This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
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The Schmooze A Rock Opera for the ‘Memory Industry’
It’s not every day that one gets to see an opera illustrated in comics and sung by rock musicians, but happily, May 7 was one of those days. That night “Memorial City,” the latest musical theater piece by comics great (and former Forward cartoonist) Ben Katchor and composer Mark Mulcahy, had its Manhattan premiere as…
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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…
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The Schmooze Crowning the ‘King of Klezmer’
Klezmer legend clarinetist David Tarras will be center stage for the first time in decades on May 5, thanks to the efforts of klezmer violinist and ethnographic field researcher Yale Strom. Strom and his band, Hot Pstromi, will be giving a special performance of Tarras’s music — including some pieces that have never been published…
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The Schmooze Of Beastie Boys, Kafka, and the Hot Sauce Academy
Getty Images I imagine the hot sauce committee to be a studious and dour group, as dispassionate in their judgment of peppers and spices as the academy is of Red Peter the talking ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” Which is to say, that if the Beastie Boys are not quite the heir…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Trailing Clouds of Glory Does He Come
Photo by Frank Vena Like many of his klezmer contemporaries, Geoff Berner, the Vancouver-born accordionist and songwriter, has a lyrical flair for pairing social commentary with the comically absurd. And he’s been able to do it with tongue-in-cheek storytelling and a Tom Waits-ian sense of balladry. Two of his most recent studio releases, “The Wedding…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Prime Time for Eprhyme
At the New York release party for Eprhyme’s first CD a few years ago, the audience was an unusual blend of angel-headed Jewish hipsters bopping along to neo-Hasidic hip-hop, along with a smaller African-American crowd which was there to check out the new record drop. Eprhyme straddled two communities — the New-Jew one, and the…
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The Schmooze Haifa Starts Rocking
Crossposted from Haaretz A festival being held for the first time is an idea. A festival being held for the second time is already a fact on the ground. Haifolk, Haifa’s indie music festival, had its second run this weekend and can, therefore, safely be declared an established festival on the Israeli indie music scene….
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The Schmooze Matzos for Lord Byron
On January 2, 1815, the 27-year-old Lord Byron married the odious Annabella Milbanke, daughter and heiress of Lord and Lady Wentworth. Their daughter, Ada, was born on December 10. On January 15, 1816, Lady Byron took Ada and returned to her parents. The “first popular media scandal” erupted, and rumors spread that Byron beat and…
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