Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
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The Schmooze Monday Music: For Uruguayan Pop Star Jorge Drexler, Jewishness Is a Connecting Force
The Skirball Center, a sober cultural institution on Los Angeles’s ritzy Westside, was unusually alive on January 27. Music journalists, record executives and South American diplomats with an array of Spanish accents — from Argentina to Spain to East Los Angeles — bounced about the room. Along with the requisite contingent of L.A. yentas and…
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The Schmooze Berlin New Music Festival Honors Avant-Garde Composer Alexander Goehr
For over half a century, Alexander Goehr has been one of England’s most important composers, an avant-garde musician whose varied (and often challenging) body of work has been championed by luminaries including Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline de Pré. Goehr’s manuscripts have recently been acquired by the music archive of Berlin’s Akademie…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Banned in Tel Aviv, Monotonix Tours Stateside
Though they hail from Tel Aviv, punk outfit Monotonix sounds like 1970s New York punk by way of Los Angeles rockabilly garage heroes like X, The Germs and Alice Bag. On their new album, the speedy half hour long “Not Yet,” lead singer Ami Shalev expectorates, clears his throat and howls through 10 fast-paced tracks….
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The Schmooze American Cradle
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts associate editor Itzik Gottesman writes about “Mayn shifl” (“My Cradle”) by poet Leah Kapilowitz Hofman, as sung by Nitsa Ranz: Nitsa Ranz was born in Poland in 1922 and emigrated to America in 1950. Mayn shifl (My Cradle) was recorded at an event that I produced…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Adrienne Cooper’s Enchanting Yiddish Songs
I never learned to speak Yiddish. As a child in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the language of my grandparents, the language that my parents only spoke when they didn’t want me or my brothers to understand what they were talking about (and I don’t think they spoke it when my childhood friend Michael…
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The Schmooze A Yiddish Writer’s Fashion and Misfortune
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts associate editor Itzik Gottesman writes about “Di mode” (“Fashion”), a poem by the early Yiddish writer Yitskhok Yoel Linetski, as adapted by his grandmother, Lifshe Schaechter-Widman: I never thought I would thank Google Books in this blog, but the website has opened up tremendous possibilities for…
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The Schmooze Cold Can’t Stop Eilat’s Winter Jazz Festival
Crossposted from Haaretz When one is talking about jazz, the word “dissonance” often is heard in reference to avant-garde, cacophonic-sounding music. At the Red Sea Winter Jazz Festival, held over the weekend for the first time (as the new, younger sibling of the veteran Red Sea Jazz Festival, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in…
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The Schmooze Naomi Shemer’s Archive Reveals a Softer Side
Crossposted from Haaretz The 17 cartons that held Naomi Shemer’s private archive contained a small black telephone book and tucked in its pages was a note in which the popular songwriter jotted down an extra stanza to “Jerusalem of Gold” at the end of the Six Day War: Just four lines in all, plus numerous…
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