It’s no coincidence that The Klezmasters are highly reminiscent of The Klezmatics. The former band, which bills itself as Russia’s only klezmer orchestra, was inspired by the latter. Having been created in 2003 by a group of classical music students who met through Hillel in Moscow, The Klezmasters have been gaining notoriety in recent years…
October 4 was the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which erupted when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march through the East End of London. Five thousand black-shirted men amassed on the border of Stepney, which at the time 60,000 Jews called home. But they didn’t get in: 300,000 people…
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…
Tzadik Records’ Radical Jewish Culture releases often split the difference between jazz and klezmer. Both genres drag long canonical histories behind them like the train on a wedding dress. Both are easily innovated upon, prone to flights of improvisation, and adept at locating individual musicians in the midst of a vast history. Joel Rubin and…
Photo by Angela Jimenez. At a July 26 concert at 92YTribeca in celebration of New York’s first legal same-sex marriages, the singer-guitarist Nedra Johnson struggled to find the words to describe the relationships between love, politics and the blues. In an age in which sex and marriage are subjects of legislative debate, she reasoned, performing…
There is a time for mourning and there is a time for PR. The shocking murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, z”l, in Borough Park this week, is an unspeakable horror. And yet, with what seems to be a total lack of sensitivity regarding what kind of public reaction is or isn’t appropriate, Haredi artists are…
On September 4, 1965, Lin Jaldati stepped onto a stage in Pyongyang, North Korea and quite possibly became the first person in Communist North Korea to sing in Yiddish. As I will discuss in a July 13 talk at the Yiddish Book Center’s Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival in Amherst, Mass., Jaldati and her husband,…
Courtesy of Dibbukim It’s almost too fitting that the band Dibbukim comes from Sweden. I don’t know that much about metal, but in my research I’ve found out that the country is home to such bands as Opeth, Amon Amarth, and Hammerfall. I’ve also watched a few episodes of the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse, which,…
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