Will Friedwald
By Will Friedwald
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Culture Another Velvet Fog Summer
Mel Tormé (1925–1999) was the Art Tatum of singers: a daredevil improviser with equally flawless chops and remarkable harmonic smarts, he would take a tune and break it down into 1,000 glistening arpeggios, then put it back together in a way that often improved on the original. Like Tatum, he could do all this without…
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Culture Anything You Can Do
In jazz terminology, it’s known as “call and response”: The trumpet section plays a few notes, which are answered immediately by the saxophones. Or, a soloist will give out with a four-bar phrase and then hear it echoed back at him by the full ensemble. Call and response is as essential to big band swing…
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News On the Fourth Night, Tunes, Jokes and Shoe-Throwing
How better to celebrate the fourth night of Hanukkah than by throwing a shoe at Bernard Madoff? On December 24, nightlife impresario Michael Dorf, who gave the world the Knitting Factory, opened his new space, City Winery, with a variety show that served as the fourth evening of New York’s fourth annual Sephardic Music Festival….
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News No Jews allowed: White supremacists are building a segregated community in Arkansas, but is it legal?
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News Zohran Mamdani has represented Astoria’s Jews for 4 years. What do they think of him?
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News Curtis Sliwa has a plan to beat Zohran Mamdani in NYC mayor’s race — and it starts with apologizing to Jews
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Culture Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Right-wing insurrectionists tried to topple the German government in 1920 — it’s happening again in Trump’s America
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Theater Can a kinky new Yiddish musical resurrect a lost art — and one man who got spanked to death?
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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Yiddish דאָקטוירים פֿון אַן אַנדער שניטDoctors of a different sort
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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