My grandfather had a surprise for me. Seven years after buying his 1971 Buick LeSabre, he’d finally decided to get with the times and install an eight-track cassette player under the car’s dashboard. This in itself was not surprising, as he was a talented amateur pianist and violinist who genuinely loved music, even if his…
To understand the close ties between the singer Aretha Franklin, who has died at the age of 76, and Jewish musicians, writers, and performers, one need not have seen the 1982 TV special starring Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen) in which the comedian who famously got no respect feigns singing backup on Franklin’s 1967 recording…
The selections for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors were announced this morning and, as ever, they’re a who’s who of people it’s hard to imagine otherwise interacting. American Jewish composer Philip Glass is receiving the famous rainbow-banded medal, awarded annually to five artists whose talents have helped shape American culture. Glass is joined in the…
“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…
Calling Seymour Stein one of the most influential figures in American pop music barely does justice to a 60-year career whose highlights include discovering Madonna, the Ramones, the Smiths, and Talking Heads. Now, in his autobiography “Siren Song’” Stein tells all — and we mean all — about his unbelievable life, with seemingly every instance…
Jews have always had a complicated relationship with opera. Ostracized in European society, Jewish composers and librettists had few chances to make professional headway; perhaps the most successful of them, Mozart collaborator Lorenzo da Ponte, converted to Christianity. The most influential late-Romantic opera composer, Richard Wagner, was a notorious anti-Semite. And prior to the mid-19th…
Central Park’s annual SummerStage Festival, typically the domain of Americana artists like Rhiannon Giddens, rap veterans including Public Enemy, indie rock legends such as the Feelies, latter-day folkies like the Indigo Girls, jazz artists including McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, and Afropop stars such as King Sunny Adé, took on a decidedly Ashkenazic tinge last…
The following is an excerpt from “Famous Father Girl,” by Jamie Bernstein. Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Bernstein. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. In February of 1964, halfway through my sixth-grade year, the Beatles came to America. By coincidence, Aunt Shirley was returning from a trip to England on the same…
Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the first couple of pop music, kick off their second co-headlining stadium tour — dubbed the On the Run II Tour — on June 6 in Cardiff, Wales (home to about two in five Jews in Wales, or about 800 total). The tour will run through Europe for a month and a…
In 1993, John Zorn began composing music based on Jewish themes for a new group, Masada Quartet. Now, 25 years and 613 tunes later, Zorn is closing the book — literally and figuratively — on what evolved into a sprawling, genre-defying series of hundreds of compositions written for dozens of different ensembles, all united by…
Without the support of one Jewish sixth-grade teacher in Brooklyn, Shawn Carter might never have become Jay-Z. During a conversation with David Letterman on the former “Late Show” host’s new show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” the rapper and entrepreneur discussed how his former teacher, Renee Rosenblum-Lowden, played a critical role in fomenting his…
