Fans of Zorn’s work, which includes an exploration of new Jewish music known as the “Radical Jewish Culture,” must have at least been scratching their heads at the news. A Dreamers Christmas is now airing on NPR, not merely its songs but also a live interview, during which Zorn spins a few tracks from the album and other holiday songs that have inspired him over the years. The composer has a reputation for shunning the press—at times, abrasively. But in this segment with NPR’s David Garland, he’s warm, perfectly charming, and really accessible—quite like the album itself.

Indeed, the album’s accessibility is perhaps more surprising than the fact of its existence. As Zorn puts it in the interview, this is one of his most user-friendly projects ever. “My message is joy to the world,” he says. “This is a record to play while you’re trimming the tree.” A subversive thinker and composer, Zorn has often gravitated toward subversive sounds—of screeching free jazz, punk, hardcore, and noise. This project is nothing like that: Playing at the supermarket before and after other traditional carols, it might not raise any flags to an average shopper. A connoisseur, however, will discern the difference, since the date includes, among others, art-rock and avant-jazz giant Marc Ribot, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Jewish Radical Culture phenomenon, along with Kenny Wollesen on vibes and glockenspiel, and the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, a frequent Zorn collaborator. Everyone in the band is a tremendously accomplished musician who at some point or another gravitated toward aggressive, thrashing music—of which, on this project, there’s hardly a trace.

So, what’s going on here?

Before I even listened to the tracks and the interview, Lenny Bruce’s classic routine came to mind: “Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish. B’nai Brith is goyish. Hadassah, Jewish. Marine corps—heavy goyim, dangerous.” And so then, Christmas may be goyish, but writing Christmas carols is very Jewish. Based on Zorn’s chat on NPR, however, this project appears a much deeper and more intriguing affair. In the interview, Zorn talks about growing up in a largely Jewish neighborhood but being the only Jewish family there to not observe Hanukkah and hoist a tree instead. Zorn’s grandparents had been down the route of assimilation, and they’d passed this attitude on to his parents, who understandably thought their son crazy when he began to not only rediscover his Jewish roots but also grow into the face of the New York Jewish avant-garde in the early 1990s.

Needless to say that Zorn is no Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae musician, nor Danny Zamir, the religious soprano sax player who got his start on Zorn’s Tzadik label. He did not “return” to institutionalized Judaism, or publicly commit himself to a prescribed praxis. Instead he forged a new identity, informed by the encounter with a number of things Judaism had to offer him—particularly, what he referred to as the “radical” side of it.

“Radical,” a good Latin word, means something pertaining to the roots, something originary. And our roots always grow—usually, in opposite directions to the way we grow. A few decades ago, Zorn engaged his mythic Jewish roots: mysticism, protest, social justice, and above all, ideas about Jewish otherness, which resonated with his own eccentric approach to art. Perhaps, then, with this Christmas album, the composer is addressing his actual roots: his family traditions, including the manner in which they observed the December holidays. Who is to say that this true bit of his family history is any less Jewish than someone else’s memories of celebrating Hanukkah? The content may be different, but both are actual, lived experiences of equal value.

Zorn’s experience speaks of a complex reality of the Jewish identity in this place and time. His Jewishness is informed by his family’s customs, and these customs aren’t merely a form of rebellion but a component as vital as a body part. The album contains no religious tunes but lots of classics: “Winter Wonderland,” for example, and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” which, in the great jazz tradition of transforming simple pop tunes into complex explorations, roam far and wide—be it in Ribot’s spectacular guitar work or in Jamie Saft’s endlessly exciting piano solos. There are also two Zorn originals, “Santa’s Workshop” and “Magical Sleigh Ride,” which both feature rhythms and textures that will be familiar to a Zorn listener, and a mellow feel reminiscent of some of Miles Davis’ fusion albums as well. But there’s also an unmistakable hint of caroling, especially in Wollesen’s festive chimes and vibes and Baptista’s percussion work.

Whether or not these originals will become part of the American carol canon remains to be seen, because music as complex as Zorn’s is a highly personal, subjective experience. When I first listened to these songs, I found myself getting defensive, then tried hard to like it, then tried hard to dislike it, then got lost in the music because it was very good, and perpetually came back to a feeling of pleasure laced with dismay. And then I realized that I was really thinking about my own memory of a decorated tree in my parents’ home.

When Zorn says, discussing his Christmas music, that he misses “the tree,” I know what he means: When I pass by a street vendor in New York with rows of evergreens the smell immediately brings back a recollection: growing up in a Russian Jewish family in the still-Soviet Ukraine, where a tree was less of a novelty than it might have been for an American Jewish family in New York. In fact, I didn’t know of any Jewish families who didn’t celebrate the holiday for ethnic reasons. The holiday was for everyone. Celebrations, with gifts, were held on New Year’s. While over the past 16 or so years I made no secret of this in my Jewish circles—even at the time when I was committed to a largely Orthodox milieu—it felt like something of a dirty little secret. Very quickly, my memories of the holiday became marred with disdain, and over the years, when I’ve called my parents on New Year’s Eve, hearing their cheerful voices laced with festivities, I’ve had to squelch a certain disaffection. But listening to Zorn brought back a surge of positive memories: family-time, days spent cooking, gifts, and decorations. As a child, the only night I was allowed to stay up past midnight was also the first time I tasted champagne.

This is not to say that suddenly now I have any desire to run out and get a tree. I live a traditional Jewish life, and a Christmas tree no longer has a place in it. Frankly, I don’t even know if I’ll listen to this album again. The point, really, is that I have a whole lost world inside of me, and Zorn’s engagement with his lost world reminded me of that and brought that world back to me. Buried memories suddenly surfaced against the backdrop of my life’s trajectory. It feels like a catharsis, and only real art is able to engender that.

Zorn’s Christmas album is not a practical joke or a jest. Zorn is a serious composer, and he approached this album with the seriousness he brings to all of his music. As he says in the interview, when working with a specific style, his goal is to make it into “more what it is.” That is, he seeks to summon the style’s essence and spirit. In this case, that’s to avoid celebrating the consumerist hype or drunken stupors of the holiday season, in favor of the national, nearly secular festivity. As Bob Dorough sings on a record with Miles Davis—which Zorn brought for Garland’s listeners—“When you’re blue at Christmas time/ You see through all the waste/ All the sham, all the haste/ And plain old bad taste/ It’s a time when the greedy give a dime to the needy.” Zorn’s album takes its name from his band, the Dreamers, but maybe there’s also a bit of an actual dream in its concept: That of a holiday time for everyone.

To come back to Lenny Bruce: “Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe is a Jewish word.” Christmas most certainly will not be celebrated at the Sixth Street Synagogue this Saturday night. That’s why the event—which, in addition to Zorn’s own Aleph Trio features three other top-notch Jewish bands, two of which include the synagogue’s rabbi, illustrious sax player Greg Wall—is billed as “Nittel Nacht.” That’s how Jews named this day in the Old Country. The evening is not about celebration, but the act of observing—looking around and inside, riffing and transforming, revealing and questioning.

For Vox Tablet, Fruchter and Jeremy Brown, Pitom’s violinist, played a stripped-down version of the track “Neilah,” and they explained to host Sara Ivry why a jazz-metal-rock take on the Day of Atonement seemed like a good idea. [Running time: 15:09.]

It is no secret that the Jewish people figure prominently in the American music industry, but New Orleans is not Los Angeles or New York City. With an aging Jewish population of less than 10,000 in a city of almost 345,000, it’s hard to imagine a serious Jewish influence on a music scene that’s traditionally and predominantly African American. And yet a small group of Jewish entrepreneurs—including Kaplan, record executive Mark Samuels, and musician and promoter Ben Jaffe—are currently at the fore of New Orleans jazz, helping shape the familiar sound and find new audiences for artists both new and established.

Kaplan spent his career working for the Colorado Rockies. Fourteen years ago, after he was passed over for a promotion, he decided to relocate and bought a bar in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Three years later, he bought the Howlin’ Wolf. Next, Kaplan recalled, “one of my managers came to me with the idea to manage Rebirth,” one of the most prominent and successful bands in town. “It made sense because we were friends with the band and they appeared to be needing some help. It’s kind of funny that you’ve got a Jewish guy from Illinois with family roots in Brooklyn, and now I manage the premier brass band in New Orleans.” Now he also manages the Revivalists, a indie-rock band, and his team at the Wolf helps produce major annual festivals, including the Essence Music Festival and the Voodoo Music Experience.

Listen to ‘Why Your Feet Hurt’ by Rebirth Brass Band from their CD Rebirth of New Orleans:

Mark Samuels—the founder and president of Basin Street Records, which has signed artists like Kermit Ruffins, Irvin Mayfield, and Jason Marsalis—is responsible for much of the music on the HBO show Treme. Samuels was an energy executive when he started a record label as a hobby. Early success, however, convinced him to quit his day job, and he produced a string of hits, including a live recording by Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers recorded at Tipitina’s, a popular New Orleans club, and a record by Los Hombres Calientes, that won Latin Billboard’s award for top jazz album of the year.

A New Orleans native, Samuels developed his passion for local music in his teens, he said: “It was a combination of going to junior and senor proms and going to BBYO dances”—B’nai Brith youth group dances. “That’s when I first saw Deacon John and the Ivories. High school is also when I first went to Tipitina’s and saw the Neville brothers,” he said. But there was something else: “I was fortunate enough to be in the high school band with Wynton Marsalis,” he said. “That allowed me to maintain contact with the things that Wynton was doing during his early recording stages. I eventually met a lot of people in the music industry through him, like Harry Connick Jr. and Jeremy Davenport. He was just that central character that seemed to be in the middle of a lot of the opportunities I had to meet talented artists.”

Listen to ‘Almost Never’ by Jeremy Davenport from his CD We’ll Dance ‘Til Dawn:

Through his involvement in Treme, he’s been able to return the favor, bringing attention to New Orleans artists. “Kermit Ruffins, Jon Cleary, Henry Butler, and Rebirth have all performed on the show, and they’ve all had speaking lines,” Samuels said. “Last summer I had an opportunity to serve on jury duty with Lolis Elie, one of the writers, so I was also pitching story ideas to him.”

“Those guys really got it right,” Kaplan said of Treme’s creators. “They’re as close to the music and culture as anyone’s ever gotten. We are all New Orleanians, that’s who we are first. People talk about whether you’re American first or Jewish first, but here everyone has a shared experience that came from Hurricane Katrina.” The Wolf has been seen on the show, and Kaplan is involved in the production of “A Night in Treme,” a national tour featuring live performances by New Orleans artists.

Listen to ‘Panama’ by Kermit Ruffins from his CD Happy Talk:

Ben Jaffe makes sure there’s always a place for New Orleans jazz in New Orleans. His parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, founded Preservation Hall in 1961, a music venue in the French Quarter created to preserve and protect local jazz. When he was in elementary school, Jaffe began studying the string bass with jazz bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton, who taught band. Payton’s son, the celebrated trumpeter Nicholas Payton, would eventually play with Jaffe in the All Star Brass Band. Now, in addition to helping run Preservation Hall, Jaffe plays tuba for the acclaimed Preservation Hall Jazz Band—which has collaborated with the rockers of My Morning Jacket, played at the Bonnaroo music festival, and recently appeared on Late Show With David Letterman—and also serves as its creative director.

“Growing up, I was exposed to tuba just about every day of my life at Preservation Hall, in parades and jazz funerals,” he said. “We lived up in the French Quarter, so you could literally hear live music from the moment you left your house in the morning until you came home at night.”

Jaffe sees real connections between the Jewish and black communities in the New Orleans music scene. “I think it’s a real testament to the local music scene that there are people with deep roots in the Jewish community, but most of my Jewish connection is to the African American community,” he said. “Walter Payton converted to Judaism later in life. There’s a unique connection between the Jewish and black communities in New Orleans, it’s something that’s really strong.”

Allison Good is a freelance journalist living in New Orleans.

“It was something in me,” he said over lunch at a Brooklyn café near the apartment he shares with his wife, Liat, and their 2-year-old son, Zohar (glancingly named after Zohar Argov, Israel’s first breakout Mizrahi pop star). “On this instrument, the oud, I could express that. Later, I listened to recordings from that time.” He turned his head to the side, laughing, and lifted his hand dismissively. “It wasn’t good.”

Avital’s humility belies the substance and import of his music: Over the last few years he has become a leading force in a hybrid that synthesizes American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past. And unlike the self-conscious projects in which many musicians cloak themselves—garments as easily thrown off as put on—Avital’s work has emerged in the course of his search to better understand his identity as a jazz musician, as an Israeli, and as an heir to a Mizrahi cultural tradition historically viewed as inferior by Israel’s Ashkenazi elite.

In 2008, the New Jerusalem Orchestra premiered Avital’s “Debka Fantasia,” an extended composition that unearths the Bedouin roots beneath Israeli folk tunes such as “At Adama (You, Soil).” And in 2009, he presented his “Song of the Earth,” a Middle-Eastern Afro-Jewish musical suite for 13 pieces at Merkin Concert Hall. On March 9, he appeared at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, with the Israeli-Yemenite singer Ravid Kahalani, presenting their joint project, “Yemen Blues.” And on April 2, Avital will perform again with his quartet at the Jazz Gallery, also in New York.

“Omer’s work is very important politically because it represents part of a trend in Israel over the last 10 or 15 years of Mizrahi Sephardim finding public space to reclaim identity,” said Carmel Raz, an Israeli-American violinist and doctoral candidate in music theory at Yale who has performed with Avital. “In the development of Israeli identity, you can be Arab and Jewish and live in Israel. They’re not mutually exclusive. The stage is now open for a broad way of being Jewish.”

Listen to “Eli,” by the group Yemen Blues:

Avital, 39, who has been known to wear a Jewfro, long sideburns, and beads that evoke an Israeli Superfly, grew up in Givatayim, then a middle-class Labor Party redoubt east of Tel Aviv. His late father, Eliyahu, was from a family of mughrabim, North African Jews from Morocco, who emigrated in the late 19th century. His mother, Dalia, comes from a Yemenite family originally from Ta’izz, near Sana’a, home of the great 17th-century poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, celebrated by Jews and Arabs alike as the “Shakespeare of Yemen.” While his grandparents prayed as Jews, and lived among Arabs, his parents sought to become secular moderns. Eliyahu, a photographer and free spirit, introduced Omer to big band jazz, Frank Sinatra, European classical, and Arab traditional music. Dalia, dogged and practical, worked for the phone company and pushed her husband to Hebraicize his last name, Abutbul, which means “Father of the Drum.” Abutbul became Avital (“Father of the Dew”), as Israeli as Smith or Jones is American.

“When I grew up, Mizrahi culture was considered garbage compared to the European; nothing to take seriously,” said Avital. “For my parents, there was a survival thing that was key. They wanted for me to be part of something, not grow up in the ghetto. My mother, who is dark-skinned, really suffered. They tried to integrate. They joined the Labor party and believed in the Zionist ideal, but they were laughed at.”

While proclaiming Israel open to all Jews, David Ben-Gurion sometimes referred to Mizrahim as “savages.” “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs,” he wrote in the mid-’60s. “We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.” As the historian Avishai Margalit summarizes: “For the Labor leaders only Ashkenazi Jews had ‘culture’; Oriental Jews had at best a ‘heritage.’ ” In 1977 Menachem Begin exploited their seething resentment, when his right-wing Herut party swept into office with widespread Mizrahi support.

As a boy, Avital won a children’s songwriting contest and began to play an old guitar. He got good enough to audition for the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts, Israel’s predominant incubator of young talent. After a botched first attempt, his mother’s friend, a Yemeni cleaning lady who worked for the school’s music director, got him a second chance. He was accepted, and though generally ostracized for being an Oriental Jew, he was inspired by the sounds of jazz and blues around him and gave up classical guitar for jazz and the acoustic bass. He came under the sway of Emil Ram, a bassist who had studied in New York with Barry Harris at the legendary pianist’s Jazz Cultural Center. Ram, along with the late pianist Amit Golan, who also studied with Harris, carried back to Israel a muscular sense of swing and a historically rooted jazz lexicon.

“He had everything,” remembered Avital. “Meeting Emil meant finding someone who could give you a taste of what was really happening. From then on, I always had Mingus and Ellington in the back of my head.” Avital’s parents felt comfortable watching Omer play jazz, which resonated with Arab music’s tradition of incantation, improvisation, and trance-inducing rhythms.

Before he could pursue a jazz career, Avital, like most high-school graduates in Israel, was compelled to perform mandatory military service, which after a month of basic training he spent in the Air Force Orchestra. At first motivated by a sense of belonging, Avital soon found the experience a nightmare. He was disgusted by what he saw as the army’s anti-Arab and anti-Mizrahi sentiments. He became depressed, buoying himself with incessant chatter about his latest jazz obsession, Clifford Brown, the American bebop trumpeter of the ’50s who co-led a landmark group with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“They treat you like human garbage. I met the worst people I ever met. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be living in this country. If this is what’s it’s about, it’s not for me,’ ” he said. “My commander hated me. He’d yell, ‘If I hear the words Clifford Brown one more time, I’m going to send you to grease the bombs in the South!’ I was a bad influence in the orchestra.”

In 1992, following his discharge from the army, Avital boarded a plane with his friend, trombonist Avi Lebovich (the renowned bassist Avishai Cohen was on another flight the same day), and flew to New York to pursue his calling.

“I knew I could play and that what I do doesn’t interest anyone in Israel,” he said. “New York was the place. It allowed me to be something I couldn’t have been without it. I had two dreams: One was to play with the musicians I admired, and the second was to just become a good musician. I just wanted to get better.”

Listen to “Brighter Future,” from Live at Smalls:

Unbeknownst to him, Avital arrived just as a great wave of young jazz talent—global in orientation and possessed of shocking technical proficiency—was cresting in New York. Much of that talent revolved around the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program, where Avital spent a semester getting oriented before continuing his studies at Mannes College. In the early ’90s, New York was full of small bars and restaurants—St. Marks Bar, Nuyorican Poets Café, Zinc Bar, Jules, the Village Gate, the First Street Café—where musicians could play and hang out. (What few are left pay the same or less today as they did then, a sign of a struggling bohemia after dark.) Avital used these opportunities to learn standard tunes and build his confidence.

Now known for the missile-like speed, trajectory, and impact of his improvisation, Avital once remarked that he developed his sound not by acceding to some higher plane of musical understanding, but by deciding at some point only to play—to make heard—those ideas to which he could commit totally: strength through self-editing. To supplement his income he worked for a moving company run by his now brother-in-law.

In 1993 while on a gig at the Village Gate, Avital was heard by the bassist Dwayne Burno, who recommended him to saxophonist Antonio Hart. Hart took him on tour and featured him on his next record, along with Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on Miles Davis’ landmark 1959 recording, Kind of Blue.

Avital also formed his own band, a sextet that featured four tenors, which appeared regularly at Smalls, one of the Greenwich Village clubs where the new wave of young musicians pooled.

“He brought so much, man,” remembered tenor saxophonist Charles Owens, a member of Avital’s group, who plays with a meaty sound that recalls Sonny Rollins. “He was such a badass that when people from Israel were noticed subsequently, they were always compared to him, which was a gift and a curse for them, I suppose, as leaders. I don’t know if he had a specific agenda for an Israeli sound. He was just writing what was in his heart. He brought together jazz, French impressionist harmonies, Middle Eastern rhythms and tonalities, as well as a love for four-part harmony. His pieces were very challenging, not necessarily because there were a lot of notes, but say for example holding the lowest note on your horn for measure after measure, and at a piano or even double piano level. What a great feeling when it came together. Magic.”

New York at that time was, Avital said, an ideal place for exploring his multiple identities. He and guitarist Amos Hoffman would hang out with their friend, a Palestinian oud player and Williamsburg falafel shop owner named Najib Shaheen (brother of the oud player and activist Simon Shaheen), who before buzzing them in would answer his intercom in a mock sinister baritone, “Go away you filthy Jews. You are not welcome here.” In Israel, Avital would take trips to the Sinai desert and spend time with Bedouins. He started speaking with his father in greater depth about North African music and reading about Israel before 1948, when strains of Zionism looked to the Arab, rooted in the land, as an example to emulate rather than a threat to defend against. All the while, his music, characterized by its tuneful gritty romanticism, became more distinctive, personal, and searching.

“I made my own music and people wrote about it. They treated me like I was saying something,” he said. “That wouldn’t have happened in Israel. In New York you can be a human being and think for yourself. In Israel you have to make it your career to think for yourself.”

Listen to “Faith,” from Arrival:

In 1997 Impulse! records signed Avital and prepared to release his first record, Devil Head, but before it could do so, the label dropped the project.

“I was a little disappointed,” said Avital. “I had that band which was going super well. I found myself doing the same things. What do you do next? I had the feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I met Liat and started this long-distance relationship.”

Avital had been traveling more regularly to Israel, which in the wake of the Oslo accords was slowly becoming a more hopeful place. “Once you had that possibility for peace, it was amazing, that whole Middle Eastern sensibility came to life,” he said. “Israel became a much hipper place for about three years. Everyone was going to India and they brought back a looser vibe. The old Israel was ending. A sense of possibility opens people up.”

Avital started to study Moroccan music and played with Israeli-Arab musicians in Nazareth and the Galilee. He played in joint Jewish and Arab bands with Arnie Lawrence, the American saxophonist who created the jazz program at the New School, made aliyah, and founded the International Center for Creative Music. He moved to Ein Kerem shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and began a course of study combining the European and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

In 2005, longing for the “openness of jazz and society” in New York, Avital returned and began to further develop the concepts he had been working on in Israel. He resurrected his own groups and released a string of albums on Smalls Records, the club’s label. And with the percussionist Yair Harel, the director of the Israel Festival, he co-founded the New Jerusalem Orchestra, which draws on traditional piyutim, or liturgical poems, and the work of modern Israeli poets.

“I’m really trying to rebuild a bridge to the past. I have to learn this tradition. I have to know it,” said Avital. “It’s part of my body. I have to not lose it for the future.”

Avital’s vision of a shared Middle Eastern sound—exuberant, inclusive, and hopeful—could easily provide the soundtrack to the region’s fast-changing present. “In Israel, and in the United States, the Arab world can be seen as unknown, as one block of darkness,” he told me. “And now all of a sudden it’s like the world is seeing the people of these countries for the first time.”

Near Grand Army Plaza he recounted a recent session he had in his apartment with an Iraqi-American trumpeter, a Syrian singer, a Moroccan Berber percussionist, and a Palestinian oud player.

“It was a great vibe,” he said, smiling.

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Cohen, who has curly brown hair and a round, brightly expressive face set off by a barely perceptible nose ring, turned to the band to count off “Limehouse Blues,” a showpiece of Goodman’s, authoritatively and at a swift tempo. After playing the melody, she began to improvise, building short motifs into longer, harmonically challenging disquisitions. Over the music she draped long tones that seemed to be kept afloat by drummer Lewis Nash’s rhythmic jabs. She bent and shook notes, projecting sound with a physicality that became a dance. The clarinet seems to have a plaintive, pre-modern quality built in, and her sound evoked at once the blues, antique worlds, and indistinct old countries. As the crowd applauded, Wein, 85, beamed at his protégée from the corner banquette where he was sitting, his hands resting on an upright walking cane. Cohen paused to look at her watch. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, smiling, before introducing the band.

Wein—a pre-eminent figure in the jazz world for five decades and founder of the Newport and New Orleans jazz festivals—met Cohen three years ago at a concert sponsored by the Sidney Bechet Society, named for the legendary New Orleans soprano saxophonist. “I heard her play ‘Shreveport Stomp’ and was blown away,” he said. “Her approach to jazz is total. She’s got big ears and respects the tradition but isn’t locked into it. She just played a festival in Puerto Rico and got a standing ovation from 3,000 people. She wasn’t playing salsa but ‘Memories of You.’ ”

For Cohen the last few years have been a blur, recording, performing, founding Anzic, her record company, and earning accolades. She’s been named Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association of America four years running. In 2007 and 2008 she placed at the top of Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll in the “Rising Star: Clarinet” category. This year she was named its top rising jazz star overall.

Watching Cohen play, it’s clear why her popularity is growing. Whether on tenor or soprano saxophone or clarinet, Cohen plays with an emotional directness that connects with the listener, which is rare in the New York jazz scene, where musicians are often more apt to display skill than convey feeling. Cohen entertains without pandering. If Cohen isn’t playing, she’s roving around the bandstand, rooting on the soloist, singing back a phrase she liked, doing a dance. She treats the bandstand like her living room, putting her audience at ease. At one gig, she played like a snake charmer, sitting cross-legged on the floor with audience members who couldn’t get a seat.

Listen to “St. James Infirmary,” from Clarinetwork, Live at the Village Vanguard:

***

While Cohen’s musical voice is highly individual, she is also one of a growing number of Israelis on the New York jazz scene today. If you look at the jazz listings, you’re apt to see the following names appearing regularly: Cohen, Avital, Degibri, Silberstein, Aran, Ravitz, Mor, Klein, Tal. And younger Israeli musicians keep coming. For the last few years, Israelis have made up about 9 percent of the student body at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “Ironically, it’s the Israeli musicians that come who are keeping the flame of the bebop tradition alive,” said Martin Mueller, executive director of the New School’s jazz program. “When they come here, they’re able to take it in so many directions. And there’s an intensity to the music that comes from a culture surrounded on all sides by either water or enemies.”

The level of talent from Israel at times seems uncanny: A YouTube video of Gadi Lehavi, a 13-year-old piano prodigy, playing a duet with saxophonist David Liebman at Smoke, the uptown club, is a sensation in music circles less for the teenager’s prodigious technique than for his probing maturity at the keyboard. Recently at Fat Cat, the Greenwich Village jazz club and pool hall, the veteran black American drummer Billy Kaye led his group through a set of taut hard-bop that sounded as authentic and creative as any Blue Note record from the early sixties. It turned out that three members of the quintet, pianist Jack Glottman, bassist Ben Meigners, and saxophonist Asaf Yuria, are Israelis under 35. Between games of ping-pong, Amit Friedman, a young saxophonist who had come to hear his friends before returning to Israel the next day, commented on the level of jazz talent among his peers: “Maybe it’s a little bit corny, but Jews have had to improvise for thousands of years in order to survive. It’s natural to us.”

***

Anat Cohen, the middle of three children, was born in 1975 and grew up in Tel Aviv. Yuval, her older brother, is a saxophonist, and Avishai, the youngest son, is one of New York’s most prominent trumpeters; together they form the group 3 Cohens. Their grandparents fled Poland in the early 1930s, and their great-uncle helped found Kibbutz Ein Harod. “It’s very difficult in today’s society to live in this idea,” said Anat Cohen, referring to the collectivist ideal of the kibbutz movement, over lunch in Union Square. Earlier, waiting for a table, she’d chatted with a waiter in Portunhol, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “There’s always going to be someone who wants more, who wants something else,” she said. “I could never really figure out why people would live in a kibbutz. I’m such a city girl.”

Her now-retired parents, David and Bilha—he was in real estate, and she was a teacher—supported their children’s growing interest in music. “My father knew classical music very well,” said Cohen. “Driving in the car, listening to the radio he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.”

At age 10, Cohen started on the keyboard and at age 12 switched to the clarinet and began playing in a Dixieland band at the Jaffa Conservatory of Music, where she could begin to feel the rhythm of jazz while still following a written part. At age 16, she began playing tenor saxophone in the big band at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv.

Insipired by Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane records, Cohen began to absorb the jazz tradition, but she found few opportunities beyond school performances to develop her musical voice, and like many young musicians she was daunted by the prospect of improvisation. That changed when she met a saxophonist from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn who had immigrated to Israel and shaken up the music scene, Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein, or Arnie Lawrence.

“Arnie is very much responsible for me being here,” said Cohen, remembering him fondly. “I met him when I was a soldier. Something about Arnie that was always so pure. He would talk to you without any judgment or preconception. I’m a human being, you’re a human being, let’s communicate. That was his vibe. I was not used to that. Israel, as wonderful as it is, it’s a very intense place. The level of life there is just very stressful. People are always alert. They have a famous phrase in Hebrew: ‘respect and suspect.’ You always have to kind of check what’s going on around you. People are not always just, ‘We’re all here, we’re all together,’ because you never know.”

Lawrence, who was born in 1938, was a passionate figure. Tutored at a young age by the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, Lawrence at age 17 was leading bands at Birdland, once sharing a double-bill with John Coltrane. In 1986 he founded the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. Over the years, he would visit Israel with his wife, Liza, a native, making contacts and meeting musicians and performing. By the mid-1990s, Lawrence found himself with fewer gigs and increasingly at odds with the New School’s administration over his nontraditional teaching approach. Liza’s mother’s health was also declining. So, in 1997, Lawrence and Liza moved to Israel permanently to begin anew.

In Jerusalem, Lawrence founded the International Center for Creative Music, which welcomed Jews and Arabs alike. There he would hold his weekly “Harif” sessions, named for a spice. Whoever showed up would be the band that night.

“Every Wednesday we would go,” said Cohen. “I would get in the car, my two brothers and I, and drive to Jerusalem. It was the most special thing for us to do. Maybe there would be just bass or just drums, sometimes just seven saxophones. Arnie would call tunes, play open grooves, whatever, pointing at people to solo. I was the most insecure one at the time, because I was the latest of us coming into jazz. He gave me confidence. He would talk to me after sets about beauty, about people, wonderful vague conversations, not about this note or scale. He was the first one who told me there were no wrong notes.”

***

Walking south on Loisada Street in New York’s Lower East Side, toward The Stone, the experimental jazz club, one steamy evening in late May, you had to pass through music to get to music. The neighborhood, which long ago teemed with the street life of Eastern European Jews, was alive with the sounds of the Hispanic immigrants who followed. Two congueros sat drumming near East 4th Street as neighborhood folks, heads bobbing, some singing, gathered slowly to them like flower petals blooming in reverse. Sidewalk barbecues smoked.

Nearby, another crowd gathered on the corner of Loisada and East 2nd, outside The Stone. Approaching, you could hear English speckled with Hebrew being spoken by yet newer immigrants, young, hiply dressed, with black instrument cases slung over their shoulders. Inside, the small club—no liquor, no food, just music—was packed beyond capacity for New York’s first Festival of Israeli Jazz.

Listen to “Washington Square Park,” from Notes From the Village:

“If you have to lose liquid, let it be sweat and not tears,” said the trombonist Rafi Malkiel, from the stage. It was both a reference to the heat in the room and an epigraph to his composition “River Blue,” binds Jewish and Arabic melodic traditions together within the traditional 12-bar blues form. Malkiel’s newest music, heavily informed also by the Latin groups in which he’s played, is inspired by the concept of water, of life’s liquid nature, its currents of influence.

The ensemble, which includes Cohen and her brother Avishai, began to weave together in rigorously arranged polyphony, grooving muscularly through the Middle Eastern-tinged minor blues. When it finished, Malkiel, an Israeli of Moroccan heritage, thanked the festival’s organizer and curator, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who stood in the back.

“It takes a Cuban to put on a festival of Israeli music in New York,” said Malkiel, smiling. “I promise you, next year we’ll have a Cuban music festival in Israel.”

Rodriguez, 51, whose close-cropped silvering hair belies his youthful enthusiasm, is a drummer, composer, and the founder of the Sexteto Rodriguez Cuban Jewish All Stars, which appeared this summer at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow (or, as he calls it, the “big powwow”). His group, accented by clarinet and accordion, combines Cuban son and klezmer, evoking an imaginary world where the Buena Vista Social Club and a chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund might exist on the same street.

“I grew up in the Jewish community. I did weddings, bar mitzvahs, and Yiddish theater down in Miami Beach,” said Rodriguez by phone from the Catskill home he shares with his wife, drummer Susie Ibarra, and their young son. “It’s interesting to see the similarities between their culture and mine. I’d go over to my friends’ houses, and their furniture would be covered in plastic. I’d go over to my aunt’s house and their furniture would be covered in plastic. ‘You can’t sit on it! You can’t touch it!’ They’re warm cultures, passionate cultures, and they both have a certain kind of schmaltz. It was easy to just blend in. I never considered Jews to be white. They’d say ‘I’m white.’ ‘No, you’re Jewish.’ ”

Rodriguez’s artistic enterprise, to showcase the various ways Israeli musicians are combining these influences with jazz, was not, however, immune to the political pressures that follow Israelis wherever they go, regardless of their politics. Shortly before the festival began, Rodriguez received an email from Andrew Fellus, a New York music producer and organizer of Artists Against Apartheid, a group that works in concert with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and its counterpart in the United States. Some performers have heeded the groups’ call to boycott Israel. Elvis Costello characterized his cancellation of a recent show as “matter of instinct and conscience.” Carlos Santana and the Pixies have joined in the boycott. Fellus’ email to Rodriguez read: “I noticed that you are curating the upcoming Israeli jazz festival, and curious if you realize this event is being promoted by the Israeli Consulate? You might not want to have your event associated with a government that is responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing, colonization and dispossession of Palestinian land.”

Rodriguez replied to Fellus by email: “I am a friend of all musicians and artists from all over the world regardless of what country they are from. I do not appreciate your actions against me curating a program of Israeli musicians who live in New York City, or anyone else for that matter.” He ended the letter: “Where politics and boycotts fall short, music and art goes a very long way. I am inviting you to come and listen to the music. I hope you can make it.”

The first Festival of Israeli Jazz ended without controversy. But the day after its last show, Israeli forces raided a flotilla of ships attempting to break its blockade of the Gaza strip. A battle ensued aboard the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, that resulted in nine deaths, sparking international outrage and further energizing the movement to boycott Israel. Next year’s festival, which Rodriguez hopes to expand into the Abrons Art Center, may not proceed so smoothly. Fellus’ group was planning to protest an upcoming concert by the Jerusalem String Quartet. The quartet’s April concert in London’s Wigmore Hall was disrupted by hecklers, which forced the BBC to stop its live broadcast of the recital.

***

“I have an ambivalent feeling about the Israeli army,” said Cohen. “Growing up in Tel Aviv, being involved in the arts, the last thing artists want to do is fight.” Young Israeli musicians can audition for a limited number of spots in Israel Defense Force bands; the result can determine whether you end up playing Ellington or invading Gaza. Cohen was accepted into the Air Force Band prior to her induction.

“Basic training was not fun, but it was an interesting experience,” said Cohen. “You’re finishing high school, summer vacation, everything’s beautiful, you’re an optimist, you’re a kid. You finish your exams and very quickly, in July, my mom takes me in the morning. I get on the bus, and they close the doors. Someone’s shouting, ‘Don’t look out the windows!’ Your parents are still standing outside the bus. Immediately”—Cohen snapped her fingers—“you lose your identity.”

Cohen hadn’t known that the First Festival of Israeli Jazz had become politicized, but it came as no surprise.

“I avoid as much as I can any political conversation mainly out of fear,” said Cohen. “It depends on the environment. I went to Dartmouth College to play and went to Chabad House. I had no problem engaging in talking about politics. But I’m afraid of hostile reactions. With cab drivers I always say I’m from Brazil. I don’t say I’m from Israel. It’s happened more than once that someone is blaming me for the government’s policy. And I say, ‘Listen, I live here. I’m a musician. I don’t call the shots.’ ”

As a kid, Cohen traveled abroad as part of youth orchestra. Its members were told not to wear yarmulkas or clothing with Hebrew slogans. “Just hats,” said Cohen. “Try to mingle. It’s a good rule in general. Why be a target if you don’t have to? I remember taking a cab at 3 in the morning, with a Muslim driver. He was explaining that he was not allowed to listen to music because it distracts attention from God. I revealed I was from Israel and as we were just near my street, suddenly he locked the doors. And I freaked out. ‘Please don’t lock the doors.’ I immediately imagined the worst. Maybe he wanted to intimidate me. That was the last time I told a cabdriver that I’m from Israel.”

***

Listen to “Hofim,” from Poetica:

Cohen returned to Israel last year during the incursion into the Gaza Strip. “Conflict is so rooted in the culture,” she said, pondering whether she would ever return to Israel to live. “Everything is a consequence of something that happened before, and not seeing the end of it, it’s so difficult. You cannot live there and not be involved in what’s going on. It got under my skin so deep I couldn’t shake it off. For the first time I told myself, maybe not.”

Now that Israel may face the existential threat of a nuclear Iran, many have suggested that its best and brightest will increasingly choose to live elsewhere. This summer, the Israeli Cabinet implemented a plan to stem “brain drain” among the country’s scientists. Academics are also choosing increasingly work outside of the country.

Cohen suggested that it’s nothing new. “They don’t have to wait for a nuclear weapon from Iran for people to say this is an insane place,” she said. “I keep meeting people who have been here for 30 years. They’re 100 percent Israelis, in their behavior, they way they talk. They visit Israel, they’re connected, and have families there. Israel is a wonderful place to visit. But think about raising kids there. Suicide bombers? Having to send your kid to the army?”

Cohen also noted that there are far fewer jazz stages to play in Israel.

“I’m having a great time and love being on stage, but the amount of stages in a small country is limited,” said Cohen, betraying what seemed like a faint twinge of regret. “Going back to live in Israel is a serious decision.”

“If people just understood that jazz is about life, it’s about taking people from different backgrounds, put them in one room and say, ‘OK, start talk, and communicate, make sense, explain where you come from, respect and listen, react and suggest and don’t take over, be polite,’ ” she said. “How many times have you heard someone playing jazz but not really communicating? I don’t get it, just monologuing. It’s about dialogues and conversations.”

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Ruzow’s 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, or 4WAKO, is just what the name implies: a band that combines Afropop with Eastern European Jewish music—though there are hints of other styles floating around in there, as well. Ruzow, who was a founding member of the avant-jazz Gold Sparkle Band, once co-led a klezmer ensemble called Mazel Tov Cocktail. Seven or eight years ago, he acquired a taste for the African pop produced by musicians like Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Thomas Mapfumo, and a year-and-a-half ago, he had the idea to fuse the genres. “It just came to me, and I wrote three tunes,” he said in an interview. He brought together a group of veteran Atlanta players to perform them, and soon he’d written a bunch more, resulting in East Atlanta Passover Stomp, 4WAKO’s debut album, released last November.

The first track, “Greater Lagos Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”—named for a tune by one of Ruzow’s heroes, the African-American bassist and composer Charles Mingus, who was himself known to work in a wide range of styles—is a traffic-stopping illustration of the group’s Afro-Judaic aesthetic. What begins as a silky-smooth, Fela-style Afrobeat groove, complete with drunken horns, suddenly segues into a jaunty arrangement of Harry Kandel’s klezmer classic, “A Nacht in Gan Eden” (“A Night in the Garden of Eden”). The 10-piece band proceeds to cut back and forth between the two like a DJ dropping the needle on two very different records, and while that might not seem like the best idea in theory, in practice, it’s great—at least, if you like both Fela Kuti and Harry Kandel (and really, why wouldn’t you?)

Something similar occurs on “Sweet Auburn Mishegas,” in which Ruzow alternates between an original, and slightly deranged, klezmer-inspired melody and another laid-back Afro-groove. On other tracks, however, like “Dolgo Horo,” he juxtaposes European- and African-derived sounds vertically rather than horizontally, supporting an Eastern European melody (in this case, a Balkan one) with West African rhythms.

Just as Mingus often imbued his work with a political subtext, so, too, does Ruzow. The band is named for Atlanta’s historically black Old Fourth Ward, which encompassed the once-affluent, then crime-ridden, and now-gentrifying Sweet Auburn district where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. The title “Sweet Auburn Mishegas” sums up Ruzow’s attitude to the way in which the area was redeveloped in the name of creating a “mixed income” neighborhood—a laudable goal, but one that he feels simply provided cover for razing a bunch of older, low-rent buildings and displacing their poor black residents. (He may have a point.) “A Nacht in Gan Eden” also has geopolitical significance. “Some people say that the Garden of Eden was in central Africa,” said Ruzow, who intended the tumultuous collision of klezmer and Afrobeat to represent “the strife and indignities occurring on the African continent.”

Strife is also a theme in David Chevan’s most recent recording, The Road that Heals the Splintered Soul. Since 1998, Chevan and pianist Warren Byrd have led the Afro-Semitic Experience, an ensemble dedicated to exploring the musical heritage of both Jews and blacks. Their repertoire encompasses synagogue and church music, jazz, blues, and material from the African diaspora. The ASE’s latest offering explores some of the more painful episodes in black and Jewish history, with an eye toward healing and forgiveness, and it draws on the group’s distinctively bifurcated pool of resources.

“Shout It from the Mountain” is based on “Run Daniel,” an old slave song from the Georgia Sea Islands with a rhythm that resembles a common klezmer pattern. “I have always been bothered by the lack of the slave voice in the Torah,” Chevan wrote in an email. “We read about Moses, but we don’t really hear the voices of the Hebrew slaves. And we certainly don’t have any of the slave songs that the Jews must have sung while working for Pharaoh. So I began to imagine what a Jewish slave song would have sounded like.” What he imagined includes elements of “Run Daniel,” supplemented by a klezmerish melody and some jazzy improvisation. Similarly, “Adon Olam,” which is sung both at Sabbath services and for the dead, gets a funk-jazz makeover; and the title track includes an impassioned, gospel-tinged vocal, along with instrumental nods to John Coltrane’s spiritually charged “A Love Supreme” and Nat Adderley’s hard-bop classic, “Work Song.”

The Afro-Semitic Experience and 4WAKO both move easily between tight ensemble playing and a looser, more ragged sensibility. The sense that things are sometimes falling apart lends added energy to these groups, ensuring that their explorations of different genres and traditions, though touching upon issues of race and class, never become dryly academic or polemical. Like good music everywhere, their work offers something for the mind, something for the heart—and something for regions further south, as well.

Those songs were the only Jewish thing that Cioma chose to bequeath to David and his younger son, Sascha. Like many survivors who lost their families during the war, Cioma’s feelings about Judaism were complicated. “He’s very critical of Jewry and consciously chose not to raise us as Jews, but a Jewish consciousness was always present,” said David. “He was absolutely convinced that being Jewish is what killed his parents. We grew up in a Christian milieu; our Jewishness was limited to stories and history.”

Stories and history, and those songs. Years later, when David, a bassist, and Sascha, a saxophonist, decided to pursue careers in music, they began to re-examine the music of their childhood. Before long, they had teamed up with the German violinist Andreas Wäldele to form a klezmer ensemble, Baith Jaffe; the name is a German transliteration of the Hebrew form of Schönhaus, or “pretty house.”

The quartet, which also includes pianist Niculin Christen, performs many of the tunes that Cioma brought with him from Berlin: classics like “Oifn Pripetshok“ and “Oifn Weg,” which became the title tracks of the band’s first two recordings; lesser known pieces like “Main Tairer Mann” (“My Dear Man”), which tells the story of a woman whose husband emigrates, never to be heard from again; and near-oddities like “Wie Ist Dos Gessele” (“Where Is the Street”), which Cioma sang in Russian—his own father had served in the Red Army, contributing more than a few songs (some of them X-rated) to the family repertoire—but which had been recorded in Yiddish during the 1920s.

The brothers dove into the same archival recordings that have served as touchstones for American klezmer revivalists, including discs by David Tarras, Naftule Brandwein, and Abe Schwarz. They listened to Andy Statman, the mandolin player and clarinetist whose work traverses bluegrass, Hasidic niggun, and late John Coltrane; they performed alongside the Epstein Brothers, one of the last surviving klezmer bands from the 1940s; and they collaborated with the late Marcel Lang, a Swiss cantor who taught them about Jewish music and religion before his death in June. “The band served as our entry point to Judaism,” David said.

Ultimately, David and Sascha arrived at their own version of Jewish roots music, one that draws on traditional Ashkenazi materials but also alludes to classical music, Russian folk music, and jazz—a mixture of personal and contemporary elements which comprises their family’s musical legacy. (They tend to tailor their approach to their repertoire, which means you can hear them get all Russian on “Katjusha”, or sort of jazzy and Americana-ish on “Andy Statman 17″, or unapologetically Jewy on the Epstein Brothers’ “Chassidic Medley.”)

Their approach appears to have struck a chord. David estimates that 80 percent of their European audiences are non-Jewish and says they always play to sold-out houses. They do the bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding circuit, play festivals in Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, and even venture to the United States, where they recently gave a series of concerts at Pacific Lutheran University.

And Cioma? “He has a very ambivalent view of our band,” David said. “On the one hand, he loves our music. On the other, he believes in creating a world religion in which Judaism no longer has a place. But he’s always supported us in our work, and is proud of our success.”

***

While David and Sascha have spent the last 20-odd years coming to terms musically with their family history, Kat Parra only recently discovered hers. Parra studied voice in college with Patti Cathcart, of Tuck & Patti. But life, in the guise of an early marriage, two children, and a divorce, interrupted her dreams of a musical career. She spent eight years waiting tables and another six working as a graphic designer for Cisco Systems while singing jazz, R&B, and salsa on the side.

Then three things happened: her youngest son graduated college, enabling her to quit her corporate gig and pursue music full-time; she discovered through a family-tree project that despite her Ashkenazi upbringing, her maternal grandfather had been a Sephardic Jew from the Iberian Peninsula; and she encountered Sephardic music on a trip to Spain. The result: a series of albums that have explored, in ever greater depth, “Sephardic world jazz”—an artful mishmash of traditional Sephardic songs and different forms of Latin music.

Parra’s latest release, Dos Amantes, includes a buoyant Latin jazz rendition of the old drinking song, “La Vida Do Por El Raki” (“I Would Give My Life for Raki”) and a sumptuously orchestrated version of “Fiestaremos” (“Let Us Celebrate”) set to the African-derived rhythms of a Peruvian lando. The disc benefits greatly from the work of several highly skilled arrangers, including Bay Area veterans Wayne Wallace and Murray Low, and from a gimcrack band that combines the delicate flute-and-violin instrumentation of a Cuban charanga ensemble with steely rhythmic precision.

Maybe Parra’s Sephardic grandfather would regard this reimagining of his cultural legacy with the same ambivalence as Cioma Schönhaus. Or maybe he’d just slip on his dancing shoes, toss back some raki, and join the party.

David Lehman’s Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne. “Listen to Sinatra’s version of this interestingly self-referential lyric.”

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard. “Michael Feinstein was my source on this one. And I’m surprised! The lyrics involve an impromptu wedding ceremony performed by a Parson Brown. The most interesting lyrical moment is the rhyme of ‘snow man’ and ‘no, man.’”

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer. “Very enjoyable song. The closest thing to a jazz song here. ‘Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney to me.’ It adapts the conventions of Christmas songs to become a kind of love and seduction song. Eartha Kitt sings a swell version.”

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. “Sometimes people encounter it as a musical backdrop. On a personal note, I remember flying between the U.S. and England in the 1970s, and at Heathrow or Gatwick or JFK, you would always hear that. I had never liked it particularly, but because of the association it is very dear to me. Parrish—born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania—wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous of all jazz standards, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’”

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent. “Like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Have Yourself,’ this song was popular during World War II, and it appeals to a certain nostalgia and homesickness, not only on the parts of the troops abroad, but the loved ones at home.”

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “This is a great song that is sometimes overlooked when people think of great Christmas songs, in part because of the other major Berlin effort in this category, and in part because it is one of the few songs on this list that can be done come snow or shine, year in and year out.”

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne. “This is my own favorite of the ‘Jingle Bells’-type Christmas song. I love the way it is used as the exit music in Die Hard.”

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. “These first two picks are traditional Christmas songs—they mention the holiday explicitly, are full of heartfelt sentiment, and may jerk a few tears.”

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “Bing Crosby’s version is the best-selling single ever.”

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.

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry interviews Etkin at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, where he teaches, about his unusual musical trajectory. For information on his upcoming performances, go here.

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.

Pinsky was about to read “Ginza Samba,” a poem named for a little-known jazz number. “The tune is played by a Jewish-American saxophonist on the recording I have,” said Pinsky, referring to composer Stan Getz. He added that its title “reveals the beautiful hybrid nature of America, and of the saxophone: a European instrument that was made a black American instrument by geniuses who used it to play their music.”

Then, with the band playing a samba behind him, Nextbook author Pinsky—himself a Jewish-American saxophonist who once aspired to be a professional jazzman, and who found himself performing that night alongside a trio of African- and Indo-American jazz musicians—recited the piece, which neatly places both Getz (“this great-grandchild of the Jewish Manager of a Pushkin estate”) and Charlie Parker (“a great Hawk or Bird, with many followers”) in the same imaginary family tree, distant cousins related through European immigration, the African slave trade, and a 19th-century Russian poet. Seeing Pinsky do this live, I felt as if I were watching a man recite a poem and act it out at the same time. The whole tableau was as striking an illustration of the “hybrid nature of America” as the tune that inspired it.

Robert Pinsky

Jazz poetry itself offers a pretty good example of that hybridity. The phenomenon originated in the 1920s, when Langston Hughes began giving private recitations with musician friends in Harlem. Kenneth Rexroth, who claimed to have done something similar at around the same time, helped bring it into the public sphere in the 1950s. He and a handful of other poets, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, performed with musicians like Charles Mingus and David Amram in nightclubs and coffeehouses. (Both Rexroth and Ferlinghetti can be heard on the re-issued recording Poetry Readings in the Cellar.) The practice of pairing poetry with popular music never went away—Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets picked up the torch in the 1960s and ’70s, updating the sound with R&B and soul; and hip hop is really vernacular poetry dressed up with beats and samples—but the particular combination of poetry and jazz did.

That’s a pity. Jazz poetry often evokes images of self-consciously hip bohemians reciting bad rhymes in front of equally bad bands; more often than not, bongos are involved, and not in a good way. But as Rexroth pointed out in a series of articles 60 years ago (a prolific essayist, he also wrote about kabbalah and Hasidism), jazz and poetry can in fact complement each other nicely. They also share certain similarities.

Simic’s colloquial language, which the poet delivered casually, hand in pocket, was earthy and sly; the poems he chose to read—“Crepuscule with Nellie” (another poem named for a jazz tune, this one by Thelonious Monk), and “Mummy’s Curse” (an homage to the horror films Simic watched as a child)—often had punchlines, and might have passed for exquisitely crafted jokes if they weren’t so loaded with meaning and memory. In a way, they work on an audience in much the same way that jazz does: to those who know the music, its traditions and history, it is jam-packed with allusions, inside jokes, and wry, self-referential moments that can elicit smiles of recognition and even outright laughter.

Then there’s the issue of rhythm. Rexroth claimed that a good poet could swing as hard as any jazz vocalist. That’s certainly true in Pinsky’s case, though he did more than just swing. Bobbing in place as he read his lines, he displayed all the rhythmic finesse of a fine jazz instrumentalist, varying his accents, feinting to the left and right of the beat, sometimes delaying and sometimes anticipating an expected cadence. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Pinsky is a far better jazz saxophonist than he lets on. He clearly has a performer’s instincts, bounding onstage and declaiming his verse with an actor’s enunciation in an urgent, rhythmic voice.)

Pinsky read the same lines that he did at a similar event last year, but I’m willing to bet that a careful comparison would reveal all kinds of shifts in rhythm and phrasing. That, too, is something that jazz musicians do, altering the delivery of their favorite licks to keep them fresh. They also delight in quoting from standard tunes and from their peers, something Pinsky did while trading fours with pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Andrew Cyrille, reciting both his own couplets and some of his favorites by other poets (John Donne, J.V. Cunningham) and then listening to the musicians’ improvised responses. Both variation and quotation are part of the beautiful hybrid nature of jazz, an art form whose practitioners walk a fine line between improvisation and composition, invention, and imitation. Apparently, poets tread the same path. They ought to work together more often.

During the late 1960s, when Washington, D.C. native Jane Goldberg was a student of the historian and playwright Howard Zinn at Boston University, she thought she was on her way to becoming a socially conscious journalist who would help to realize Zinn’s pronouncement that, “If you can’t liberate the world, you must liberate the ground upon which you stand.” Then came Goldberg’s eureka moment, in the unlikely form of a book review: Jack Kroll’s account, in Newsweek, of Arlene Croce’s landmark study The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book. Goldberg had never even seen an Astaire-Rogers film, but the article inspired her: She sought out other books on tap dancing, and enrolled in tap classes. And then she started to seek out the wonderful, famous, and, for the most part, African-American tap soloists (John Bubbles, Charles “Honi” Coles, Chuck Green, her eventual teacher and stage partner Charles “Cookie” Cook) whose golden age had been during the big-band and bebop jazz years of the 1930s and 1940s and who, thanks to the advent of television and rock and roll, had become sidelined from show business.

Ever the Renaissance woman, Goldberg put herself at the service of this older generation to bring them back into the limelight, arranging tap festivals, gathering oral histories, and, as in the case of Cook, performing with them, too. Her 40-year tap odyssey took her across the United States, to the Hollywood set of Nick Castle’s movie Tap (for which she served as a consultant and in which, at the request of her longtime friend and star of the film, Gregory Hines, she also appeared), and as far as India, where she brought her “rhythm-and-schmooze” tap act to quizzical audiences in Nehru jackets and saris. Some of her many achievements and tribulations, along with illuminating portraits of tappers she has spent time with—from Ginger Rogers to Meredith Monk—make terrific reading in her new memoir, Shoot Me While I’m Happy: Memories from The Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side.

You say that you came to an understanding of the difference between Broadway tap and jazz tap, and between show tap” and the real thing.” In tap dancing, what is the real thing”?

The first time I heard that expression was when Sammy Davis, Jr. used it in the movie Tap. He said, “In tap, we don’t go ‘5-6-7-8.’ We go, ‘UH, uHH. Bad um UH, uHH badum.’” Now, I just took the line the way he said it [that "real" means]: “black,” though he never said “black.” He might have meant that “real” means more syncopated and more…uncounted. That “real tap” was more old-school-on-the-streets, that it wasn’t taught, that it was self-taught.

Gregory Hines, Jane Goldberg, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Dance teachers would never say that what Gregory [Hines] was doing was “improvising.” You know the steps and you pull them out and do them differently every time. That’s why Gregory wanted the word “improvography” to be more popular than it is. He used to have trouble with directors, say, for TV. They’d say, Where are you going to land?” And he couldn’t say exactly. He knew what steps he was going to be doing, but they were never the same twice…He used “improvography” in the credits of The Cotton Club and Tap. Savion [Glover] even named his show Improvography, but he never explained where the word came from.

For “show tap,” it matters a lot how one looks. You used to perform in high heels—wasn’t that constricting to the percussive dance effects you could produce? Isn’t “the real thing” in tap also about the many subtle changes of texture in the sound?

I don’t think you’re looking for an individual sound when you’re auditioning for a Broadway show. The Honi Coles school of rhythm tap, and that world in general, was about getting your own sound, as an individual.

Women were all wearing men’s shoes. I could buy a pair of Capezio 360 low-heel men’s tap shoes for $40, and I had to decide whether $40 for an hour of psychotherapy was worth it, when I could get a pair of Capezio tap shoes. I remember making that distinction: $40 for 40 minutes, or $40 for a pair of 360s with 20,000 taps in them!

Wasn’t the issue of costumes and shoes for women in tap the occasion of some arguments with your friend Gregory Hines?

I think he did come around. He focused so much on women and wardrobe, and I said to him, “Why don’t you just let us decide what we want to wear?” his idea of sexy was not loose and comfortable. What was so ironic was that I was the one who danced with cleavage and high heels, but I was still defending the loose and comfortable.

Savion Glover sounds like an entire orchestra when he’s tapping.

There was a very famous scene at a Grammys, when Savion was pitted against the Irish dancer, the famous Michael Flatley. Gregory said that was really important time for Savion: they challenged each other, and it was clear that Savion had much more technique.

You use the word “challenge” when you write about tap. Would you explain what the reference is there?

Tap, at its red-hot core, is about competition and challenge. Guys younger than Gregory may not like the challenge mentality, but they still know who the champ is. They like to think that they’re as good as Savion; and they are all really good. But in that black male tradition—tap and boxing came out of the same era. A couple of tappers from Bubba Gaines’s act were also boxers.

The challenges that interest me the most are the ones that don’t even happen on stage but that you just hear about. Like this guy, Groundhog, who was from Cincinnati. [Jazz dance historian] Marshall Stearns set up a venue at The Village Gate with Chuck Green and others. And he literally beat all the guys, and then he just fled back to Cincinnati. He wasn’t in it for the profession; he was in it just for the feet!

There are so many Jews, whom you discuss in your book, who have been part of tap—Carl Schlesinger, Mura Dehn, Sammy Davis, Jr., of course, who converted. And it worked the other way, too. Honi Coles goes to Seder at your house. . .?

And he knew more Yiddish than I did, because he had worked in the Catskills. He really did. All those dancers! Look, Jennie Grossinger hired all of them!

Would you speak a little about your Hebrew tap”?

I was hanging out with a girlfriend in a temple in South Orange, New Jersey, and I just started tapping to, “A-DON o-LOM, a-SHER Mo-LACH.” I got into that, but I never thought I’d use it in my act. Then I did a [demonstrates] “Ba-RUCH, a-TAH, A-don-AI ch-ch-ch-ch.” That’s a soft shoe. Cookie [Cook] really liked that, and he got off on doing his roots in sand dancing. So that was part of our act.

Yeah, I found that Hebrew was very conducive to tap dancing. I used to love to go to Hebrew school, just for the singing parts. You could really tap to it.

What music is tappable and what is not?

Savion asked me once why the guys I worked with, who were from the 1930s and 40s, didn’t tap to the music they were listening to now, rather than stay in swing music. In other words, Buster Brown might listen to Mel Tormé, but he’d only tap to his work song, “Cute” [a Neil Hefti chart for Count Basie]. I think jazz lends itself to tap, because the two really evolved at the same time. I can tap to Bob Dylan, so I am answering Savion’s question about tapping to music that I listened to, when I came of age. But I think the purest sound—I’ll get in trouble for this—is really jazz music and tap.

A friend just sent me CDs from the 1980s, and I’d listen and list off “tappable” or “not tappable.” It just depends on the song. Rock is a little bit square. Van Morrison is very tappable, Dylan. And I’m still very old-school: I don’t play CDs [in classes]. I teach to my singing.

Watch a clip from the companion DVD to Shoot Me While I’m Happy

Contemplative and bedroom-eyed, Irving Fields puffs on his pipe

First Meeting: Arrive at Nino’s Tuscany, an Italian restaurant on West 58th Street. At age 93, Irving Fields still plays at Nino’s six nights a week for tourists, regular patrons, locals, and the occasional celebrity. Few of them know anything about the 75-year career of the white-haired, nattily dressed man who ambles from table to table taking requests. I.F. has played professionally in New York City’s society cafes, hotels, and nightclubs since the mid 1930s; wrote songs performed and recorded by Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Dean Martin, and Xavier Cugat, including the hits “Miami Beach Rhumba” and “Managua Nicaragua”; and pioneered the Jewish-Latin musical fusion that made him a star in the 1950s with albums like Bagels and Bongos (still beloved by lounge fans and Jewish hipsters today).

I.F. has asked me to collaborate with him on his autobiography, which he wants to call The Pianos I’ve Known. Has it in his head and on tape but never got any of it down on paper. I jump at the chance.

We arrange weekly meetings at his Central Park South apartment to discuss various aspects of his career and life. He asks if I have any questions before we start. What was the worst place he ever played? “Oh, that’s a good question! Let’s see … it was some Chinese restaurant upstate where the owner never had enough money to pay us, so he’d pay us in food. It was a dump!” Pauses. “But I don’t really want to talk about the bad stuff. I’ve played so many wonderful places in my life, I’d rather discuss those.” Can’t wait!

Interview #1: Plan to kick off interviews by asking about early days of the Irving Fields Trio. Instead, I.F. discusses his memorable sexual encounters—“I’m a very sexual person.” Mentions first time he made love in the ocean: “It was quite relaxing, actually. And afterwards, when we were holding each other and treading water, I felt something nibbling on my ding-dong. It must have been a fish or something.” Create chapter of sexploits—working title “Around The World In 80 Dames.” I.F. likes it. Keep “ding-dong”?

Interview #5. I.F. mentions new song he’s recorded, “YouTube Dot Com” and says it’s the featured video on YouTube. No idea what he’s talking about—he doesn’t even have a computer—but return home later to find out that he is in fact featured and has gotten more than 700,000 hits to date. Turns out one of his fans came to his home to record him. Song took 15 minutes to write. Add chapter about how he became an Internet celebrity.

A flock of sirens clings to Fields on the deck of a cruise ship, c. 1965

Interview #7: I.F. calls and says he has “extremely important news” and must see me ASAP. Move up meeting by a day. I show up with digital recorder and note pad at the ready. “Did I tell you about my idea for a game show?” Yes. “Did I tell you about my comedy record by my alter ego, Joe Putz?” Yes. “Did I show you the lyrics for ‘Happy Farter’s Day’?” Yes. “OK, very good. Let’s go get some lunch.”

Interview #10. Try to get more background on what recording sessions for Bagels and Bongos were like, apart from “We just did them. We knew what we were doing. And it became a big hit.” Ask if he was aware of the impact they’ve had on contemporary Jewish music, I.F. demurs: “My audience is made up of all races, religions, ethnicities. I don’t want to focus on the Jewish thing.” I counter that he’s been a part of Jewish popular culture since the 1920s. “My music appeals to everyone.”

Interview #13. Shows me campaign song he’s written for McCain, “McCain Can.” Add to “How Songs Are Born” chapter with other campaign songs for Reagan, Bush I, Giuliani and Bloomberg. “This is important—mention that I’m not affiliated with any party. My attitude is, may the best man win.” I mention that everyone he’s written songs for is Republican. I.F. pauses, contemplates for a moment. “People are dumb. They won’t figure it out.”

Interview #17. I.F. gets autographed picture and birthday greetings from Pres. Bush in the mail. Immediately faxes every media contact he knows—”This is an item!” Considers asking Bush to pressure Tony Bennett to record I.F.’s song “You’ll Love New York City” : “You can’t say no to the president, after all.” I.F. has tried to get Mayor Bloomberg, who also sent birthday card, to make it the official anthem of NYC, without success.

Interview #19. Book nearing completion. I.F. pats me on the shoulder and says, “It’s been a pleasure working with you.” I tell him the pleasure’s been all mine. As I get ready to leave, I.F. says “Did I tell you the story of the tree? No? OK, here’s the story of the tree.” Points to large plant on a coffee table with a papier-mâché bird attached to one of the stalks, with stuffed monkey leaning against the planter and a porcelain dog with one leg lifted on the floor beneath it. “See, the bird, he’s pissing on the monkey’s head. The monkey, he’s got a shmuck, and he’s pissing on the dog. And the dog is pissing on the carpet.

“And that’s the story of the tree.”

“Put a piece of chicken in front of me, and my wife starts to get sweaty if there are guests around,” Shapiro told me a couple of weeks after the show. “I sort of lose touch with reality, and before you know it, it’s all over the place. There isn’t much left on my plate except for some half-eaten bones. If there’s not enough napkins around, it can get very, very dangerous.” And not just for poultry. “I’m a great lover of food,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty wide palate, and I eat all kinds of ethnic foods.”

But Shapiro isn’t just a culinary gourmand; he’s a musical one, too. He’s even written a tune titled “Different Flavors” (“I like different flavors, yes I do…”) to express his love of variety in all things consumable, from soups to songs.

As a member of the Microscopic Septet in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shapiro was part of a small but vibrant community of jazz musicians who refused to submit to the narrow, neoconservative ethos of the day, and chose instead to celebrate the entire tradition, from early swing to the avant-garde. You can hear that joyous open-mindedness in all of Shapiro’s subsequent work, including his two previous albums for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Midnight Minyan and It’s in the Twilight, which subject traditional synagogue melodies to a variety of treatments, from rhythm and blues to modal jazz.

Paul Shapiro Band

Shapiro’s growing interest in Jewish music eventually led him to a pocket of repertoire from the 1930s and 1940s that occupies a fascinating middle ground between big band swing, Yiddish pop and early R&B. For the past several years, he has been presenting these finds, many of which take food as their theme, at Cornelia Street as part of his Ribs and Brisket Revue.

There are klezmer-inflected melodies like Benny Goodman’s “My Little Cousin” (based on the Yiddish tune, “Di Grine Kuzine”), and jivey, bluesy numbers like Henry Nemo’s “A Bee Gezindt,” which was sung by both Cab Calloway and Mildred Bailey”neither of whom, presumably, could resist a lyric that rhymes “Miller” with “schmiller”; Borscht Belt material like “Tsouris,” a shtick-laden Yinglish routine originated by the Barton Brothers, and the food-obsessed title track, a Billy Hodes bit that was later reworked by Lee Tully (né Kalman Naftuli), and which Shapiro tracked down among the 78-rpm records in the YIVO archives; and a couple of tunes by the late, great hipster Slim Gaillard: the frenetic “Matzoh Balls” and “Dunkin’ Bagels”, which Shapiro reworks as ultra-groovy new jack swing.

Many of these pieces illuminate the game of give-and-take that Jewish and African-American artists have played for generations, including “Utt-Da-Zay,” a Cab Calloway vehicle from 1938, which features mock cantorial gibberish by Revue singer Babi Floyd; and singer Cilla Owens’ earthy cover of blues singer Sophie Tucker’s Yiddishized cover of Jane Green’s “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” dating to 1923. “You listen to it and it’s very much a bluesy version, ’cause Sophie was really bluesy,” Shapiro says of Tucker’s rendition, which he also found at YIVO. “And yet it’s in Yiddish.”

The musical ancestry can get even more complicated. A couple of years ago, Owens brought in “Yes, My Darling Daughter,” a popular tune from the 40s sung by Adelaide Hall, among others. Audience members began coming to Shapiro between sets and telling him that the song was based on the old Yiddish tune, “Yuh Mein Tiere Tochter.” That was true, but it wasn’t the end of the story. “The funniest thing is, I played it last summer up at the National Yiddish Book Center, and [Jewish music scholar] Hankus Netsky was in the audience,” Shapiro says. “And he tells me afterwards, ‘Guess what — it’s really a Ukrainian folksong.’ That’s very typical; these melodies are popular and they get pulled into various musical families, and everybody shares.”

Shapiro casts many of these gems in the form of jump, a bouncy, jazzy precursor to R&B built on shuffle rhythms and boogie-woogie basslines that will be familiar to anyone who has heard Ray Charles’s early recordings or sampled the oeuvre of saxophonist Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five. He also weaves in bits of reggae and funk and bebop, all of which are deftly executed by pianist Brian Mitchell, bassist Booker King and drummer Tony Lewis. What stands out most, however”aside from the breadth of styles on display”is the consistent and strikingly well-integrated combination of serious musicianship and easy, lighthearted humor.

I have been to see the Revue more than once, and I have listened to Essen umpteen times, not just because of the novelty of the material or the intriguing relationships it reveals between various streams of American popular music; but because, as performed by Shapiro and his crew, it is endlessly entertaining.

Without committing to anything, Shapiro admits that there might be enough music for another album. To which I can only respond: Please, sir, can I have some more?

Listen to a clip of “Dunkin’ Bagel” by Paul Shapiro

Listen to an excerpt from Alexander Gelfand’s interview with Paul Shapiro

Listen to a clip of “Utt-Da-Zay” by Paul Shapiro

Alexander Gelfand is a writer and sometime jazz pianist. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and The Forward.

The front man of the six-member group, Joel Covington, was born in Baltimore and goes by the name Rebel Sun. As part of a series of interviews with artists and writers in Israel, Nextbook spoke with Joel about Coolooloosh, the trouble he had gaining legal residence in his adopted homeland, and the differences between hip hop in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Coolooloosh’s new album, Elements of Sound, will be out in mid-November, but you’ll get a preview in this podcast.

Photo: Ronen Lalena.

“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.

When I first began writing about Jewish music several years ago, I thought the job would be pretty straightforward. As a recovering ethnomusicologist, I’d had to deal with some pretty exotic sounds; how tough could the Jewish beat be?

Tougher than I could have imagined. Jewish music comes in as many varieties as the people, Jewish or otherwise, who make it. It has blended with, and borrowed from, a dizzying variety of other musical traditions. And the more I learn about it, the less I realize I know. What makes music Jewish in the first place? What’s the connection between new genres and old ones? What makes one style sound traditional, and another progressive?

I still can’t answer those questions to my own satisfaction, let alone anyone else’s. But wresting with them has made my mother very happy, and exposed me to a great deal of strange and wonderful music. I’ll continue to pursue them as I trace the web of connections, commonalities, and contradictions that links the music of the past to the music of the present, and Jewish music to the wider musical world.

Thirteen years ago I shared an office in the school of music at the University of Illinois with a fellow graduate teaching assistant named Kip. Kip looked like what Robin Williams, referring to fellow comic Martin Mull, once described as “Hitler’s wet dream”: tall, blond, and slender, with blue eyes and fair skin. His people came from Virginia, and he studied old-time string band music (he now plays mandolin in the Chicago-based bluegrass band Tangleweed), the kind of square-dancey, fiddle-and-banjo stuff that I had always associated with Hee Haw, incest, and that scene in Deliverance where Ned Beatty is forced to squeal like a pig. As a sophisticated urban Jew, I understood that this was music made primarily by and for hillbillies. Mountain mutants. Toothless wonders.

You get the picture.

Fortunately, Kip, who became one of my closest friends, had no idea what an ignorant, prejudiced jackass I was. In his kind, gentle, and infinitely patient way, he introduced me to rural American music, particularly the stuff that seeped out of Appalachia and into much of the South and Southwest, eventually giving rise to country music and bluegrass, a flashier, more virtuosic version of old-time string band music. At Kip’s suggestion, I read Bill Malone’s Country Music USA, which describes how the poverty-stricken descendents of Scots-Irish immigrants, when not scratching a living from the soil, created a style of dance music that was capable of expressing both great joy and sadness, sometimes at once. It made me think of the bittersweet music my own ancestors brought with them from the Old World to the new, and forced me to confront, for neither the first time nor the last, my tendency to assume the worst about people I don’t know.

Of course, some people have done more than simply ponder the parallels between Jewish and American folk music. For the past seven years, clarinetist Margot Leverett has performed an amalgam of klezmer and bluegrass with her string band, the Klezmer Mountain Boys. Although their latest recording, 2nd Avenue Square Dance (released October 14), takes detours into rock and Brazilian choro—Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) and the Brazilian Bay Area-transplant Carlos Olivera both make appearances—Jewgrass remains the dominant sound. That’s especially true on tracks like “High Lonesome Honga” and “Boreasca,” where Leverett marries traditional klezmer melodies to the rapidfire unison delivery that mandolinist Bill Monroe, guitarist Lester Flatt, and banjoist Earl Scruggs pioneered in the 1940s. (The Klezmer Mountain Boys comprises mandolinist Barry Mitterhof, guitarist Joe Selly, violinist Kenny Kosek, and bassist Marty Confucius. Banjoist Tony Trischka also appears on several tracks.)

Leverett, who played avant-garde music in New York City before helping to found the Klezmatics in the mid-1980s, had been drawn to bluegrass for many years, indulging a taste for playing old-fashioned fiddle tunes—Appalachian, Cajun, Northeastern—on the clarinet. Opportunities to do so, however, were limited; even those bluegrass musicians who were relatively open-minded about bringing a reed player into their midst were hardly beating the bushes for klezmer-oriented collaborators. “I could spend the rest of my life sitting by the phone, waiting for a bluegrass band to call to me to sit in,” she tells me.

So Leverett formed her own bluegrass band in 2001 and began transcribing Bill Monroe tunes. In doing so, she followed in the proud tradition of Jewish musicians and musicologists who have thrown themselves into American roots music. But unlike some of her colleagues, such as the banjo player Henry Sapoznik, who were inspired to explore their own musical heritage only after discovering somebody else’s, Leverett made the leap in reverse. (Full disclosure: I spent many years studying and playing jazz and African music before I paid serious attention to Jewish music of any kind—and my “conversion” took place only when I was asked, as the token Jew in the music department at a Midwestern liberal arts college, to deliver a lecture on the subject.)

Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys

Listen to clips from “Boreasca” and “Electric Kugel”

Leverett also came to appreciate the social and historical parallels between klezmer and old-time country music. “Both came from people in isolated rural communities that led harsh lives, and their music reflected the oppression they suffered, as well as the strength and joy it takes to overcome that,” she says. And both genres were transformed as the people who originated them migrated from one place to another: from rural Appalachia to the industrial cities and towns of the Midwest and Northeast, and from the shtetls of central and eastern Europe to America.

As it spread cross-country via recordings and radio in the 1920s and 1930s, early Appalachian string band music, at once idiosyncratic in its tunings and rhythms and communally oriented in its emphasis on ensemble performance and dance accompaniment, became a vehicle for virtuoso solo displays and artful arrangements, culminating in the polished brilliance of 1940s and 1950s. Yet if this new, more urban form was in some ways more sophisticated than the folk tradition that preceded it, it was also more homogenous. Klezmer followed a similar trajectory. Only a handful of the local styles that originated in Europe made it to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and those that did quickly hybridized with American popular music in subsequent decades, resulting in swing klezmer, dance band klezmer, and much else that Tevye and the good people of Anatevka wouldn’t have recognized as klezmer at all.

Both old-time country music and early klezmer also absorbed elements of African-American music, like jazz and blues. Listening to the eerily compatible sound of Kaukonen’s bluesy electric guitar and Leverett’s klezmer clarinet on “Electric Kugel,” it’s tempting to surmise that there is something similar, or at least mutually sympathetic, about the music of downtrodden folk everywhere.

Then again, that’s exactly the kind of essentialist thinking that nearly got me into trouble with Kip way back when. Perhaps it’s best just to note how well Leverett’s particular fusion project works, and leave it at that.

Like the protagonist of her first novel, Early Bright, Ami Silber is a Los Angeleno, and her investment in that city and its history is palpable on every page of her insightful, absorbing—and often sexy—book. The 1940s L.A. of Early Bright comes to life in these pages: sultry and seedy, glaring and haunting, a land of all-American possibility and all-American despair. The book’s narrator, Louis Greenberg, is a Bronx-born jazz pianist who’s finagled his way out of fighting in World War II and come instead to Los Angeles, where he plays bebop by night and runs con schemes by day. He also falls deeply in love with a black woman, Beatrice, with whom, in the segregated 1940s, he can never have a future.

Silber has a master’s degree in literature from U.C. San Diego, and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2000.

Your protagonist, Louis Greenberg, is phenomenally complex. Where did your idea for this character come from?

Louis’ identity evolved, rather than emerged fully formed from my head. He underwent many transformations as Early Bright took shape, until he ultimately became a fully realized person. His voice drives the novel—the mixture of con slang, jazz patois, Jewish New York and his own particular way of seeing the world. We’re not much alike, but I knew the only way to really tell his story was through first-person narration, so I essentially had to inhabit his consciousness whenever I sat down to type. Writing is a lot like Jungian dream analysis—every character is, in some way, a permutation of the author’s own identity, so that somewhere inside me is a tough-talking, sentimental, and manipulative con artist.

How were you able to make yourself think in his voice?

Obviously, music was key. I always wrote to jazz from that time period: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson. The very first draft of the novel had Louis speaking almost entirely in slang, but that got impenetrable—just ask my early readers. And Louis, while from the Bronx, isn’t a Bowery Boy. He comes from a comfortable, lower-middle-class world. When he does use slang, it’s very conscious. He’s creating a role for himself and trying to inhabit it, just as I inhabited him.

Where did this story come from?

Initially, the novel was going to be told in two parts: the present day, featuring a young woman learning of a disgraced, never-talked-about relative; and the past, detailing the story of that relative from his point of view. The more I researched and thought about the book, the less interested I became in the present-day story. The stakes seemed so much higher with the disgraced relative. So I refocused the novel on Louis.

My dad has long been fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s, so I grew up surrounded by fountain pens, vintage rotary phones, and collectibles from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. We listened to old radio broadcasts and went to revival houses showing Marx brothers movies. I was cognizant of that era from an early age. Also, I happen to be fascinated by con men. It really intrigued me how, especially back in the height of the old-time grifters, they played upon basic human desires, especially greed. Con men exploit our own need to have it better than someone else. I also grew up in Los Angeles, a place that figured largely in the world of noir, and that underwent huge expansion in the postwar period. There was such contradiction: sunshine, prosperity, and optimism combined with anxiety, shadows, and falsehood. All of this blended to make a world that I found incredibly rich and deeply involving.

I knew very little about jazz, less about World War II, and hardly anything about con artists from that time period. I did a ton of research for Early Bright—I think it’s the grad school geek in me that loves scouring library shelves and source materials.

Were Jews involved in the worlds you depict: the L.A. jazz scene, the con game?

Jews have long been involved in the music scene, especially during the 1920s and the era of Tin Pan Alley. It’s not a coincidence that The Jazz Singer was about a Jewish man trying to enter the world of popular jazz music. That was the era in which Louis grew up, the era which influenced him, the era of the Berlins, the Gershwins. But there’s long been an uneasy affinity between African Americans and Jewish Americans, so Louis’ heroes and contemporaries would also have been, to use the parlance of the day, Negro.

As for Jewish con artists, I didn’t find a lot of documentation about that. Most of the great con artists came from the Midwest, which didn’t have as large a Jewish community as other parts of the country. However, jazz and cons are part of liminal society, the edges of respectability, and I think that Jews often are perceived as and feel themselves to be outsiders. It isn’t such a stretch for Louis to ally and identify with these forms of our culture.

And into that uneasy affinity step Louis and Beatrice. Bea is the person with whom Louis can be most honest; the only thing she doesn’t know is that he cons for a living. He thinks it’s money that will ultimately trump race in their relationship, that money will be the great leveler.

For Louis, Beatrice is as close to the “right woman” as someone like him can get. She has a self-sufficiency and realism that he finds missing in most other women. Louis is honest with her—to a point. He can reveal his truest self to her, but not entirely, since she doesn’t know about his work as a con artist. In almost everything else in his life, Louis shields himself with cynicism, yet also clings to the notion that, if he became famous through his music, all his dissonant threads will come together, all problems will be solved. He and Beatrice can have a public life together, his father will forgive him. What the reader sees, but Louis cannot, is that he’s really conning himself. And that’s where the danger truly begins, with self-deception.

Self-deception, then, is both Louis’ means of survival and his undoing?

As his mentor, Memphis Arnie, states, one of Louis’ gifts is his complete and utter selfishness, his drive for self-preservation. The only way he can reconcile himself to all the terrible things he’s done is to deliberately block them from his mind or invent a means of justification. He also believes that he is better, different from everyone else, and thus provides a rationale for his conning. But again, the irony is that, to a con artist, the perfect mark is the one who wants it better than everybody else. The ideal con victim, too, is a person who believes they are better or more deserving than other people, and so Louis, by imbuing himself with a sense of primacy, becomes the ideal mark. Which is a precarious position for anyone, but especially him as he attempts to work many angles at once.

There’s a particularly affecting scene in which Louis hears from a friend about a war souvenir the guy is desperately jealous of: a “Jap ear” necklace. In the exposition that follows, Louis is revealed to the reader in a new way. “I dragged on my cigarette to keep my gorge down and my cool up…. [I]t got me then that there were depths folks would sink to even I couldn’t guess. The newsreels, for instance, of GIs liberating the camps. Hadn’t counted on that, not at all.”

Certain truths about violence and bloodthirstiness in other people still shock Louis. The kind of violence he inflicts on others is emotional and psychological. So his revulsion is about not only the making of a human-ear necklace, but the coveting of it. Similarly, he’s profoundly shaken when he first learns about the concentration camps, knowing that he didn’t fight. He’s confronted with evidence of the deep and systematic hatred and extermination of Jews, and that he did nothing to stop it. Though it isn’t constantly present in his mind, it’s always there, buried deep within him, the legacy of his cowardice.

What role did Judaism play in your imagining of Louis’ life?

Louis strongly identifies culturally as Jewish, even as he acknowledges that he comes from a non-observant background. Many of his memories of his life in New York are grounded in things like the social life surrounding the synagogue, and most, if not all, of his friends and his parents’ friends are Jewish. The community and sense of belonging are strong. Everyone looks like him. They all share a common cultural currency. So, when Louis must leave New York, his sense of displacement is amplified—which is ironic, because by removing himself from the New York Jewish community, his identity as a Jew becomes that much more significant. I think that happens a lot with Jews, that their knowledge and feeling of being different from the general world grows stronger if they leave Jewish enclaves. I definitely felt that in Iowa!

Louis’ strongest sense of displacement and loss comes when he goes to the Fairfax district here in L.A., where there is a very active community of Orthodox Jews. There, he feels the ties to his past, his family, everything he has lost or given up. His sense of being an outsider is underscored. Because he doesn’t wear payes or tzitzit, he isn’t immediately recognizable as a Jew, so that his sense of difference is carried on the inside where it is, in many ways, even more powerful.

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.

When I heard that Noel had landed a steady job performing at churches with a black Jewish gospel singer named Joshua Nelson, I became curious: After spending his entire adult life playing all kinds of music all over the world with countless bands, would religious music be just another gig—or would Noel Sagerman be moved by the spirit?

Was your family religious when you were a kid?

My parents observed certain things. We would light candles on Sabbath when I was younger; we went to Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, New Jersey every Saturday. I was never very into it, and I just did the bar mitzvah out of obligation and didn’t really go back. The way Judaism was presented at our temple was not very spiritual. It’s not that I perceived a lack of spirituality at age 12: to me it just seemed boring. But looking back, I remember that prayers were said as if they were an obligation, not an inspiration. I didn’t have anything to compare to it, so I didn’t know anything was missing. I’ve realized that the temple was very political, Zionist, they were really trying to give you a strong idea about Israel as the Jewish state. They would teach you a little bit of Hebrew, and they would teach you Jewish history, but I don’t remember ever dealing with any spiritual issues.

My parents felt a need to stick together as Jews. Being Jewish was more of an identity thing than a spiritual one. They felt so strongly about Israel. They took us to there; they really believed in it. As a kid, I was very taken with that. Of course you don’t get two sides of any story, so, I feel differently now.

How old were you when you got into jazz?

Noel Sagerman

I was at college in Burlington. I was living with a couple of guys, Erik Satre and Jonathan Koerner. We would jam just for fun, get drunk and play AC/DC covers. Jon had already gotten into jazz, and he had a duo with another guitar player, Brian Camelio. They asked me to play with them, and the first time I played—we played a gig at the Sheraton in town—was the first time I’d ever heard anybody play jazz. I never listened to jazz, and I have no idea what I played. I was completely ignorant. I didn’t know if I needed to bring the whole drum set. I know I used brushes, but I don’t remember what I did with them. Brian was really good at hustling gigs and pretty soon we were the house band at a club on Main Street. We were there four nights a week. It was great, I was learning by repetition. And by my last year of college I had given up my landscaping and busboy jobs. I was making a living.

And jazz captivated you?

I didn’t get it, I didn’t really get it at all, but I knew that there was something about it that I wanted to get. I had an idea in the back of my head from childhood that jazz was something cool, because a mentor of mine, Kevin Dye, was into jazz and had been a drummer in New York City. The summer that I was 14 I participated in an outdoor program he directed in Vermont. In August we drove out West in a van, which became the impetus for him starting his own wilderness education program. He’d met a commune of folks who let him use their land in Wyoming. They had this flat, sagebrush-dotted field where they lived in modern versions of traditional Mongolian-style yurts, which are small round huts with a peaked dome roof. We would set up tepees for a base camp, and go on trips into the Tetons and the Wind River Range and the Red Desert. Kevin incorporated things like Native American storytelling, creative writing, ecology, and music into his programs. He was into Buddhism. He knew knowledgeable people in these fields, too, and we’d meet them. These characters were quite intense and made strong impressions on me. Hebrew school was not at all like this!

Now you play drums with a Jewish gospel group. How did that come about?

My friend was the house drummer for the group and started getting really busy on the road, so he asked me to sub for him. He’s been on the road for the last five years, and I’ve been doing it the whole time. Coincidentally, the church where we play, Hopewell Baptist, used to be a well-known synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun.

I didn’t know what to expect at first. The musical director, Joshua Nelson, sings and plays the organ, and I’m sitting next to him, and I watch him…and just play. People talk about how important church was to the development of American music, black music, but ’til you’re sitting there in it, you don’t know. You just know the idea. I realized right away that his playing and singing were going to be a real education. His style was based entirely on Mahalia Jackson. Very traditional, really soulful. I could relate to his music. Blues, jazz, R&B: it’s all from the same roots. And he’s amazing, so you can’t help but feel the spirit from him. The first time he asked me to travel with him, I still didn’t know he was a black Jew. We went to Boston, and it turned out we were playing at a Jewish film festival.

Having had such a blah experience with organized religion as a kid, did it ever feel like a problem for you playing religious music?

I think my negative feelings were really about my specific synagogue more than religion. By the time I first played at Hopewell I already had pretty well-formed ideas about the universal spiritual aspects of music, especially soulful music. I was excited to gain firsthand experience of a culture and music that was so influential on the music I loved. Joshua being single-handedly the musical director, organist, and principal vocalist provided a lot of inspiration to me. I was definitely drawn to it and have been surprisingly (although I’m sure reluctantly by many) accepted by the membership there.

Speaking of acceptance, I have been shocked to learn that many people don’t know black Jews exist, as if being one thing excludes the other. Do you think people ever have trouble understanding who Joshua is?

Yes. There’s a lot of racism in some white Jewish circles. I have been around Joshua so many times where people have questioned his Jewishness. He is quite scholarly and has read a lot of books dealing with Jewish history as it relates to the migrations and ethnic and racial compositions of Jews. From what I know, though we are not 100 percent sure, it seems likely that the biblical Jews as well as other Middle Eastern peoples of that time were strongly African or at least mixed in their racial makeup. Maybe European Jews are the newcomers.

He had a far more devout upbringing than I did. He grew up in an Orthodox household, at first attending a black synagogue in Brooklyn and then a Reform temple closer to where he lives, where he later became a Hebrew school teacher. He also attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem and studied cantorial singing.

How does the group combine gospel music and Jewish songs?

Oh, that’s what Joshua’s all about. He’ll take a Jewish song with Hebrew lyrics and superimpose it on a gospel tune. We do a slow and a fast version of “Adon Olam.” “Lo Yisa Goy” he does like “Down by the Riverside.” He does “Hinei Ma Tov” like “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Everyone’s heard that song as a kid, right? I know I did. Some Jewish songs he leaves intact, he has some originals, and we do some traditional gospel songs that don’t specifically mention Jesus.

Has this work made you more connected with your own Jewishness?

I am being confronted with my Jewishness more than I have for 25 years. I’m traveling with someone who is often talking about Jewish topics and performing in synagogues and JCCs and Jewish cultural festivals. And often getting asked questions relating to being Jewish.

Also, if we are performing in a synagogue, often right on the bimah, I wear a kippah. Part of this is respect to the situation, but part of me enjoys participating in this ritual. I do try to be thankful. When I hear the words or lyrics in the liturgical songs I can relate to them in a general way. I agree with the message, even though I may see things in a slightly different way.

Does the music move you religiously?

I find the music very moving, but I don’t know that I am more moved because it is lyrically Jewish. Music is not Jewish, only the lyrics. I am moved by the music itself, the way notes and groove and expressiveness can affect your whole self.

But being in the church every week, you are watching a lot of people who have real faith. I’m envious of people who have that kind of faith. It gives them a root. With any religion you can have these ideas, but without real faith, they’re just ideas.

Do you feel like playing music gives you some ritual that might be like religion?

Oh, yes. You feel an energy that’s coming through you. Sometimes you think it’s coming from outside of you, sometimes from you…maybe it’s just simply the same adrenaline that you’d be getting at any kind of fight-or-flight situation, maybe there’s something else attached to it. I don’t worry about certain shit, I just feel lucky to be able to feel it, you know.