This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Music
The Latest
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The Schmooze Bringing Cantorial Music Back to Its Birthplace
“For me, this was not about a film. This was about our using our gifts as cantors to create dialogue,” said Cantor Nathan Lam of “100 Voices: A Journey Home,” which will be shown in a one-night event in over 75 theaters nationwide on November 11. The feature-length documentary chronicles the journey in June 2009…
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The Schmooze Jazz Pearls of Sweet Nostalgia
Gaucho’s “Pearl,” released last month on Porto Franco Records and launched at the Jewish Music Festival of Berkeley, Calif., is the perfect accompaniment to a lazy autumn afternoon. Channeling the sounds of 1930s Paris, the San Francisco-based sextet plays the kind of gentle, sometimes-jubilant, sometimes-melancholy swing that doesn’t make you want to get up and…
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The Schmooze An Electric Simcha With Omar Souleyman
Omar Souleyman is a singer from Hasakah, Syria, who plays a techno-ish version of dabke, an Arabic folk music usually heard at weddings. He performs in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, dark glasses, and a moustache. Not the most likely artist to take the American hipster-indie music scene by storm, you say? Think again. Now on…
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The Schmooze Just Plain Xylopholks
Crossposted from Frontier Psychiatrist While many new indie bands are busy recycling the sounds of the 1980s, the Xylopholks look deeper into the past. With a blend of earnestness and irony, their zany music draws from ragtime and jazz from the Roaring ’20s and features the xylophone, an instrument now more prevalent in elementary school…
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The Schmooze Horas for Headbangers
Back in 1997, “Buena Vista Social Club” introduced American audiences to a style of Cuban music that was popular in Havana in the 1950s. The album charmed the critics, topped the charts, spawned a documentary film, and was championed by Starbucks when the coffee behemoth decided to become a curator of world music. Such a…
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The Schmooze Yinglish and Spanglish at the International Accordion Festival
Mark Rubin is a musician based out of Austin, Texas, who has played at the International Accordion Festival since 2001. His latest project is the Atomic Duo. The International Accordion Festival is not well known outside of Texas, and that’s a shame. For a decade, the people of San Antonio have been treated, at no…
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The Schmooze A Guitar God and his Musical Monsters
When I phoned Gary Lucas this week he was right in the middle of renewing his Forward subscription. “I’m a religious reader,” he punned effortlessly. He also had his cell phone pressed to his other ear, waiting to buy concert tickets. It comes as little shock that the prolific composer, songwriter, guitar legend and musical…
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The Schmooze Lenin, Stalin, and Jewish Musicians
On October 12, Paris’s Cité de la Musique opened a new exhibit, “Lenin, Stalin, and Music” which includes much fascinating material about the fate, and often the plight, of Russian Jewish musicians. With the benefit of hindsight it’s difficult to see why any Jews stayed in Soviet Russia. However, a brilliantly concise and well-illustrated exhibition…
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