At first, this was a klezmer thing, as musicians like trumpeter Ziggy Elman brought their Eastern European baggage to “freilach jazz” in the 1930s. More recently, musicians like saxophonist Paul Shapiro, percussionist Roberto Juan Rodriguez, and trumpeter Frank London have married pre- and post-war jazz styles to everything from Ashkenazi liturgical songs to Sephardic ballads.

Now the conversation is expanding to include Israeli music, too, thanks to a small but growing number of expatriate Israeli jazz musicians with a taste for the sounds of home. I’d call the ensuing phenomenon “sabra swing,” but the music is too good to warrant such a stupid-cute label.

Take, for example, pianist Yaron Herman’s latest release, Muse. Despite the presence of a string quartet on several tracks, Muse is at heart a trio recording—Herman is joined by bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Gerald Cleaver—and like many contemporary jazz outings, the programming is eclectic. There are several original compositions and tunes by both Dizzy Gillespie and Bjork, as well as two Israeli classics: “Lamidbar” (“To the Desert”), by Alexander Argov, and “Lu Yehi” (“May It Be”), by Naomi Shemer.

Argov (né Abramovich), who was born in Moscow and came to Palestine in 1934, and Shemer, who was born on a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee in 1930, both lived through the British Mandate, the War of Independence, and much of what followed. (Argov died in 1995, Shemer in 2004.) You can hear that historical depth in their work, and it makes for some interesting resonances on an album whose overall aesthetic owes more to postmodern jazz icons like pianist Brad Mehldau and the genre-bending trio The Bad Plus than it does to Israeli pop or folk music.

“Lamidbar,” for example, is a staple of Israeli folk dancing classes that Argov wrote in 1952, and its words, by Chaim Chefer, are laden with the kind of imagery you’d expect from an era of heroic farmer-soldiers. (Argov wrote songs both for the Israeli Defense Forces and the pre-independence Palmach, an elite strike force whose members were housed and trained on kibbutzim.) You can almost taste the sweat, the gunpowder, and the Zionism in the tune’s Middle Eastern marching rhythm and its chest-pounding lyrics:

To the desert, land without water
O wasteland, we have returned
Salt-filled sands, land of wrath
The warriors returned like a storm…

Herman doesn’t even touch the melody until he’s a quarter of the way into the track. Instead, he begins with some eerily oud-like work on the piano strings, and by the time he does slide obliquely into the theme, Cleaver and Brewer have established a deep, driving groove better suited to the hipsters at Bonnaroo than to the circle-dancers at the JCC.

Herman gives “Lu Yehi”—with its melody borrowed from the Beatles’ “Let It Be”—an elegiac solo reading that matches the somber mood of the Hebrew lyrics, which were inspired by the unusually prolonged fighting and heavy losses of the 1973 Yom Kippur War: “It’s the end of summer, the end of the road/Let them return safely here.” (Shemer had a knack for capturing the national mood at pivotal moments; her “Yerushalayim shel Zahav” (“Jerusalem of Gold”), written just prior to the 1967 Six-Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem, became the country’s unofficial national anthem in their aftermath.)

There’s also a tune titled “Lamidbar” on another recent jazz album, Idit Shner’s Tuesday’s Blues. Oddly, her version of the tune is credited to Shemer, not Argov, and it doesn’t sound like the neo-folk song that Herman reinvents on Muse. And with good reason: it isn’t. Shner’s “Lamidbar” is really “Kibbuy Orot” (“Lights Out”), a song Shemer wrote in 1958 that describes a military encampment in the desert at nightfall. Shner—an alto saxophonist with a tart sound, a kick-ass rhythm section, and a gift for spinning flinty modern jazz from pre-modern Jewish material—learned the song as a child from her father, who called it “Lamidbar” because of the recurrence of the Hebrew word for “desert” (midbar) in the refrain: “Night has come to the desert; smoke rises from the campfires.” Schner gives the melody a searching, wistful reading that probably has as much to do with her own warm childhood memories as the composer’s original intent.

The story behind Shner’s mislabeled tune is an interesting one—a childhood favorite operating under a false name is reclaimed and reinterpreted by a mature musician years later and thousands of miles from home—and like Herman’s transmogrification of “Lu Yehi” and the real “Lamidbar,” it speaks to the complexity of musical transmission, the fluidity and subjectivity of musical experience, and the myriad ways in which artists are able to mine their personal histories for useful material. In the case of both Shner and Herman, those histories are rooted in a unique place with a distinctive, not to mention idiosyncratic, musical tradition—one that appears to travel surprisingly well.

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.