Willie Smith at his Manhattan apartment. Photo by William P. Gottlieb. Barney Josephson opened Cafe Society in 1938, but the music he featured (and is featured in the play “Cafe Society Swing”) has been around much longer. Jazz originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in African-American communities — most notably in New…
Photo by Carol Rosegg “Cafe Society Swing,” a new musical that opened in New York on December 21, has so many good parts it’s a shame they don’t fit together. The play tells the story of Barney Josephson, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants who scrapped together a few thousand bucks and, in 1938, opened…
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism By Thomas Brothers W. W. Norton & Company, 608 pages, $39.95 A massive, and massively detailed new biography, reminds music mavens that jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong assimilated lessons from Judaism and expressed them through music and writing during his long career. “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism” by Thomas Brothers is…
You wouldn’t think that a musician of David Krakauer’s caliber would be looking to put a new spin on his work, what with a nearly 30-year track record of virtuosity playing chamber music, klezmer and, most recently, a thrilling mash-up of funk, hip-hop and klezmer. But Krakauer’s manager, Steven Saporta, broached the idea of the…
Jana Herzen, whose jazz record label Motéma Music celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2013, confides that the Forward played an important role in her family history. Her great-grandmother walked out on her family when Herzen’s grandmother, the eldest of six, was 11. One day she just disappeared from their home in the Bronx and was…
Nikki Yanofsky seems preternaturally destined for global stardom. At the age of 12, she was spotted singing with her father’s garage band at a charity event for a Jewish geriatric center and was immediately invited to perform at the opening concert of the 2006 Montreal International Jazz Festival before a crowd of 125,000. Since then,…
Viewed from the upper-level seats in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room, Gadi Lehavi cut a slight figure. Seated at the piano, he seemed to disappear beneath a mop of unruly hair. But when he started to play, a giant-in-the-making emerged — and a moment was defined for the millennial generation of Israeli jazz musicians….
Stuck in his spartan Brooklyn studio on a warm November day, pianist and composer Vadim Neselovskyi seemed a little restless. He had just returned from a six-city tour of Russia and his native Ukraine — a tour on which he and his musical partner, the noted horn player Arkady Shilkloper, packed houses from Moscow to…
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