Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Monday Music: Fusion Mix-and-Match

In the late 1960s the term jazz fusion became a popular way of referencing music that borrowed heavily from both jazz and funk, or jazz and rock, or really any two genres that musicians troubled to smash together. If you hadn’t already noticed, fusion has been a dominant mode of expression in Jewish music over the last few decades. Reviews of new albums can tend to sound like exercises in proper noun naming; sometimes it’s easier just to list the influences on an album than it is to explain what they’re all doing together. Klezmer and rock. Klezmer and metal. Ladino and jazz.

JDub Records and John Zorn’s Tzadik label have split the difference on these fusion experiments. Tzadik headed in a more avant-garde direction, where jazz is piled on experimental guitar pieces or post-apocalyptic klezmer piano riffs, and JDub participated more in globe-trotting world music excavations or pseudo-jam acts. On Shotnez’s self-titled debut album on JDub, the band bridges the distance between world music and the avant-garde. Unlike comparable acts, however, Shotnez puts that genre mix-and-matching in the limelight. The band’s name refers to the halachic prohibition of mixing wool with linen, and with tracks like “Stolen Goods” or “Chaos” it suggests that there’s a dark blasphemous heart beating in Jewish fusion music.

On the album opener, “Stolen Goods,” a famous klezmer riff is punctuated by spoken word blasts (“ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you important news” — the news? klezmer!), baritone sax, and surf-style lap steel guitars. On other tracks they borrow sounds from crime jazz soundtracks of the 1950s. Unlike more successful acts, these influences never really gel beyond calling attention to themselves. I don’t know of another klezmer-crime jazz outfit in the world, but Shotnez has trouble convincing listeners that even one is needed.

Listen to ‘Stolen Goods’:

On the album’s best moment, a lonesome sax plays. Our Humphrey Bogart memories fill in the details — a dark alley, a criminal transaction, men with secrets and femmes fatales. And then a klezmer riff begins to play and the daydream is shattered. At its best, Shotnez sounds like “Fiddler on the Roof” noir. At its worst it’s a grab bag of influences that don’t come together. Why is Bogart listening to Naftule Brandwein? I guess because Lauren Bacall was trying to get back to her Yiddishe roots.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.