This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
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The Schmooze Algeria and Jamaica, By Way of Golan Heights
Crossposted from Haaretz Brothers Hasan and Rami Nakhleh, from the Golan Heights Druze village of Majdal Shams, were raised on classical music. Classical Arab music, that is. Hassan studied Oriental violin. He can play, in their considerable entirety, works made famous by singers Umm Kulthum, Fairuz and other great “roots” musicians, as he calls them….
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The Schmooze Nebuchadnezzar Becomes a Jew at the Met
Just in time for the High Holy Days, the Metropolitan Opera is bringing back its production of one of the few works of music that helped change history. “Nabucco” (Nebuchadnezzar), a wildly eccentric story inspired by the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, was Giuseppe Verdi’s first professional breakthrough, and it helped inspire the Risorgiomento, which ended…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: The Klezmatics at 25
Courtesy of GAT publicity The Klezmatics are 25 this year (where does the time go?), and to mark the anniversary, they’ve released “Live at Town Hall,” a two-disc recording of a performance given in New York five years ago. That concert, itself an exuberant 20th anniversary celebration, was recorded in conjunction with “The Klezmatics: On…
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The Schmooze Where Are the Local Composers?
Crossposted from Haaretz Fourteen years ago the Israeli Ministry of Culture, through its music department, devised a program for boosting local concert music: It created the Israeli Music Celebration, a festival of free performances at which Israeli ensembles and soloists would give concerts consisting exclusively of works by Israeli composers. The idea was a good…
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The Schmooze Leonard Cohen’s Yiddish Song
We were remiss in not wishing Leonard Cohen a happy birthday yesterday, but the 77-year-old Montreal poet, novelist and singer-songwriter has other consolations. On October 11, Legacy Recordings will re-release 17 discs of Cohen’s back catalogue as a box set, including all of his studio albums and a few live ones, as well. The “Complete…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Cellist Alisa Weilerstein on Winning ‘Genius Award’
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein was at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival last week when she received an unexpected phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling her she was a recipient of their 2011 fellowship. The “Genius Award,” as it is called, is a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000, paid out over five years. Weilerstein, 29, is…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Making a Loving Mockery of Modern Orthodoxy
It all started with a video that went viral. Shortly after The Groggers’ frontman L.E. Staiman got back from studying in yeshiva in Israel, he began recording punk songs with quirky Jewish-themed concepts. The demos got positive feedback from friends, but he was told that there was no demographic that would “get” his songs. Then…
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The Schmooze Amy Winehouse’s Last Song
This week, in honor of what would have been Amy Winehouse’s 28th birthday, her duet with the legendary crooner Tony Bennett was released. The two recorded the jazz standard “Body and Soul” last March, just four months before Winehouse’s untimely death, to which no definitive cause has been attributed. In a video about the recording…
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