Irving Fields—composer, pianist and lover of life— died on August 20th at age 101. He thought he would live and be at the keyboard forever, as did his friends and fans. His performance portfolio ranged from concerts at Carnegie Hall to gigs at The Plaza, Miami Beach, the Catskills [Fallsview] and—amazingly—the marble and gilt abode…
Irving Fields, the songwriter and pianist who died on August 20 at age 101, revealed talent that transcended the question of what is authentic Jewish music. Born Yitzhak Schwartz in New York to parents from Minsk and Pinsk, he was raised in Coney Island and Bensonhurst. An amateur choir singer, his father got him involved…
“It’s almost my birthday!” Irving Fields announces, no sooner have I arrived at the doorstep of his Midtown apartment. He gleefully declares that he will be turning “100 years young” in a couple of weeks and then promptly invites us to his birthday party. And so begins my afternoon with Fields, a pianist who has…
What do Michael Feinstein, Mayor Bloomberg, Angela Lansbury, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, and Barbara Walters, have in common? They were among the roster of [mailed-in] well-wishers joining the crush of notables and friends helping celebrate songwriter-pianist Irving Fields’s 98th birthday on August 1 at Nino’s Tuscany Steakhouse on West 58th Street where, for the past…
Maybe it was only a matter of time before Socalled, the frizzy-haired, klezmer hip-hop hipster, tried to sidestep his ever-expanding identity as a “Jewish artist.” The arbiters of Jewish cultural identity go to great lengths to rope in the eclectic and the original, and a klezmer hip-hopper is a no-brainer. But no one wants to…
Here’s a delightful little clip that examines the meaning and roots of Hava Nagila as mythic folk tune, originally a wordless nigun of the Sadagora Hasidim, and reality as an artful 20th century pop-composition by seminal musicologist Avraham Zvi Idelson that somehow crept under our skin and into our consciousness until hardly anybody remembers anymore…
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