Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward. He is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009) and the forthcoming Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press).
Seth Rogovoy
By Seth Rogovoy
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Culture A Reluctant Prophet
Bob Dylan turned 70 on May 24. So what? Well, for one, let’s see you continue to perform two-hour concerts, 100 nights a year, as you’ve been doing practically nonstop for the past quarter century or so, all over the world, keeping things new and fresh while the music industry around you falls apart. Your…
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The Schmooze At 70, Bob Dylan Remains the Reluctant Prophet
Bob Dylan turns 70 on May 24. So what? Well, for one, let’s see you continue to perform two-hour concerts 100 nights a year, as you’ve been doing practically nonstop for the past quarter-century or so, all over the world, keeping things new and fresh, while the music industry around you falls apart; your body…
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Culture Bob Dylan’s Mystical Midrash
The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan Edited by Kevin J.H. Dettmar Cambridge University Press, 204 pages, $24.95. Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957–1973 By Clinton Heylin Chicago Review Press, 496 pages, $29.95. In his landmark work, “The Prophets,” theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The prophet is a person who, living in…
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Culture Radical Music for the New Global Shtetl
On Charming Hostess’s new recording, “Sarajevo Blues,” a capella girl-group harmonies blend with hip-hop beat-box techniques and Bosnian war poetry. Zohara’s new album, “Scorched Lips,” finds common ground among ancient Hebrew love poetry, the Turkish oud and contemporary space music. Koby Israelite’s “Mood Swings” is a dizzying blend of ersatz klezmer, blues and New Orleans…
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Culture What the Klezmer Revival Can Teach Sephardic Music
At least one listener did a double take at a recent Hanukkah-themed concert when Annette Ezekiel, singer/front woman of the Yiddish/klezmer outfit, Golem, introduced the famous Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas” as “another Eastern European song.” Surely Ezekiel, who is a Columbia University-trained scholar and linguist as well as a pre-eminent bandleader on the contemporary Jewish…
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Culture A Slew of New CDs To Take Into 2005
Madonna is probably the world’s most famous quasi-Jewish musician. Next time she goes on tour, she might consider bringing along some of the following artists, thus allowing her star to cast some rays of light on them and to do for contemporary Jewish music what she’s done for her friends from The Kabbalah Centre. There’s…
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Culture ‘Peter and the Wolf’ Gets Klezmerized
After having reinterpreted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” as the “Klezmer Nutcracker” a few years ago, it wasn’t a great leap for Boston-based klezmer group Shirim to revisit Sergei Prokofiev’s classic story “Peter and the Wolf” as “Pincus and the Pig: A Klezmer Tale,” which they have done on a new CD by that name,…
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Culture Digging Into Jewish Liturgy for Musical Inspiration
According to legend, a Polish nobleman once hired a group of Old World klezmer musicians on the condition that they use written music. Rather than forfeit the well-paying gig, the musically illiterate players faked it by bringing their Bibles. They placed the books on their music stands, the landlord glanced at the strange squiggles on…
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