One good turn, they say, deserves another: Last year, Jay-Z, the king of rap, put on a blinding white dinner jacket and made his debut at Carnegie Hall, the high cathedral of American classical music. So it’s only right that Itzhak Perlman, the patron saint of concert violinists, should reply by playing the house that Jay built: Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

Tonight, Perlman will join the superstar Park East Synagogue cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot onstage at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues—Perlman’s first arena show, he says, since an appearance he made at Madison Square Garden as a teenager in a Hanukkah concert. The duo will play a selection from Eternal Echoes, the album of liturgical music they released last year. “We were looking for a venue in New York, so why not do it right there, where you have a lot of the Jewish community?” Perlman said last week. “To do it in Brooklyn was something that just seemed right.”

Continue reading "Barclays Center Hosts Violinist Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot" at...

It was the album Hillel Tigay has been training his entire life to record. Not that he knew it: Growing up as the talented son of a prominent biblical scholar, Tigay rebelled in ways that seem sweetly familiar. He helped young men study for their bar mitzvah sermons, but dreamed of arenas dense with screaming fans; as soon as he could, he moved to Los Angeles, got a record deal, and began working as a musician. He put out a few albums, dabbled in pop and rock and hip-hop, and waited for L.A. to do what it did best and deliver one big, lucky break.

Not that Tigay thought about breaks when the phone call came from the synagogue. Despite his traditional upbringing, he was not one for weekly attendance. But the congregation on the other end of the line—Ikar, the celebrated progressive community led by Rabbi Sharon Brous—presented him with a challenge he couldn’t ignore. If you hate attending services, Brous told Tigay, how about coming up with a service you would love to attend?

Continue reading "What Would Jesus Listen To? New Album Tries To Answer Age-Old Question" at...

Action Bronson is a 29-year-old chef-turned-rapper of Albanian and Jewish extraction from Queens, who is internationally known for his love of THC, epicurean feasts, and whip gymnastics.

He reminds me of my grandfather.

Continue reading "Action Bronson, Genius Jewish Rapper From Queens, Deserves a Grammy" at...

Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia’s beloved balladeer, would have turned 75 this week. Though he died more than three decades ago, at the age of 42, he is still revered as a singer and poet who captured the mood, and the soul, of a dejected generation. But while Vysotsky’s music and persona clearly spoke to a particular time and place (the USSR in the post-Stalinist “Thaw” era), his songs have been adopted by social movements all over the world, including, most recently, Israel’s tent protesters during the summer of 2011.

Today, on Vox Tablet, Liel Leibovitz looks at the too-short life, and enduring afterlife, of this remarkable man and considers what it is that makes his ballads so resonant for so many. [Running time: 10:11.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature012813_vysotsky.mp3

Continue reading "Remembering Vladimir Vysotsky, Son of a Jewish Colonel, Whose Irreverent Ballads Have Far Outlasted His Soviet Homeland" at...

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, of course, “White Christmas.” But it’s not just Berlin: As Michael Feinstein recently reminded us in the New York Times, Jews wrote lots—most—of the great American Christmas songs. David Lehman, author of A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, from Nextbook Press, says that this Christmas phenomenon is just one example of his larger point: that the story of American popular music is massively a Jewish story. Tablet Magazine asked Lehman to list his 10 favorite Christmas songs written by Jews. His only regret? “I really wish that ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ was by Jews,” he says. “That would definitely be in the top five.”

David Lehman’s Top 10 Christmas Songs Written by Jews

Continue reading "From ‘Winter Wonderland’ to ‘White Christmas,’ the Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews" at...

1.

I taught David Berman’s Actual Air the other day. Teaching books that really matter to you is always risky. Someone, or everyone, might dislike the book. This puts you in an even worse position than the “I am a fraud” problem. (If you have to ask, you have not taught creative writing.) Having your cherished book be greeted with dislike by your students requires epic expenditures of self-restraint. Someone says they are bored or grossed out or annoyed by a book you love, and you have to equanimously nod your head—It’s unnatural. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part, and I should argue with them like I would if I was talking to somebody at a bar or a party. But you can’t go stomping around on the tender shoots. And so one must suppress the love you feel for the book, and the joy of talking about books dies a little, which is to say you die a little.

Continue reading "A Tribute to David Berman, The Silver Jews' Genius of Free Association" at...

That Jews wrote many of the most beloved Christmas songs in the holiday songbook is no secret. “White Christmas,” by Irving Berlin, is perhaps the best-known example, but there are countless others, including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (Johnny Marks), and “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” (lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne). At age 27, Benj Pasek is now in a position to add his name to that illustrious lineage. Pasek is one half of the songwriting team Pasek & Paul. The two met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, where they wrote their first production, a song cycle about twenty-something confusion called Edges. Several co-productions later, they were brought on to write the music and lyrics to A Christmas Story, adapted from the 1983 blockbuster movie. The show is now on Broadway and has been delighting crowds and critics alike. Pasek speaks with Vox Tablet about how he and partner Justin Paul collaborate, about his own relationship to Christmas, and about his aspirations to apply his musical-theater talents to create more contemporary expressions of Jewish communal life. Guest host Rebecca Soffer, a New York-based writer and producer, is a former Colbert Report producer. Most recently she was the national network coordinator at Reboot. [Running time: 23:06.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature121112_benjpasek.mp3

Continue reading "Like So Many Jews Before Him, Songwriter Benj Pasek With Collaborator Justin Paul Is Writing Christmas Classics" at...

This month marks the 35th anniversary of the most famous album you’ve probably never heard. Its creators, Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector, couldn’t have been more poorly matched: one, the audacious composer of teenage pop symphonies who had by most accounts gone entirely crazy, the other the singer of small and sad songs accompanied by grim guitars. What they created, after many nights of writing in Spector’s Los Angeles mansion and many days of recording in a studio dense with musicians, guns, and backup singers like Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, was grotesque but also supremely interesting. All there is to know about the history of American pop music, about the place of Jews in American culture, about Cohen, about Spector, is there in Death of a Ladies’ Man. And it all boils down to one moment: One night, at around 4 in the morning, as another recording session cascaded to an end, Spector stumbled out of his booth and into the studio. In one hand, he held a .45 revolver; in the other, a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz sweet kosher wine. He put his arm around Cohen’s shoulder and shoved the revolver into the singer’s neck. “Leonard,” he said, “I love you.” Not missing a beat, Cohen replied, “I hope you do, Phil.” The rest is commentary.

***

Continue reading "Phil Spector and Leonard Cohen’s Forgotten Masterpiece" at...

There are three things that must be said about The Lives of John Lennon, the best-selling and controversial biography of the rock star who was assassinated 32 years ago this weekend. The first is that the book, published in 1988, is vile. Written by Albert Goldman, a former Columbia University English professor, in the panting style of the tabloids, and stretching over more than 800 pages, it makes the following claims about Lennon: He was a closeted homosexual who was busted buggering Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, by the latter’s mother; he was a clandestine pedophile who prowled on young boys in underground Manhattan clubs; he killed a man, or two, or three if you count the fetus his wife, Yoko Ono, miscarried after Lennon allegedly punched her in the stomach; he was a bully, an anorexic, a narcissist, a deadbeat father and a no-talent hack who mostly wrote catchy ditties that were nothing more than plagiaristic rearrangements of “Three Blind Mice.” For his troubles, Goldman was accused by Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney of being a liar and a lowlife, by Gore Vidal of writing the biographical equivalent of pornography, and by Greil Marcus of practicing cultural genocide. These are all fair points, considering that despite reportedly conducting more than 1,200 interviews over the course of six years, Goldman offers absolutely no convincing evidence to support his outrageous claims.

The second thing to know about Goldman’s book is that it’s not only brilliant but also—despite the liberties it takes with the truth, or maybe because of them—the most perceptive and telling portrait of Lennon ever compiled.

Continue reading "How Albert Goldman, John Lennon’s Controversial Biographer, Got the Beatle Right" at...

When we speak about the transmission of Yiddishkeit, one of the most fascinating cultural phenomena of the late 20th century was New York’s downtown music scene. A number of tremendously talented young Jewish musicians aligned their musical identities with traditional Jewish music, re-interpreting it a new, radical way. Hasidic New Wave, one of the experimental groups to emerge from the downtown music ferment, will go down in history for their treatment of traditional Hasidic chants—niggunim—which the band’s leaders Frank London and Greg Wall, fellow graduates of the New England Conservatory, learned when playing Hasidic weddings to support themselves. The band’s entire output, as well as a CD of new, previously unreleased material, has now been collected and is being republished by John Zorn’s Tzadik Records as a box set. On Dec. 12, the release will get a celebration from friends and special guests at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. I had the honor of writing liner notes for the HNW boxset. When I asked Wall if he had any thoughts about the writing, he said: “Write it in a way that’s most exciting for you.” When I asked London he said: “Make it a poem.”

***

Continue reading "'Hasidic New Wave' Compiles a New Box Set for John Zorn's Tzadik Label" at...

It is hard to overstate 30-year-old cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s musical achievements. In 2011, she was named a MacArthur fellow, aka “genius,” for her accomplishments as a musician and as an “advocate for contemporary music.” She is constantly in demand, performing, giving master classes, rehearsing, and recording with the world’s best orchestras. And she’s just released an album on Decca Classics—the first time the label has signed on a cellist in over 30 years. The CD, Elgar, Carter: Cello Concertos, features concertos by Edward Elgar and Elliott Carter along with Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and is conducted by Daniel Barenboim and performed with the Berlin Staatskapelle.

The last few weeks have been particularly tumultuous for her, with the last-minute cancellation of her Carnegie Hall concert because of the danger posed by a crane dangling above the concert hall as a result of Hurricane Sandy, and then the death, at age 103, of Carter, whom she greatly admired. And then there was last week’s last-minute invitation, which she accepted, to play Brahms with the New York Philharmonic, stepping in for the principal cellist, Carter Brey.

Continue reading "Cellist Alisa Weilerstein Plays Bach and Talks About Her New CD" at...

Some people say the way to measure the health of a society is by the status of its women. Others look to the GDP, or to voter turnout. For Tablet’s Liel Liebovitz, it’s a question of beats, rhymes, and samples. When he was 13, Leibovitz had something of a crisis of faith in his home, as well as his homeland, after his father landed in jail with a 20-year sentence. He could no longer stomach the saccharine tunes that made up the mainstream of 1980s Israeli music. That was when he discovered American hip-hop.

It would take a few years before Israel got a hip-hop scene of its own, and its output, quality, and popularity have waxed and waned in the intervening decades. (We have an essay on some of the best new talent here.) Leibovitz, now living and raising a family in New York, finds that his feelings toward his homeland have followed a parallel course. [Running time: 8:41.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature111212_lielhiphop.mp3

Continue reading "The Promise of Israeli Hip-Hop" at...

I.

Resembling a flying saucer that hovered too low, Kikar Atarim is the perpetual promise of Tel Aviv. With 200 stores housed inside the structure, shoppers could amble out onto the boardwalk, breathe the salted air, and admire the perfect union of nature and commerce. So, at least, went the plan when Kikar Atarim was built in 1975; if it succeeded, other spots just like it would be built along the shore. Tel Aviv would become one part Nice and one part Hong Kong—charming and modern, inimitable. Within three years, however, Kikar Atarim started falling apart. The cheap, low-quality materials with which it was built were gnawed away by the salty air, and the building began to crumble. Renovations were insufficient and haphazard, and the sandstone cliff on which the structure was built tumbled into the Mediterranean.

Continue reading "How an Obese Comedian and his Band of Misfits Revived Israeli Rap" at...

One evening last month, under a ceiling visibly weighed down by a library of over 10,000 books, Yossi Green, one of the most prolific and talented composers in the world of traditional Jewish music, performed a kumzitz. Part VH1 Storytellers episode and part campfire singalong, the performance was for a 40-strong gang of jittery, somewhat inattentive 18- to 21-year-old yeshiva bochurim. Green, who speaks in the style of Don Corleone and dresses in designer shoes and glasses, played with genuine spirituality and, ever the entertainer, molded his reactions and songs to the audience’s desire for a more jaunty experience. They wanted to sing and shout, and Green obliged them.

Continue reading "The Music of Yossi Green, Satmar-Raised Composer" at...

“Jerry Garcia never existed,” an academic colleague and fellow Deadhead once told me. “He was merely the figment of Robert Hunter’s imagination.” Robert Hunter, of course, was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and many of the words and the persona that we associate with Garcia—the bearded “rebbe” of the counter-culture, in his simple black T-shirt and Cheshire grin—were Hunter’s inventions. When we remember Jerry Garcia, we remember the myth that Robert Hunter made, and that Garcia enacted.

This dynamic comes to mind when I think about Shlomo Carlebach, especially this week, as we commemorate his 18th yahrzeit. There are some individuals, such as the Baal Shem Tov, who become myths after they are gone, and others whose lives and the myth surrounding them overlap such that the person loses historical relevance. If this sounds flaky, or fantastical, it is because it is. But that is the way myths are; they become ciphers, mirrors, for all whom they touch.

Continue reading "Shlomo Carlebach As Reflection of the Pain of Post-Holocaust Jewry" at...

Last Thursday night, Zubin Mehta was not happy. Carnegie Hall’s Maestro Room was being renovated and had been reduced to the size of a walk-in closet. There were no chairs for guests. The hanger for his garment bag was permanently affixed to the flimsy metal coat rack above the piano. “Did they think I would steal the hanger?” he said, glancing around the room. “It looks like a motel,” he added, the unspoken adjective “cheap” hung limply in the air.

“Shall we begin?”

Continue reading "Zubin Mehta Slams Artistic Boycotts and Israel’s Treatment of the Palestinians" at...

Lou Reed is the indelibly hip version of Woody Allen’s Zelig: A human chameleon continually and thoroughly transformed by his surroundings. The difference, of course, is that while Allen’s film character grotesquely altered his physical appearance and worldviews so he would be liked, Reed’s radical shifts have been determined by desire to duck expectations, to shake up and subvert established forms of normalcy. As an iconic rock star, Reed has lived out his numerous rebirths and in the process popularized if not outright invented a number of musical genres—art-rock, avant-pop, noise, and punk, among others.

What remained constant throughout his transformations, however, is Reed’s rootedness in literature. His lyrics have always been filled with references that ranged from Shakespeare to the Marquis de Sade, from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce. And now, after over half a century of bona fide writing and composing, Reed has penned a piece that is among his very finest bits of writing to date—an introduction to the New Directions reissue of Delmore Schwartz’s collection of short stories In Dream Begin Responsibilities.

Continue reading "Lou Reed's New Tribute to His Teacher, Writer Delmore Schwartz" at...

The most frequently recurring sentence in conversation with David Fishof is “it was the greatest night of my life.” He’s not being hyperbolic; the nights all qualify.

There was the night he brought the Monkees back from the dead, for example, and all those nights spent on the road with Ringo Starr, and the night he conceived of his best-known enterprise, rock ’n’ roll fantasy camp. All of these nights have made Fishof one of the entertainment industry’s most successful impresarios and inspired him to share his insights in a new book, Rock Your Business. Most likely, it is the only book ever published that features Jon Bon Jovi and the Bobover Rebbe next to each other in its index.

Continue reading "Impressario David Fishof on Rock 'n' Roll and Religion" at...

Donald Fagen reclines awkwardly on a hotel sofa. We are in a one-bedroom suite at the Hotel Wales on the Upper East Side. He is surprisingly without shades, but he seems to have found something on the ceiling to stare at. He’s in his usual attire—that is, a going-to-the-bodega look: tucked-out shirt, a few days’ worth of stubble, and attitude to spare. He finally settles on a position he can tolerate, leaning sideways, looking very much like he does at the keyboard. Without fellow Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker to trade quips with, today he instead has Michael Leonhart, who co-produced Fagen’s new album, Sunken Condos, which sounds more like a Steely Dan album than anything since Gaucho (1980), the band’s 42-musician, 8-song farewell. (Steely Dan reunited on the road in ’93 and recorded two albums in the 21st century—the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature [2000] and Everything Must Go [2003]. Both albums have their greatness—the latter including the superb jazz pianist Bill Charlap—but they don’t sound quite like Steely Dan albums.)

Sunken Condos explores the rich bass and warmth of the last days of vinyl. It turns out that making an album that sounds like Aja (1977) isn’t as impossible as putting another man on the moon. The album opens with “Slinky Thing,” sort of a pre-post-script to the later “Hey, Nineteen,” except that the guy not only gets the chick who is way too young for him, but he broods about it with a funky beat. (“I think rock ’n’ roll is, you know, cars and girls are good subjects,” is all Fagen would say about it.) Fagen name checks Al Gore in the funkadelic “The Weather in My Head,” and adds some campy nasality to Isaac Hayes’ “Out of the Ghetto,” which has got to be the comedy track of the decade so far. He keeps the funk going, with a rich (sometimes upright) bass and a mixture of blues and kvetching. Along with Leonhart—son of bassist-humorist Jay Leonart and a serious trumpet player—we are having this meeting on Rosh Hashanah, and one of us had to mention that we were a troika of bad Jews sullying this holy day.

Continue reading "An Interview With Donald Fagen of Steely Dan: A Band Named After a Sex Toy Still Gives Pleasure" at...

This week, Barbra Streisand returns to Brooklyn for her first public performances in her native borough since moving away more than 50 years ago. News of her homecoming shows was announced in May—with tickets to performances tonight and Saturday selling out months before the $1 billion Barclays Center, where she’ll appear, even opened.

How did this happen? In 1960, Streisand was a 17-year-old kid from Flatbush trying to make it big in Manhattan. Four years later, she was the country’s top-selling female recording artist and was starring on Broadway as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. How she and her loyal associates transformed her into a beloved and critically acclaimed star is the subject of Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand, a new biography by William Mann. (Mann’s previous subjects include Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn.) Mann joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about how Streisand exaggerated her “kooky” persona—since traded in for a more poised demeanor, how she sassed Mike Wallace on national television, and how she capitalized on her nontraditional looks. [Running time: 23:05.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature101112_barbra.mp3

Continue reading "The Making of Barbra Streisand, According to Biographer William Mann" at...

A few weeks ago, I was attending a high-profile educational conference in Tel Aviv when I overheard the beautiful people in the trendy T-shirts sitting behind me talking about that evening’s must-see concert, a gig by a band called Men of North Country. Excitedly, one of them held up an iPhone and played a few bars from one of the band’s songs, which sounded like a sweet mixture of Wilson Pickett and the early Kinks. Sulking in my seat, I was soured by the thought that I had failed to hear of this cool, new British band, now evidently popular enough to acquire fans and tour the world over. I chastised myself for getting old and promised myself that as soon as I got back to the hotel, I’d learn more about these lads. I did. That’s when I found out that even though they sang in English and were signed by a posh London label, Men of the North Country originated not from some suburb of Liverpool but from the north of Israel, which is where their lead singer grew up. On a kibbutz.

“It’s true that ours isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of Israeli music,” said the singer, Yashiv Cohen. “But musically, I had the privilege to grow up in Kibbutz Kfar Blum. The founding members of the kibbutz were primarily from the USA and the Baltic countries, and it opened me up to British and American music from a very early age. My mother’s family emigrated from Brooklyn, and growing up in my house was a bit like something out of Woody Allen’s Radio Days. I grew up listening to American records, to classic American rock, Heartland rock, and some soul music. Pretty soon soul became my favorite music. As I dug deeper into the genre I fell in love with Northern Soul, a dance movement that emerged from the Mod scene in northern England in the late 1960s, and from that point I pretty much fell in love with everything Mod.”

Continue reading "Israeli Band Playing English Soul Is Big in Britain" at...

Miri Ben-Ari’s spooky ability to make her violin talk in a multiplicity of voices, from classical, to jazz, to soul, to hip-hop, has made the classically trained cat-suited Israeli violinist a favorite of artists like Jay Z, Wyclef Jean, and Kanye West (she co-wrote “Jesus Walks” and produced many other songs on West’s debut, The College Drop-Out). Ben Ari’s mastery of technique is more than matched by a drive for emotional and musical openness that declared itself with unusual strength—accompanied by occasional tears, and a cappuccino—during a long lunch at Antica Botega del Vino, a wine bar near Central Park. I liked her combination of hard steel, softness, blatant self-involvement, and crazy. “Dim the Lights,” the first single off her upcoming album, is already out: The video features Ben-Ari flying on a violin, and Ben-Ari and a dog wearing identical sunglasses, and sounds like something you’d hear in a cool late-night club in Paris.

The following is an edited version of portions of our conversation.

Continue reading "Grammy-Winning Violinist and Producer Miri Ben-Ari Talks Kanye, His Mom, Jay-Z and Serving in the IDF" at...

Zach Fredman is a musician, composer, and rabbi-in-training now in his fifth year at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over the past several years, he has worked to combine his spiritual and musical passions by composing devotional songs that draw on his favorite musical traditions. Those include Indian raga, North African rhythms and forms of chanting, as well as the Grateful Dead and Aretha Franklin.

For lyrics, he turned to Torah and other religious texts. For collaborators, he turned to musicians whose work, like his, isn’t easily categorized. Perhaps most surprising is his singer Alsarah, a Muslim woman who grew up in Sudan and Yemen, went to Wesleyan University, and now leads the band Alsarah and the Nubatones from her base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Together, the 10-person band, which is called the Epichorus, is releasing their first album, One Bead, available here at the end of this week.

Continue reading "Epichorus, Led by a Rabbi-to-be and with a Sudanese Soul Singer, Breaks New Ground with its Devotional Music" at...

I recognized his voice the moment I heard it. Calm, slightly accented, indolent but melodious, ever so baritone, and though nearly 30 years older than it was on the tracks I knew so well, it was undeniably the voice of Georges Moustaki. I grew up listening to the Jewish-Egyptian French-speaking songwriter with my Alexandrian grandfather, who died during my senior year of high school. It was for that reason that when Moustaki called my room in Paris I could picture him on the other end of the line—graying hair tousled by the wind, linen trousers, a sardonic but charming grin. At once it felt like I was talking to someone I had known all my life and as though I was listening to an old familiar recording.

Several days earlier I had begged the French editor of my book—also a well-connected editor at Le Nouvel Observateur—to help me contact him. Although she hesitantly agreed, she also confessed that she did not know the right people and that it didn’t seem hopeful. Forty-eight hours later, she sent a note to inform me that after a great deal of work she had finally been able to come through for me. So, there I was, at 11 at night, gracelessly strumming an antique guitar, when Moustaki called. “Look,” he said. “I’m tired right now, but why don’t you come by next Tuesday at 5?”

Continue reading "Alexandrian Crooner Georges Moustaki's Epitaphs for the French-speaking Jews of the Middle East" at...

Originally from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and now based in and around Tel Aviv, the Alaev Family includes three generations of musicians. They’re led by Allo Alaev, the family patriarch, who’s now 80 and who spent 50 years as a percussionist with the Folk Opera of Dushanbe. These days he leads the seven-person family ensemble, which includes his sons and grandchildren. Together, they update traditional Jewish and Central Asian folk songs to create a propulsive and almost ecstatic new sound.

This month, the Alaevs concluded a world tour with a gig at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival. They also have a new CD, produced with Tamir Muskat, the drummer of the high-energy dance band Balkan Beat Box. And, come fall, they’ll be hitting the road once again, bringing their singular sound to the Netherlands and South Africa. Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry met most of the Alaev family in their midtown Manhattan hotel just days before their Lincoln Center performance. They spoke about how they came by their musical talent and about the origins of the songs they perform. And, periodically, they broke into spontaneous song. [Running time: 15:30.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature082012_alaevfam.mp3

Continue reading "The Alaev Family Brings Together Jewish Music and Central Asian Folk Songs To Create a New Sound" at...

When I first met Hamlet Zhou, he was the guitarist in Andy Brown and the Storm, for years one of Zimbabwe’s most popular and exciting bands. A small, wiry guy, he would always remain in the background, spoke little, and never did much to attract attention. He would observe whatever was happening with a slight smile, as if he had seen something but wasn’t telling. When he did speak, it would be slowly and deliberately; usually just a short, to-the-point sentence. His guitar playing reflected his personality—it was never about virtuoso pyrotechnics, just carefully placed, simple, perfect phrases.

Listen to “Masango,” from Mavanga (Red Admiral Records):

Continue reading "Lemba Guitarist Hamlet Zhou Explores Zimbabwe's African-Jewish Heritage " at...

All rock stars, more or less, grew up fatherless and were ugly and slightly damaged until they picked up a guitar and realized they could get laid. And all rock critics, more or less, grew up nerdy and Jewish—except for Lester Bangs, whose mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, which is basically a variation on a theme—and slightly damaged until they picked up a guitar and realized they couldn’t play it very well, so they picked up a typewriter instead.

That, more or less, is Richard Meltzer’s story: He did some graduate work at Yale, made some money booking bands, wrote some lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult—“I’m burning/ I’m burning/ I’m burning for you”—and tried his own hand at making noise. After one very modest, beautifully named hit, he stuck to writing about rock instead, going on to author the now sadly neglected classic The Aesthetics of Rock.

Continue reading "The Return of Rock Critic Richard Meltzer, Author of the Classic 'The Aesthetics of Rock,' Who Never Went Away" at...

Last week I heard my friend, the great Malian singer Khaira Arby, playing in Manhattan. She was performing a new song called “La Paix,” an emotional exhortation to peace and reform in her home of Timbuktu, a city racked by political unrest in recent decades. Khaira has been thrilling audiences around the world with her politically charged anthems, performed with her band’s trademark breakneck beats and vertiginous virtuosity.

But the forum for this recent concert was not a club or world-music festival. The concert was taking place in a humble elementary-school auditorium in Harlem as a fundraiser, hastily put together by members of the Malian expat community, and the audience consisted almost entirely of Malians. In the last six months, a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions in Mali’s history has been unleashed by a revolt of the Tuareg, a semi-nomadic group living throughout the Sahara desert. This is not the first Tuareg uprising in Mali by any means, but it is the first to attain the goal of establishing regional authority. In April, the Tuareg liberation army, known by its initials MNLA, declared the independence of the Republic of Azawad, encompassing a vast swath of Mali’s northern Saharan region, including the major cities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal.

Continue reading "Like Jews, Mali’s Nomadic Tuareg Dream of a Homeland. So, Why Are They Allying With Radical Islamists?" at...

I grew up in a small town just outside of Tel Aviv, and because there wasn’t a lot to do I joined the scouts. Unlike its American counterpart, the Israeli scouts are a co-ed organization dedicated mainly to getting together and talking about values and being good citizens and helpful members of the community and patriotic Zionists. When you turn 16, you and your friends are awarded the highest honor in the scouts’ ceremonially inclined universe: You get to plan the Memorial Day commemoration.

It’s a major event. People come from all over town to honor fallen sons and brothers and friends. And, year after year, they expect more or less the same thing: a few poems, a few classic Israeli sad songs about dying prematurely, maybe a somber speech or two. But then it was my group’s turn to put on the show. We were a year away from joining the army ourselves and couldn’t help but think that all the dead we commemorated had been, a year or two before their demise, doing the same thing we were now doing: planning a Memorial Day tribute to those who had died before them. We decided to be antiwar. And because we were 16, and this was the early 1990s, we turned to The Wall.

Continue reading "‘The Wall’ Falls Down: Why I Loved the Pink Floyd Album as an Israeli Teen, and Why I Hate It Now" at...

One night during Hanukkah in 1961, a special guest arrived at the Forest Hills apartment of two German Jewish refugees named Otto and Bertha Heilbut. She was Marion Williams, one of the foremost gospel singers in American history, who was in New York to perform in Langston Hughes’ Christmas musical Black Nativity. At one point during dinner, Mrs. Heilbut whispered into Williams’ ear and the guest slipped briefly into the bathroom. She emerged smiling, having removed her girdle at her hostess’s knowing invitation.

As the evening progressed Mr. Heilbut sang a few Hebrew songs, more somber than celebratory, more a testament to his uprooted life and slain relatives than to the triumphal holiday. Then he turned to Williams and asked, in his impeccable yekke manners, “Perhaps you would like to sing some hymns.” And there in the Heilbut apartment, she launched into “Touch Not My Anointed,” a gospel classic drawn from verses in 1 Chronicles and Psalms. From that night on, for decades to come, Williams would always refer to Bertha Heilbut as “my Jewish mother.”

Continue reading "In ‘The Fan Who Knew Too Much,’ Anthony Heilbut, Son of Holocaust Survivors and Gospel Guru, Writes on Politics and Culture" at...

By day, Chris Silver works for a Jewish task force trying to raise awareness about civic inequalities facing Israel’s Arab citizens. But he dedicates his free time to Jews in an Arab land, with his blog, Jewish Morocco. Silver created the blog in 2008, while traveling in Morocco, as a way of sharing the stories, photographs, and other artifacts he was collecting to document what Jewish life there had been like in its heyday. Along the way, he developed a particular interest in the country’s Jewish musicians and singers—characters who were beloved by Moroccans of all backgrounds, and to whom he gives ample space on his blog.

Silver joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about some of the unique voices he’s discovered, what happened to Jewish Moroccan singers once they left the country in the 1950s and ’60s, and where he gets his missionary zeal (hint: It has to do with Bob Dylan; Mama Cass; Bill Cosby; and Chris’s dad, Roy). [Running time: 25:55.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature060412_moroccanmusic.mp3

Continue reading "Rediscovering the Infectious Music Created by Morocco's Jews" at...

Matthew Lazar grew up singing—at home, at summer camp, everywhere. A trained musician and conductor, he found that singing in a chorus offered him a way to foster community and express joy in being Jewish. That joy reached greater heights when Lazar took over the reins of the Zamir Choral Foundation, an organization dedicated to giving teenagers and adults an opportunity to sing together throughout the United States and Israel, 40 years ago.

This Sunday, the voices of the Zamir Chorale will fill the halls of Jazz at Lincoln Center, when they perform with Yehoram Gaon, Alberto Mizrahi, and other special guests in a concert celebrating Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day, the holiday that marks the reunification of Jerusalem after 1967’s Six Day War.

Continue reading "Singing the praises of Jewish choral music" at...

What is the grandson of two of the Yiddish theater’s most prominent composers doing at the helm of one of Germany’s premier chamber orchestras? Michael Alexander Willens, the conductor of the Kölner Akademie, grew up davening the Shabbat service as cantor of his junior congregation in Chevy Chase, Md. Today he davens with the Orthodox congregation in Cologne, where he conducts historically accurate performances of Bach and Mozart. As Yogi Berra would have said, only in America.

In collaboration with the Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam, Maestro Willens and his Cologne band are recording all 27 of the Mozart piano concertos, the first complete cycle on period instruments. Brautigam performs on a replica of a Mozart-era fortepiano. Four concertos are available, including perhaps the most challenging of the group, the C Minor Concerto K.491. Willens and Brautigam achieve a transparency that is barely possible, if at all, with modern instruments. Listeners who want to hear Mozart’s music as he heard it should spend some quality time with these recordings.

Continue reading "Mozart’s Quirkiness Comes Out in a New Recording of His Piano Concertos, Conducted by Michael Willens" at...

What’s the best thing about celebrity deaths? The million little masturbatory orgies they inspire under the oh-so-respectable blankets of news and analysis. When Billy Joel dies of a heart-attack-ack-ack, we’ll be on it—not because we care about the father of Alexis and ex-husband of Christie, but because we will have just been given a free pass to mourn our lost youths in Massapequa, Long Island, where we slow-danced to “Piano Man” at the prom. The phases of the competitive mourning cycle are all equally loathsome: shock at the loss of an icon, retelling of the heroic career, ironic distance to show that we are now grown-ups, etc.

But Adam Yauch’s death made me feel sad. I didn’t go to high school with Adam, and the fact that I lived on the same block in Brooklyn as his mom isn’t really anything to boast about in the annals of celebrity shiva. I will gladly abdicate my responsibility to evaluate the cultural significance of the Beastie Boys and their place in the firmament of late-20th- and early-21st-century American jazz-pop-rock-rap. What I want said here is that Adam Yauch was a rare mensch in a world populated by natural-born assholes and egomaniacs and by people who are high or scared or both. I don’t mean to suggest that he wasn’t one of Brooklyn’s finest white rappers and a city kid to the core. But rap music will survive his death. What has been lost is a model of how to live as a humble yet active and entirely responsible citizen of the world and also, at the same time, as a rock star, which is something that few human beings have the emotional capacity—including the knowledge of their own uniqueness and also the tolerance for their own limitations, and the limitations of others—to manage.

Continue reading "Shiva for a Beastie Boy: Adam Yauch, Pioneering Hip-Hop Star, Was Also a Mensch" at...

“For the most part,” Regina Spektor told me after a recent concert at Lincoln Center in New York, “I’ve been making music in the time of the Internet. Anything I make, even if there’s not a specific place in society for it, I try to just put it online. Let it find its own way.” It may have, but not to me. All it took for me to ignore Spektor’s entire musical career was my decision—made, let’s say, in 2004—to be into “independent music.” I would listen to lo-fi rockers Guided by Voices, and a program’s algorithm would recommend Sebadoh, for example, but nary a cute Russian. Yet Spektor’s music, in a different era, could be universal.

Before I attended Spektor’s benefit concert for HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, at Lincoln Center a few weeks ago, only one song of hers had broken into my self-curated indie/punk/metal/rap bubble, a song I quickly started referring to as the “it breaks my heart” song. Perhaps you know it by its actual name, “Fidelity.” On display in “Fidelity” is what I would later discover is her trademark: a delightful playfulness with the words of the English language, stretching and bending their sounds to her will, perhaps in a way only an immigrant can, as in “breaks my hea-a-a-a-a-a-rt.” Spektor is Russian-American and Jewish—and a benefit for HIAS was explicitly one of personal passion.

Continue reading "Indie star Regina Spektor, a Russian Immigrant, Headlines a Benefit for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society" at...

Growing up in Tel Aviv, pianist Alon Yavnai was exposed to a range of musical traditions including Middle Eastern, jazz, and Latin (his mother is Argentine). Since then, the Grammy-winner has experimented with other influences, touring with a Cape Verdean dance band, for instance, and collaborating with accomplished musicians such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera. Yavnai’s last album featured his own jazz trio. Now he’s trying his hand with a much bigger ensemble. Working with the Hamburg-based NDR Bigband, Yavnai has put out Shir Ahava, a jazz album that sometimes veers into symphony territory, blurring the lines between genres and suggesting, furthermore, that such lines are immaterial—to those making the music, anyway.

Yavnai speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry at his home in Brooklyn about how he first took up the piano, his ventures into big band music, and the eclectic origins of his favorite tracks on the album.

Continue reading "Alon Yavnai Takes Jazz Piano in New Directions" at...

Apologies to Mark Twain, but what is the secret to William Shatner’s immortality? I mean, there’s Star Trek, but Shatner’s not just a cult actor, like Nathan Fillion or Bruce Campbell. He’s a cult human being. He’s been able to get job after job because so many people like the idea of giving William Shatner work. This work includes, but is not limited to: lucrative primetime TV gigs, shilling for a variety of Internet companies, showing up “confused” at gala ceremonies, a play on Broadway, and a music career. Perhaps stretching himself so thin has turned him from a human into a living, breathing brand, forever selling us on the next thing with a plodding, deliberate elocution and affected self-seriousness? Or is there a real man still left under all that marketing?

The impetus for these questions is an almost decadelong fascination with Shatner. And the answer can be found, if you look right, in the form of his Shatner’s World, Bill’s new one-man show playing all across the nation now. I saw it in New York at the Music Box Theatre, playing to a mostly full house of partisans sporting Captain Kirk and Boston Legal attire in equal measure (no jumpsuits, sadly). The famous transporter sound played, and we heard off stage “No no no! I wanted to come on with a jetpack strapped to my ass!” and he rushes on stage. The joke didn’t work, but there was raucous applause followed by an hour and a half of amusing anecdotes. It was very nice, but I soon started to itch impatiently: I was there for the music.

Continue reading "Accepting William Shatner As a Musical Genius" at...

About 20 minutes after Whitney Houston’s death was confirmed by all mainstream media outlets, I saw a Tweet from my good friend and colleague, Jewcy’s Jason Diamond: “The countdown to somebody writing about Whitney Houston’s Jewish connection begins now …”

Well, Jason, I guess it might as well be me. Her funeral will be held Saturday, Feb. 18—exactly a week to the day that the Queen of Pop was found unresponsive in her bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton—at the Newark church where she first showed the public the power of those unforgettable pipes. Doubtless there will be a Jew or two in the invite-only audience: Clive Davis, of course, the “Jewish uncle,” mentor, and lifelong protector, enabler, and friend, who discovered her as a teenager and managed to turn her into the first black female artist that White America felt comfortable truly embracing; perhaps Billy Joel, who likes to tell the story about how he reluctantly indulged a very young model who asked if she could sing along when he was fooling around on the piano in a hotel lounge once, only to be blown away by the voice that was soon to be among the most recognizable in the world. Maybe even a Black Hebrew or two, come from the village of Dimona in southern Israel to mourn their most famous honorary citizen—a laurel conferred during Houston’s 2003 visit to Israel, when she declared the country “home” before a benignly puzzled Ariel Sharon, whose hand she then weirdly refused to shake.

Continue reading "No 1990s Bar Mitvah Was Complete Without the Music of Whitney Houston" at...

The brainchild of former Titus Andronicus guitarist Amy Klein, Permanent Wave is three things in one: a “combination between activism, a show-booking entity, and a production company,” says Sophie Weiner, who’s involved in all three. A feminist rock collective, or call it what you want; its bands are not the kinds of acts that you are likely to see at the Grammys anytime soon.

Here’s what a Permanent Wave-sponsored show looks like in practice: A loud electro thump crashes into the graffitied warehouse walls of 285 Kent, a club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Staccato guitars and unstoppable drums loop around each other as J.D. Samson becomes one with the crowd. “Who am I to feel so free?” she hollers into a sea of waving arms. “Who am I?” Every audience member seems to take the question personally, throwing it back not only at Samson, but at an unseen force of oppression that seems to exist in the air right above them. It’s sarcastic, but deadly serious: “WHO. AM I. TO. FEEL SO FREE.”

Continue reading "Permanent Wave’s Feminist Activism Blends Music and Politics" at...

How should Jews feel about the religious music of great Christian composers (including the convert Felix Mendelssohn)? Norman Podhoretz has said that he “senses the Infinite” listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. A devout Orthodox rabbi of my acquaintance allows that he loves Mozart’s Requiem more than any other musical work. What does this music mean to Christians?

Among all the arts, Western classical music is the only true innovation of the modern West: We can read Aeschylus or Pindar just as we do Shakespeare or Keats, but the ancient world produced nothing that resembles Josquin des Prez, let alone Mozart. Alone among the arts, classical music is an artifact of the modern Christian West, and it is hard to extract it from its Christian context.

Continue reading "Is There a Jewish Concept of Beauty?" at...

Leonard Cohen releases his 12th studio album, the profoundly moving Old Ideas, today. None of his records has ever cracked the top 50, and his last album, 2004’s Dear Heather, peaked at No. 131 on the Billboard charts. Those few of his songs that are well-known—particularly the ubiquitous “Hallelujah”—are well-known for being covered by other musicians. He is 77 years old, and his peers are either nostalgia acts or four decades dead, icons of a church that’s fallen into sad disrepair.

But not Cohen: He’s featured on the album’s cover, dressed in a suit and a tie, donning his trademark fedora and wearing dark shades, sitting on a blue wooden chair in a Los Angeles backyard, grinning slightly, and reading a book. It’s a fitting pose for the man he’s become, the kind and pensive dispenser of profound truths who earns in acclaim what he lacks in raw popularity; he’s the only entertainer around who looks as natural receiving Spain’s top literary award from Prince Felipe as he does sharing the dais with Madonna and John Mellencamp at the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that honored all three. Even that almanac of cool, the Financial Times, recently saw fit to lionize St. Leonard, calling him “a sage for the post-crisis age.”

Continue reading "Leonard Cohen, With a New Album, ‘Old Ideas,’ Was Never Popular But Always Profound" at...

Virtuosic mandolin and clarinet player Andy Statman recently released his first album in five years. It’s called Old Brooklyn, and it includes collaborations with a number of top-notch musicians, including Béla Fleck and Paul Shaffer. Perhaps most unusual, though, is the track titled “The Lord Will Provide.” The song is an 18th-century hymn, and this beautifully spare version is a collaboration between Statman, an Orthodox Jew, and country music star Ricky Skaggs, an evangelical Christian. Independent radio producer Stephanie Coleman wondered how this collaboration came about. Here’s the story, as told to Coleman by Statman and Skaggs. [Running time: 10:20.] http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature013012_statmanskaggs.mp3

Continue reading "Andy Statman and Ricky Skaggs bond over music and faith" at...

Agenda is Tablet Magazine’s weekly listing of upcoming cultural events.

New York: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and S.Y. Agnon’s The Lady and the Peddler get double billing starting Thursday, when La MaMa theater group debuts performances by the Israel-based Nephesh Theater (Through Jan. 29, showtimes, $18). Also premiering Thursday is Lazarre Seymour Simckes’ latest play Open Rehearsal, which tells the tale of a Jewish family clamoring for the spotlight—literally, since the play takes place as though it were what the title says (through Feb. 5, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m., $12). A highlight of the ongoing Times Square International Theater Festival is self-described Isramerican Sivan Hadari’s ensemble piece 1,934 Days, which features 10 actors of different nationalities reading monologues inspired by soldier Gilad Shalit’s return to Israel—and a Gavin Degraw song (Jan. 18 and Jan 21, 10 p.m.; Jan. 22, 6 p.m.,  $18).

Continue reading "Agenda: Tablet’s Cultural Events Calendar" at...

When classical composers wanted to bring alive the music of the Jews, they often turned to the cello, the instrument that most approximates the range, tone, and texture of the male voice. After all, Jewish music was the voice of men—men went to shul, men prayed and women’s voices even outside the synagogue were often stifled.

The most famous example of this use of the cello comes in Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei,” in which the cello develops the atonement theme sung by the cantor at the beginning of Yom Kippur. And the cello is central to other compositions, like Maurice Ravel’s “Deux Melodies Hebraique” and Ernest Bloch’s “From Jewish Life.” The music reflects not only the somber nature of the Jewish life that these composers saw, but also the essential masculinity of Jewish music of the time.

Continue reading "The New Album 'Sacred Time' Highlights the Cello as the Most Jewish Musical Instrument" at...