Alexander Gelfand
By Alexander Gelfand
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Culture A Cantor’s Tale
He was a vaudeville star who was offered $100,000 to appear in Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer.” He toured North America, Europe and Palestine to tremendous acclaim, earning record fees and a kiss from Enrico Caruso. When he died in 1933, at the age of 51, more than 5,000 people attended his funeral in Israel,…
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Culture The Restless Opera Company
Many musicians can trace their choice of career to an act of teenage rebellion. But Eric Stern may be one of the few whose youthful bad-boy urges led him to opera — though, to be fair, his Vagabond Opera ensemble is not your standard opera company. Nor is Stern your standard opera singer. Stern’s parents…
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Culture Blitzkrieg Flop
The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: a secret History of Jewish Punk By Steven Lee Beeber Chicago Review Press, 272 pages, $24.95. By turns entertaining and infuriating, Steven Lee Beeber’s “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s” is a study in contradictions: Rarely have so many carefully researched facts been placed in service of such deeply flawed arguments. Beeber’s basic…
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Culture Hip Hop as Conflict Resolution
CORRECTION: In the print version of this story, the Palestinian group DAM was mistakenly identified. The members are from Lod, Israel. If the only rap you’ve heard is of the gangsta variety, and the only MCs you recognize are those whose mug shots you’ve seen on television, you’re not likely to think of hip hop…
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Culture Making Old Music Seem Very New Again
For most people, the past is an undiscovered country, a place we choose not to visit in our haste to get from the present to the future. For pianist Anthony Coleman, however, it’s an artistic goldmine. When Coleman’s former teacher, Jaki Byard, died under mysterious circumstances in 1999 — shot by an unknown assailant in…
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Culture Remembering How the Yiddish Theater Turned Into Broadway
Last fall, a musician friend who plays on Broadway took me to see the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre’s revival of “On Second Avenue,” a revue chronicling the glory days of Yiddish theater in New York City. As one might expect, the show was heavy on nostalgia. “But the Yiddish theater didn’t really die,” my friend commented…
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Culture A Mosaic of Jewish Music in America
The old Woody Allen joke about a book of great Jewish athletes — it’s more of a pamphlet, really — wouldn’t work with great Jewish composers. So when pianists Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer, co-directors of the new music ensemble CONTINUUM, decided to present a program of works by modern American Jewish composers last month…
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Culture Folk or Not, Sephardic Music for the Ages
Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s easy. Classical composers, for example, have long mined folk music for inspiration: Brahms had a thing for German folk tunes, Chopin made the Polish mazurka a mainstay of Romantic piano literature and Bartok built much of his music atop a foundation of Magyar folk song. But turning folk…
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