A dream of a utopian Black-Jewish music collaboration is going forward — even after the war in Gaza complicated it
Fred Wesley, who played trombone for James Brown, is one of the composers who created music for the Generate project. Courtesy of PRISM
When Jewish-American saxophonist Matthew Levy was on tour in Croatia in 2018, he visited an exhibition about “Entartete Musik,” degenerate music, as the Nazis called work that didn’t conform to their racist ideology. He saw a poster of a Black sax player wearing a Jewish star. The poster disgusted Levy, who’d grown up in a largely Black part of Philadelphia, often playing with Black musicians.
Then, it inspired him.
He dreamed of a concert that would discredit American bigotry against Blacks and Jews with music they made together and he would call it (take that, Joseph Goebbels!): Generate Music. He’d ask innovative composers from the two groups to write new pieces about mutual connections. He’d turn that poster’s ugly purpose inside-out by offering premieres of original music written and performed by some of the best Black and Jewish musicians around.
As a founding member of the 40-year-old PRISM Quartet, a saxophone group that plays classical as well as other kinds of music, Levy and his PRISM colleagues knew cultural funders, mostly in Philadelphia. Among Levy’s contacts was Helen Haynes, an African-American woman who has worn many cultural hats in Philadelphia, including chief cultural officer for the city under former Mayor Michael Nutter. Haynes became his co-curator, and they went to work.
“I was thinking about how our peoples have experienced so much, how we have so many commonalities, so much generational pain and suffering and discrimination,” Haynes said, in a joint interview with Levy. “And, within that, what has been created is a music that is evocative of us as a people and how we communicate with each other.”
Now, that music will happen: Premieres of eight pieces played mostly by the artists who wrote them, including works by Tyshawn Sorey, the African-American multi-instrumentalist who just won the Pulitzer Prize for composition; David Krakauer, virtuoso klezmer clarinetist; and Fred Wesley, who was James Brown’s protean trombonist, though he’s one of a few composers who won’t join the 11-member group on stage as everyone helps play everyone else’s work.
This weekend — June 8, at the World Café Live in Philadelphia, and June 9, at Roulette in Brooklyn — the blend of live performances Levy imagined will be followed by moderated artist talks about the Black-Jewish relationship. Both nights will include work by two poets, Erica Hunt of Brooklyn and Ursula Rucker, whose work got her image on a street mural in Philadelphia.
“With the eight pieces, we were not trying to dictate to the composers,” said Levy, of the effort to commission a stylistic range of pieces that started more than a year ago. “We wanted them to tell their own stories, their perspectives. We wanted to let people be honest and speak their feelings about being Black and Jewish Americans.”
Stating his awareness of difficulties that have sometimes made the Black-Jewish relationship a fragile one, even ruptured at times, Levy said, “I didn’t want us to paint an overly rosy picture.”
But they couldn’t predict the wrenching impact of history, artists also being witnesses, as the musicians absorbed the traumas of the Oct. 7 attacks and what has followed. How to navigate different reactions to the Hamas-Israel war has tested the collaborative glow that lit Levy’s dream.
Most of the commissions, made with help from the Philadelphia-based Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the National Endowment for the Arts and other funders, were made before Hamas attacked and Israel retaliated. The catastrophic context to artistic content became inescapable. Some works were rewritten. Others had already responded to questions of conflict, and didn’t change.
From early on, having the artists talk about their music and backgrounds with audiences has been a part of the project, which is set to eventually result in a recording. Two panel conversations with some of the artists were held in Philadelphia last month, at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and at the Charles L. Blockson Afro American Collection at Temple University. Realizing that the Generate artists might have strong feelings they wanted to talk about, Haynes and Levy organized a Zoom meeting at which several artists took part.
There was a range of views, “a real and honest conversation,” one artist called it. In the end, Haynes and Levy said, the call met division with dialogue.
Interviews with several artists reflected feelings that emerged on the call.
Yotam Haber is an Israeli-American composer whose piece, commotio cordis, expresses his reaction to the Oct. 7 attacks. The title is Latin for “agitation of the heart.” Haber describes this as “a condition in which an abnormal heart rhythm and cardiac arrest happens when an object strikes the chest directly over the heart at a critical moment during a heartbeat.”
Haber teaches composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but he, his wife and two young children were in Jerusalem on the morning of the attacks. “I have spent most of my life in America, most in the Midwest, where sirens you hear are the sirens of a tornado watch,” he told me. “So, I really thought that’s what it was. But they were the sirens of a missile attack. We ultimately heard missiles landing.”
The family left for Germany, where his wife is from, and eventually returned to Kansas City. He’d started his Generate Music piece well before the attacks, and kept some of his basic plan for it. Born in the Netherlands, Haber grew up partly in the West African country of Ivory Coast, and said he’s kept to his plan to make his piece about his own musical history in Africa. Tyshawn Sorey, he said, will perform the African percussion element of his score.
Still, Haber said he “feels sure the writing of the piece was affected by trying to deal with this horrific experience of attacks that began at a music festival. The joy and ecstasy these people must have felt when this attack began was something I was trying, maybe, to keep in the music.”
Poet and vocalist Ursula Rucker, who is one of the program’s composers and who will perform in Haber’s piece, is the daughter of an African-American father and an Italian-American mother; her past work includes a poem that turns a gang rape into a declaration of the female victim’s empowerment.
Rucker told me that poetic candor is a principle she lives by. These times, she said, are “very hard, super hard for me, because of my Palestinian poet friend and sharing how she feels every day” through her friend’s work.
“I am a feeler and everything is hurtful now,” she said. “I am in the business of feeling and thinking, and things have to get said, if you are in the business of saying things.”
She said she was “concerned” about a level of anxiety that has entered the Generate Music project, but quickly stated: “I honor all that we are all doing — a common sharing of ideas. I think it is such a beautiful project.”
Erica Hunt, an African-American writer with a significant reputation in the poetry world, has joined with composer-pianist Myra Melford — the New Yorker called her a “stalwart of the new-jazz movement” — on a piece called When No Way Stops Short of Some How. According to Melford, in an artist’s statement, the work “centers on the word Zion, and its similar and divergent meanings for Jewish and Black communities.”
”One people’s Utopia,” she stated, “can be another’s dispossession.”
Hunt’s poem, a recorded version of which will play with the music, combines deceptively gentle abstraction with concrete meaning to explore different, even conflicting visions of Zion:
I only remember that I wept
And I wept—as if I would never stop weeping
and blinded by tears I forgot Zion
and weaponized my weeping.
Ironies, by violinist-composer Diane Monroe, was influenced by having grandparents who attended the services of a Black and Jewish rabbi at a synagogue in Philadelphia after “my grandmother’s years of domestic work for Jewish families.”
Some of the collaborators in Generate Music, including David Krakauer and Fred Wesley, have worked together before, notably, in Abraham, Inc., which could be viewed as an historical precursor to the Generate project. The group’s exultant mixtures of jazz, klezmer, funk and hip-hop have exemplified creative freedom with Black and Jewish influences.
Wesley’s piece, Requiem For AJ, honors a young multi-instrumentalist named Al Jahara, who died recently in a car accident, and will combine “echoes of Klezmer” and Black musical traditions.
From his Upper West Side apartment, Krakauer told me that his piece, The Unknown Common Ancestor, expresses his sense that “our common humanity gets forgotten so often it is unknown.”
He was not able to be on the Zoom call to talk about his Middle East views, but wrote a statement that Helen Haynes read to the others stressing the importance of what they were doing together, even as they stayed open about individual responses to these times.
“To me, the dialogue between Jews and African Americans is a very important metaphor about human cooperation in general,” Krakauer said. “That’s important for us as musicians and artists, that model of people coming together and living in peace.”
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