Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry joins Gordon, Winograd, and Fruchter in Winograd’s bedroom-turned-studio to talk about their debut eponymous EP, out this week, and to play a little music on the fly.

I especially enjoyed the tunes with darkly appealing minor melodies, like “Ma Lecha Hayam,” or guttural Aramaic lyrics, like “Chad Gadya.” Of them all, “Ha Lachma Anya” (“This Is the Bread of Affliction”) was my favorite. So it might be nothing more than nostalgia that made me such a sucker for the jazzified version of the tune on saxophonist Idit Shner’s debut album, Tuesday’s Blues, flooding me with Passover memories at a time better suited to thoughts of the upcoming High Holidays. But I don’t think so.

Tuesday’s Blues is loaded with jazzed-up versions of Jewish and Israeli melodies, from “Lamidbar” to “Adon Haselichot.” But Shner, who played in the Israeli Air Force jazz band and earned a doctorate in saxophone and jazz studies at the University of North Texas (she’s now an assistant professor of jazz and classical saxophone at the University of Oregon), outdid herself with “Ha Lachma.”

For one thing, she recast it as a sprightly major melody, transforming the dirge-like original into something sunny and bright. She also installed a groovy descending bass line and punctuated the bridge with a couple of stop-time punches during which her backing trio drops out and she declaims the melody alone. It’s an old trick, and an effective one—the herky-jerky character of the bridge creates a sense of tension that is relieved by, and contrasts nicely with, the rest of the tune.

And then there’s the performance itself. Shner starts slow but by the end of her solo, she’s hammering away at the tune’s reinvented harmonies like a blacksmith beating hot iron, inventing little themes and throwing off showers of variations on them. Yet her rhythm section is so good—perfect, in fact—that you could tune her out entirely and still be left with one of the best trio performances in recent memory. Not that you’d want to, of course.

There’s yet more Passover material on tsuker-zis, the latest in a series of discs by trumpeter Frank London and singer Lorin Sklamberg that offer fresh interpretations of sacred Jewish music. Having already tackled nigunim and zemirot, the two long-time Klezmatics colleagues now turn their attention to Hasidic holiday songs, aided and abetted by electric guitarist Knox Chandler, Armenian-American oud player Ara Dinkjian, and North Indian percussionist Deep Singh.

Despite a few high-energy tracks—including a Chandler-driven version of an alphabetical acrostic Passover song (whose 25-word-long title lies beyond the scope of this document) that sounds pretty much the way a whirling dervish looks—the album as a whole exudes a mellow, meditative vibe: music to think about, or at least by. This might have something to do with Sklamberg’s light, reedy voice, with its intimations of emotional depth and fragility. Or it could be the result of the relaxed tempos and open, quasi-ambient textures favored on many of the tracks. But I suspect it is mostly the fault of Dinkjian, whose every pause and flourish threatens to take you out of this world and into another, far more interesting one.

The kind of musicianship displayed on both discs is wondrous to hear, and I have to admit that I tend not to expect it from singers, who, for all their talents, are often much less musically sophisticated than the instrumentalists who back them. That is most definitely not the case, however, with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb

CREDIT: Jason Wu

Whereas her previous recording, Mayim Rabim, was based exclusively on the Song of Songs, her latest, Upto Hear from Here, draws on a much more varied and uneven collection of texts. Some of Gottlieb’s self-penned lyrics, like the ones to “Life Is a Structure That Is (Accept It!)” and “Pomegranate Man,” the opening track whose fruity subject does provide a tenuous link to the upcoming holiday season, recall the bullshit that Mike Myers used to spew when doing his caricature of a chain-smoking beat poet. Then again, Gottlieb’s “Venezia,” a Middle Eastern-flavored composition dedicated to her grandmother and delivered in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with what sound like home audio recordings woven into the mix, is absolutely heartbreaking. Elsewhere, Gottlieb borrows some intriguing lines from the likes of Rumi, John Cage, and Agi Mishol.

In the end, however, the quality of the lyrics is almost irrelevant. Words play second fiddle to sound here, and sound is where Gottlieb shines. She’s a singer who thinks like an instrumentalist, and you can hear that in the very first bars of “Pomegranate Man,” when she sings wordlessly along with trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Loren Stillman, blending in like just another horn player. Whether dipping into straight-ahead jazz, rummaging through her bag of gospel, soul, and Middle Eastern licks, or tossing off an avant-garde gesture, Gottlieb is always an integral part of the ensemble. That she’s able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her bandmates in so challenging an idiom—one marked by constantly shifting rhythms, ambiguous harmonies, and constant allusions to disparate genres—makes it even easier to forgive her lyrical lapses. I don’t know if Upto Here From Here contains quite as many delights as a pomegranate has seeds, but it has enough to make up for the lousy poetry.

In Israel, even folk dance is a hybrid form. Rather than carrying traces of a mythic past, it was created by European immigrants trying to capture the spirit of their new home and express their ties to the land. Transforming borrowed materials became their metiér, and remains a significant strategy in Israeli dance today.

Modern dance in Israel got a jump start in 1964 when Martha Graham, with Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, founded Batsheva Dance Company, seeding the country’s aesthetic with her fraught, emotional style. Still the preeminent Israeli troupe, Batsheva—directed since 1990 by Ohad Naharin—now manifests a louder, more politicized approach to choreography, incorporating spoken word and song into its collage-style offerings.

Today, Graham’s heart-tugging, imagistic methods, the leotard-clad female abstractions of early modern, are mostly gone from Batsheva and smaller Israeli ensembles. Most of the female Israeli dancers now perform bare-legged, their powerful limbs slicing the air, representing themselves rather than some remote idea.

Israeli choreographers have recently taken inspiration from German tanztheater choreographer Pina Bausch’s elegant, episodic style, full of ambiguous sexuality and self-absorption. Three different pieces featured bright red pumps, often worn by men. Naturalistic movement forms like contact improvisation and release technique—American innovations that honor gravity rather than attempt to deny it, as ballet does—have become integral to Israeli dance training, giving their bodies a freedom and boldness appropriate to a culture engaged in constant struggle. In counterpoint to this naturalness is a strain of surrealism that seems to flow from the rich cultures of Eastern Europe.

InterFace by the Kolben Dance Company

Most of the choreography at the event mobilized groups of energetic young people in which the women seemed distant or reluctant to commit, except perhaps to one another. Amir Kolben’s InterFace, inspired by online dating, was the only work spotlighting a relationship between men.

White Noise by Vertigo Dance Company

Numerous pieces included film in their design strategies, notably Kolben’s and White Noise, by Noa Wertheim of Vertigo Dance Company, which embedded monitors in the tops of high stools carried constantly around the stage, tilted to show us parched desert landscapes and other reduplicated visuals. There was always plenty to look at, but rarely a clear intention.

**pagebreak next=”10 dancers groveled before an invisible mistress until they couldn’t take it anymore.”**

60 Hz by the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company

Rami Be’er’s 60 Hz, for his Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, offered a high-energy, capoeira-inflected catalogue of Israel’s first 60 years, dressed dramatically and bewilderingly in designer Maor Tzabar’s military fatigues, floaty lingerie, and a dozen other styles (red tartan kilts? A tall, blond, female ostrich? A suicide bomber brandishing huge birdcages?). Endless costume changes accompanied vignettes representing many stages of Israeli nation-building, from explosive wars to landscapes transformed; a series of identical sculptural set pieces served as waves, bridges, walls, chaises, podiums. A visual delight, it fell short of delivering narrative punch, concluding with an album-style “photo op.”

Monger by Barak Marshall

Like 60 Hz, many of the dances were picaresques, collections of incidents strung like beads against collage scores. The most successful of these, Barak Marshall’s hour-long Monger, explored the compromises members of the underclass make in order to survive. To pounding, fast-paced recorded music by Frank London, Goran Bregovic, Balkan Beat Box, Verdi, the Yiddish Radio Project, and the choreographer’s mother (pioneering Yemenite choreographer Margalit Oved), 10 dancers groveled before an invisible mistress until they couldn’t take it anymore, meanwhile displaying the physical outlets they found for their off-duty hours—boxing, whoring, and courting. The piece made imaginative use of stage space and flying bundles of shmattes, but grew exasperating with its choppy, inconclusive, almost vaudevillian structure.

**pagebreak next=”They were erotic in the manner of kids playing doctor, obsessed with self-presentation but unclear how to actually relate to others.”**

Ov by Renana Raz and Ofer Amram

While Yiddish is not exactly banned in secular Israeli society, its use has not been encouraged, so to discover a taut, surrealistic physical-theater rendering of Ansky’s The Dybbuk was a real pleasure. Choreographed and performed by Renana Raz and Ofer Amram, with live music for cello, contrabass, and the astonishing Israeli punk klezmer group Oy Division, this stunning work, titled Ov, demonstrates the striking way postmodern theater techniques can serve traditional, even surreal, material.

Singular Sensation by Yasmeen Godder

Yasmeen Godder, a younger Israeli choreographer who worked in New York until 1999 and is now based in Jaffa, showed Singular Sensation, one of the weirdest pieces on view. It featured a quintet of flashy performers channeling lost adolescents, spewing green barf and spreading red Jello on the floor, to music by the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Panda Porn. Dressed in sparkly clothes with aggressive red fingernails, screaming, fighting, they were erotic in the manner of kids playing doctor, obsessed with self-presentation but unclear as to how to relate to others.

Naharin, Israeli-born but now an American citizen, told me two years ago that support for the arts in Israel hovers between European generosity and American parsimony. Americans drool over the Suzanne Dellal facility, which contains four theaters and several studios, as well as a café, an Italian restaurant, an ice cream parlor, and an orange grove, all surrounding a huge stone plaza, bubbling with fountains and full of families in the afternoons.

While practically everyone in the Israeli dance community knows everyone else, the artists travel widely and experiment with a diversity of style and intention that continues to surprise. American dance is in the doldrums, but the Israeli choreographers display a willingness to experiment, fumble and fail that may well lead to a new flowering.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I”I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Sound familiar?

I recently stumbled across those lines by Robert Frost for the first time since high school. I don’t read much poetry these days; with a toddler in the house, my rhymes tend more toward the likes of, “Give a shout, give a cheer, let us know that you are here!”

So Frost’s poem got me thinking. The man himself said that it was a “very tricky” piece of verse, and I think that’s apt. You can read it as a celebration of the road less traveled, but the poem is ambiguous. (At least, that’s what all the poetry websites say. If Google had been around in the 1980s, I would’ve saved a bundle on Cliffs Notes.) Frost doesn’t so much say that the less obvious path is better, just that it’s different. Maybe.

Artists constantly face choices like this. No one has the time to explore every creative avenue available to him. At some point, you just have to choose one and stick with it long enough to see if it leads somewhere. Sometimes—often—things don’t pan out. But if enough people are willing to make brave and potentially stupid choices, you wind up with a lot of worthwhile experiments, some of which have very strange and unexpected relationships to one another.

Left: Omer Klein / Right: Frank London

“Dialects: Israeli Jazz and Klezmer,” a rather odd double-bill presented in September at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, seemed designed to illustrate this last point. The show, which was sponsored by the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation in honor of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel, featured Frank London‘s Klezmer Brass All-Stars and the Omer Klein Trio. At first blush, it’s hard to imagine two people with less in common, musically speaking. But upon closer inspection, London and Klein appear to be looking at Jewish music through different ends of the same telescope.

At this point in his career, London enjoys a reputation as an elder statesman of contemporary klezmer. When he joined the Klezmer Conservatory Band in 1980, he was one of a small group of young musicians who were intent on breathing life back into a dead musical language. Almost everyone who had grown up playing and listening to klezmer had either retired or expired. Things were grim.

Nearly three decades later, thanks in no small part to London’s work with the Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave, his music for theater and film, and his teaching gigs at KlezKamp and KlezKanada, klezmer is a lively and many-splendored thing. It has absorbed massive doses of other music, from rap to reggae; won fans all over the world; and acquired its own festival circuit. And large clumps of it are no longer easily recognizable as Ashkenazi dance music meant for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

The Klezmer Brass All-Stars have both real and pretend roots in early klezmer. The group, which includes a couple of trumpets, several trombones, tuba, clarinet, drums and electric guitar, is allegedly modeled after a dissolute band of 19th century brass musicians known as Di Shikere Kapelye (“The Inebriated Orchestra”), which London claims “gave birth to the soul of klezmer and gave klezmorim their imperishable bad reputation.”

Right.

In any event, the All-Stars take material that either comes out of the traditional klezmer repertoire or sounds as if it did, and pump it full of funk, dissonance, and extended improvisation. The result is a very postmodern gloss on traditional Eastern European Jewish music, part Harry Kandel and part Sun Ra. That inclusive, discursive approach can lead the ensemble from a relatively straight reading of a liturgical song like “Echad Mi Yodeah” into a bit of scatting (or is that a nigun?) by trumpeter Susan Watts, backed by swinging trombone riffs and a few wobbly chords from guitarist Brandon Seabrook that Bill Frisell would probably be delighted to stumble across.

If London is making old music sound new again, Klein is doing the opposite. The 26-year-old pianist is part of an Israeli expatriate community whose relatively small size belies its disproportionate prominence on New York’s music scene. A faction of that community has for some time been fashioning its own branch of jazz: one that takes its harmonic content and improvisational approach from canonical sources like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Keith Jarrett, but looks to Middle Eastern and North African music for melodic and rhythmic spice. Bassist Omer Avital, the de facto leader of this charge, holds up the bottom end of the trio; the other member is drummer Ziv Ravitz, who signals his intentions with a hybrid drum kit that incorporates Middle Eastern instruments like a round frame drum and a goblet-shaped dumbek.

I’m tempted to call the music they produce a fascinating mishmosh of borrowed musical elements—the formal rigor of classical music, the improvisational and harmonic insignia of contemporary jazz, the rhythms and drones of the Arab world—but that would suggest a lack of unity or integration, and these guys have plenty of both. An original composition with the cool precision of a Chopin etude might lead smoothly into a vaguely North African groove before breaking into quicksilver piano lines supported by lightly swinging bass and drums. A rhythmically complex blues with a loping bassline might instigate a hand-drum solo. Everything fits neatly into everything else, and there’s nothing incongruous about any of it.

That inspired approach to musical borrowing, along with a strong desire to blend the old with the new, unites London’s and Klein’s seemingly disparate visions. Both men are magpies, willing to steal anything that catches their fancy. But both have an uncommon knack for putting it all together in a satisfying whole, and for broadening the purview of Jewish music—whether drawing from the deep well of Arab music (the regional inheritance of Israeli Jews), or building on the foundation of klezmer (the cultural inheritance of many diasporic ones).

Neither has chosen a particularly obvious or easy path. London and Klein both make the process of combining different types of music seem simple, when in fact it can be very tricky. But their adventurousness and willingness to experiment is balanced in equal measure by their sensitivity and good taste. And that has made all the difference.

On a summer morning in 1958, up on 126th Street in Harlem, Art Kane took a photograph of a group of musicians that included some of the greatest jazz players of all time, such as Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The photograph, titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” is now legendary and recently it served as the inspiration for another group photograph.

The new picture, taken on the steps of the newly-restored, 120-year-old Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, was of nearly 100 klezmer musicians from all over the United States and Europe. They came at the invitation of musician and ethnographer Yale Strom to celebrate the vitality of klezmer today. This photo (and a series of concerts planned alongside it) would be called “A Great Day on Eldridge Street.”

It seems like such a lovely idea, but could they really pull it off? And would it really, truly, be great? Here’s our report.

Photos courtesy of the Eldridge Street Project. Parading musicians by Jessica Schein. Group portrait by Leo Sorel.