Jazz, Talmud, and the Postmodern Jewish Condition
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Ezra Glinter September 21, 2010
This Monday, September 27, the Forward is proud to sponsor “Jazz Talmud,” a “conceptual, multi-genre art performance,” by Forward (and Arty Semite) contributor Jake Marmer. Jake writes:
I wrote a sequence of “Talmudic” poems that imitate the rhetoric and turn of phrase of the Talmud but are about other things — dreams, crisis, jazz, the whole post-modern Jewish condition. I will be performing these poems with two horn players: Grammy-winning Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London and another klez legend, Greg Wall: They will be acting as Rashi and Tosafot — spontaneous interpreters of the text. Fifteen-piece jazz-klezmer group Ayn Sof Arkestra will also participate on a few compositions, as the “acharonim” — the interpreters of the interpreters. Then Ayn Sof will play their own set.
The performance will be at New York’s Cell Theater, at 7:30 p.m.
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