los Angeles-based Moshav Band, probably seems very much like any other subterranean hipster hangout. The long, rectangular antechamber is decorated in dimly lit leather furniture and exposed brick. The bathrooms — well, the men’s room, at least —…
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Culture Horn of Plenty
It’s rarely wise to single out a particular group of instrumentalists — saxophonists, pianists, laptop artists — as an engine of change in a given genre. Doing so usually just means you’ll end up ignoring the vast numbers of other people doing equally interesting work. Still, some things are hard to ignore. So if I…
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Culture Listening In to the Field of Jewish Pop, High and Low
In music, as in life, there are cool kids and misfits. And in music, as in life, you sometimes find yourself rooting for the underdog. At least that’s what I found myself doing one recent afternoon, as I alternated between “Let’s Go Shleppin’!” a new CD by Meshugga Beach Party, out of Southern California, and…
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Culture A Melody of Jewish Meditation
When I asked composer Daniel David Feinsmith what his former life as a Zen monk had entailed, he had a ready answer. “Well,” he told me by phone from San Francisco, “it involved celibacy. It involved meditation — hours facing a blank wall. And it involved frugality.” Normally, the word “celibacy” would be the showstopper…
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