Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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News Unlikely Music in an Unlikely Place
In the 1970s, Andy Statman emerged as a celebrated mandolin player in the “newgrass” movement. In the 1980s, he became a driving force behind the neo-klezmer movement. In the 1990s, he released collections with mandolin-master David Grisman and Itzhak Perlman, and was eventually lauded by The New York Times as “a master of two idioms…
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News Mixing Mountain Musics
Somewhere in New York, perhaps at this very moment, someone is hosting a “picking party,” a bluegrass gathering in a private home where musicians sit and play tunes. And Margot Leverett, a 45-year-old clarinetist, is not invited. “They’re being very careful not to let me know where they are,” Leverett said in an interview with…
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News Arnold ‘The Brain’
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series By David Pietrusza Carroll & Graf Publishers, 496 pages, $27. * * *| Abraham Rothstein raised his family in Manhattan in the late 1800s. A Sabbath-observant Jew, he was a successful businessman known as “Abe the Just.” One of…
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News Immigrants in Their Own Words
Warren Lehrer was struggling with a book of short stories called “Leap” during the spring of 1999. They were about people whose lives were about to undergo tremendous change. At the time he was assisting his wife, Judith Sloan, in a storytelling workshop at Forest Hills High School for which the students interviewed immigrants living…
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News ‘Conservatory With a Heart’ Embroiled in Union Dispute
The Lucy Moses School bills itself as “The Conservatory With a Heart,“ but some teachers at the arts school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side say the institution has had little sympathy for their efforts to unionize. Dozens of teachers at the school voted to join Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in an…
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News Jewish Melodies, Latin Beats Infuse New Jazz
What do a trumpeter from a band called Sex Mob, a popular hip-hop session musician and a Latino percussionist who once played for Yiddish theater have in common? They all play jazz infused with Jewish melodies and Latin rhythms, and are all featured in Tzadik’s “Radical Jewish Culture” CD series. And this month, all three…
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News Changing the Tune, Klezmatics Settle A Violinist’s Sex-Discrimination Suit
The Klezmatics have settled a sex-discrimination lawsuit filed by a former member of the popular klezmer band, the Forward has learned. Fiddler Alicia Svigals, 40, was fired last year for missing out-of-town performances during her pregnancy and after the birth of her son. Though Svigals declined to disclose the amount of the settlement, she did…
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News The Life and Times of a Broadway Baby
‘I was born in 1911. What am I: 90? 92?” Cy Feuer asked a visitor to his Upper East Side apartment. The 92-year-old show-business veteran can be forgiven for being a little foggy on his age — he remembers plenty about his long and storied career. He spells out the tales of his life as…
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