Jazz, Talmud, and the Postmodern Jewish Condition
Jake Marmer
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:
Jake Marmer
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.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
