Dan Epstein is the Forward’s contributing music critic. His books include Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.
Dan EpsteinContributing Music Critic
By Dan Epstein
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Music Barry Goldberg: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Most Underrated Jew
“Jewish soul brother” is a term Barry Goldberg likes to use when praising his favorite musical tribesmen, and it certainly applies to him, as well. Over the course of his six-decades-and-counting career, the keyboardist, songwriter and producer has had enough musical adventures for three lifetimes, including serving as Bob Dylan’s piano man at the 1965…
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Culture Resurrecting Yiddish Music One Song At A Time
Sometime in late 1944, Taybl Birman, a 28-year-old Soviet Jew working in a tailor shop in war-torn Minsk, composed a song for her husband, Misha, a Red Army soldier who was fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front. The song began playfully — with Taybl mentioning that she was sitting “beside my beloved sewing machine,”…
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Culture Did Simon & Garfunkel Write The Jewish ‘Sgt. Pepper?’
In the late spring of 1967, the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” hit the world like a paisley paint bomb. Its psychedelic splatters were especially evident in England, where pop artists of all stripes immediately seized upon the album’s heady mixture of lysergic wonder and Victorian nostalgia as a new…
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Music Happy Birthday And Farewell To Neil Diamond, Retiring At 77
There are certain things in this life that I pretty much take for granted: Snow will fall in December. A new baseball season will begin in April. And if he’s not already touring somewhere as we speak, Neil Diamond will be going on tour again soon. Which is why the announcement that the multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter…
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Music This Bang-Up Music Doc Is One You Should Have Seen In 2017
I first started digging for old records in thrift stores in the late 1980s, back when you could still score stacks of 45s from the glory days of AM radio at 5 or 10 cents a pop. In the course of each thrift store foray, I would almost inevitably come across a single or two…
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Culture Lou Reed Was A Regular Jewish Kid — And Cultural Rebel For The Ages
Lou Reed: A Life By Anthony DeCurtis Little, Brown and Company, 528 pages, $32 At first glance, Lewis Allan Reed wasn’t all that different from the other middle-class Jewish lads he grew up with in 1950s Freeport, New York. He was a diligent student and an avid tennis player; he liked to make weekend forays…
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Music In Memory Of Walter Becker, A Love Song For Steely Dan
By Dan Epstein Swimming lessons at the “Y” were the worst. For reasons I can no longer recall — but which probably had at least something to do with my stubborn resistance to taking any sort of extra-curricular instruction in anything that I wasn’t already deeply interested in — I got a late start on…
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Music Meet The Boston Red Sox Organist Who Got His Start At Shabbat Services
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Jewishbaseballmuseum.com Josh Kantor has performed everywhere from synagogues to orchestra pits, from seedy nightclubs to outdoor festival stages. But his favorite venue for playing music is Fenway Park, where he serves as the organist for the Boston Red Sox. A pianist since the age of five, Kantor (now…
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