“From Our Hiding Places,” this month’s installment of The Nigun Project, features Alexander Benaim, the singer and songwriter behind the indie rock band The Harlem Shakes. Benaim, a composer and writer, is now working on a solo project, which will draw on the sounds of his family’s Moroccan and Iranian origins. Benaim’s flair for creating…
While doing my research for the third installment of The Nigun Project, I discovered a melody in a Yiddish chapbook that was published in New York City in 1947. The book bears the striking title “Yiddish Nigunim I Have Heard…and Seen.” This magical little book, compiled by Moshe Gutman, constitutes a kind of testimonial and…
The Forward has a Tony Award nominee in its midst. The nominations were announced today, and among those up for Broadway’s top honor is Sahr Ngaujah — nominated for his leading role in the musical “Fela!” about the life of the Nigerian afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. As you may remember, Sahr worked with Forward artist-in-residence…
Listen to Jeremiah Lockwood and Brian Chase perform the second installment of the Nigun Project, “At the Table”: Part of my motivation for starting the Nigun Project — in which I reinterpret nigunim, with a range of musical collaborators — was to have a good reason to spend sizable chunks of time staring at old…
Listen to Jeremiah Lockwood and Sahr Nguajah’s reinterpretation of Reb Nachman’s nigun Nigunim, or songs without words, were a crucial outward expression of the religious experience of the 18th-century Hasidic revivalist movement. The early Hasidim created a new and distinctly Jewish ritual act by singing these meditative and incantatory melodies in chorus with a community…
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