Ignite Second Stage: The Silver Age of American Jewish Music is Happening Now! And You're Missing It!

Sat, 06/10/2006 - 3:18pm

When: February 28, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Jewish music is exploding. Bands and labels and venues are multiplying. Rock. Hip Hop. Reggae. Punk. Klezmer. Sephardic. Choral. Jazz. Chassidic-Pop. Bible-gum. Beat Box. House. Socialist Yiddish Gothic. Indie. A revolution is happening but we're scattered across a big nation with no common media to connect us....except the net. Will it be enough? Jack Zaientz, an Ann Arbor area research scientist who blogs about contemporary Jewish Music, will introduce you to some of the most amazing new Jewish music that you've never heard.This Extended Play version of Jack's recent 5 minute Ignite Ann Arbor talk will be loaded with more music, a road-map of the contemporary Jewish Music scene, a case study in social-networking Jewish Music, and the greatest Jewish song you've never heard.

Transcript

• [00:00:22.14] SPEAKER: Please join me in welcoming Jack Zaientz.
• [00:00:27.33] JACK ZAIENTZ: Just to introduce myself, really quick, in addition to my irrelevant day job, I write, for the last three years -- I like it but it's not relevant for right now -- I write an almost daily blog on Jewish music called Teruah. I've been doing this for about three years. I came into writing that knowing absolutely nothing and now I know a, I don't know, a percentage or two more than absolutely nothing. I know maybe a little bit of what there is no about jewish music.
• [00:00:57.48] I'm not a musicologist. I'm not a musician in any useful definition of being a musician. I'm a fan with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm going to assume that everybody in the room knows something that they're interested in and they probably know more than me about it. What I hope to offer everybody today is a wide picture of something that's going on right now that I'm really excited about.
• [00:01:19.86] And I don't think people really understand the magnitude of what's going on. So if there's one argument I'm making in today's talk, something really exciting is happening and people need to know about it. Hopefully I'll be able to explain that in a lot of detail as we go.
• [00:01:35.48] I was born in 1970. Jewish music, for me, didn't exist. I could bust into Hava Nagila right now. I'll spare. I didn't spare the people at Ignite. You're already one step over them. Other than the liturgical music I sang in shul, other that Hava Nagila, other than Fiddler on the Roof. That's about it. It was pretty barren.
• [00:02:05.94] And I loved music. If there had been somebody singing about something jewish on the radio, I would have known about it. Wasn't happening. That always kind of perplexed me. All these Jews are supposed to be in the media, how come we're not doing anything Jewish? But that's the way it was.
• [00:02:23.95] When I started getting interested in Jewish music, I wasn't really expecting to find an awful lot. Boy was I wrong. So this is a brief snapshot of what's out there, which I'll expand on, this is a tag cloud, for people familiar with it, that comes from my own website. This is the stuff that I've been writing about for three years. The comparison between the last slide and this slide, I hope is a little bit striking.
• [00:02:48.65] There is an amazing amount of music being made, in a lot of different Jewish communities, in a lot of different musical forms, and for different purposes. To get that started, I'll talk about Klezmer. Klezmer is the first place people typically start when they talk about Jewish music in the United States in the last 30 years. The Klezmer music comes from 1800s Europe, through 1920s New York, through 1950s New York, through 1970s New York, and now spread around the country.
• [00:03:23.59] I'll give you an example, Klezmer's kind of a confusing topic to talk about, because it never actually really existed, but it did really exist. So there's lots of different styles of music, and different kinds of musicians that have all been clumped together into this one term Klezmer. And they never really ever were, but by clumping them we kind of get a sense of what was going on.
• [00:03:46.61] From a 2010 perspective, we could break Klezmer down into a couple of different categories. First of all, there's the shtetl band. And, by the way, Klezmer musicians will probably be really mad at me for the way I'm about to describe all of this, but they know I'm right. So there's the shtetl band. The shtetl band is a bunch of musicians who think that the music made in the Pale of Settlement in the 1800s is absolutely fabulous and needs to be preserved for the next generation. And of course they're right.
• [00:04:18.36] There are a number of wonderful, wonderful musicians and bands that are doing this all around the country, and all around the world. Here's an example of what they think the 1800s Pale of Settlement sounded like, or at least in the shtetl, as opposed to the urban centers.
• [00:04:37.36] [MUSIC]
• [00:04:56.32] You hear that wonderful mournful, almost cantorial, liturgical tone and that that nice rhythmic sound underneath. That's Klezmer focusing in on the 1800s. Then there's Klezmer coming out of the turn of the last century. This is the revival. In the 1970s a bunch of musicians started playing Klezmer music again. And they're touchstones was New York City, primarily, but also Detroit, and also Cleveland, and a bunch of other areas coming out of the 1920s.
• [00:05:37.59] [MUSIC]
• [00:05:49.72] A little more jazz into that. Almost a little bit of a big band sound. That was Shirim, a wonderful band out of Boston. Jewish music, and the Klezmer music tradition continued, picking up the latin craze of the 1950s. Just as much legitimately part of the Klezmer tradition, though not nearly as recognizable. Just to make a point, a number of the bands I'm going to play, are not from New York. It's heretical to say that, but not all Jewish music happened in New York. Not all Jews are in New York, which I'm sure at least a few people in the audience can agree with.
• [00:06:31.11] In fact, the band I'm about to play, Yiddishe Cup, is from Ohio. They play up here in Ann Arbor every year at the Arc. They put on a wonderful, wonderful show. Nothing like the first two bands. [MUSIC]
• [00:06:49.63] A bit different.
• [00:06:58.86] These guys are a Klezmer band. OK. Big big difference, but they're keying in on different parts of Jewish history. I also have to acknowledge the Simka band. I'm not going to play a particular recording, but one of the things that's happened in the last 30 years, is that we went from there not really being any place to go here Klezmer around, to basically now any urban center that has any Jews at all, is going to have at least one band that'll play your wedding, and will play Klezmer. And that's a great, great thing.
• [00:07:30.31] That picture up there is a fellow named David Marc Klein from the Heartland Klezmorim. A wonderful down from Lansing. They're available to play parties, they're fabulous. And they can do any of these things.
• [00:07:44.92] But this is a progressing out ark, right? Switching gears real quickly to something that, again, is going to sound an awful lot like and not at all like the first couple of bands. This is David Krakauer and DJ Socalled. [MUSIC]
• [00:08:17.64] What's happening now if that these bands are coming out of this trandition, taking up rock, taking up hip-hop, taking up jazz. We're going to hear a lot more of this stuff as we go forward. Clearly it's not the shtetl band, but just as much Klezmer.
• [00:08:38.60] [MUSIC]
• [00:08:41.82] The next band I'm going to play -- I'm going to skip over one to another Michigan band, there are Jews in Michigan. Red Sea Pedestrians. A lot of Klezmer music has been picked up by the world music community. Roots rock, of all types, around the world. Klezmer's fitting right into it. Red Sea Pedestrians is a wonderful roots band out of Kalamazzo. Definite Klezmer feel. A whole bunch of different approaches. They also play in Ann Arbor all the time. They were here last week, you missed them, but they'll be back.
• [00:09:20.41] One of the things that's confusing about Klezmer, though, is that Klezmer as it got defined through the Klezmer revival, tends to be very instrumental music. Clarinet, violins, cimbalom. Instrumental music. Sometimes you'll see a Klezmer band that has people singing in Yiddish, but that's kind a second stage show piece. Yiddish was a language, Klezmer is a music that sounds like a spoken language. People have been singing in that language as long as there's been a language.
• [00:09:51.10] So there's been a wide variety of musical forms coming out of the Pale of Settlement that was not specifically Klezmer, but is still being very, very actively done.
• [00:10:02.52] In fact, some of the more exciting music that's being made right now, are people who are singing in Yiddish but not to anything that sounds like Klezmer. So I'll give you an example, and once again, I am quite deliberately focusing on local folks. This is a fellow named Daniel Kahn, from Michigan.
• [00:10:22.32] [MUSIC]
• [00:10:42.66] So Daniel Kahn isn't referencing Klezmer in his music, what he's referencing is urban Yiddish, socialist, anarchist cabaret music from the Weimar 30s. He comes at it from a totally different perspective. In fact I had a wonderful conversation with him. I asked him to what degree does he considere himself a Jewish musician, and he was a little snippy with me.
• [00:11:07.58] This is fine, right, because he's coming at this, he's latched on to this form of music, both because of his own cultural history, but because he's a socialist anarchist. This is a music that speaks directly to his political and social orientation. But it's also a place where there's something that he can offer. That's one great example.
• [00:11:28.73] I'll give you a another quick example.
• [00:11:30.59] [MUSIC]
• [00:11:31.73] Notice the roots rock connection.
• [00:12:10.19] Again, Yiddish music is a much wider array of sounds. I'm going to give you one last example, and this is an album that's been, at least for a while, was on heavy rotation in my house. Tanja Solnik, this is the black album kind of in the middle, put together a wonderful album of Yiddish and Sephardic lullabies. I'll talk about Sephardic music in a moment. This is a wonderful example of Yiddish folk music.
• [00:12:39.03] [MUSIC]
• [00:13:16.33] Pale of Settlement, Ashkenazi Jewery of the 1800s has left an indelible imprint on Jewish music in the year 2010, but a defused one, right? It's broken off in lots of really different, interesting direction, but it is not the show. Or it is not the whole show of what's going on in Jewish music, by any stretch.
• [00:13:35.15] First of all, Sephardic Judaism and Sephardic culture is making a really strong cultural come back in the United States right now. Sephardic Jews are Jews from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, basically the Jews were expelled from Spain, migrating west and south in the late 1400 and 1500s.
• [00:14:01.36] A relationship, a very strong relationship, with the Ashkenazi Jewery of Eastern Europe, but very, very different culture. And very, very different music. Also the the Mizrahi Jews, which is the further group, now we're talking the eastern Mediterranean, Jordan, Libya, Israel, Egypt along the middle eastern route. Again, absolute normative Judaism, but very different cultural basis than the Ashkenazi Jewery, as can be shown in their music.
• [00:14:38.78] I'm going to play a couple of different clips. I'm going to start off with one of my personal favorite albums, which is the up at the top far right corner by a group of called Pharoah's Daughter, this is a Mizrah-influenced track.
• [00:14:52.04] [MUSIC]
• [00:15:40.70] So Mizrahi Judaism has a very much Arab flavor, in the language, in the music. Going back to the Spanish Sephardic music, here's a wonderful example of an indie-pop band out of New York, we'll give New York, that picks up on the Sephardic music. You'll hear a romantic lyricism that you don't hear in Ashkenazi.
• [00:16:08.61] [MUSIC]
• [00:16:41.38] The one last group that I want to talk about really quickly, which is a kind of a secondary offshoot of the Sephardic community is the Latino Jewish community. Which isn't always Sephardic, but often associates itself was Sephardic Judaism, the Sephardic jewish community. Understand as Jews were expelled from Spain, some of them got on the boat to the new world, right? Brazil, United States, lots of North and South American countries had strong Sephardic populations long before they had any Ashkenazic Jewish populations.
• [00:17:14.15] In fact, I was having a nice email discussion with a cantor in Brazil last week, who was basically explaining to me how Brazil was founded by Jews. And anybody who tells you otherwise, doesn't know the history properly. Yes, the ships were Portuguese, but that doesn't mean there were that many Portuguese on the ships.
• [00:17:30.67] And so, because of this is, there's been a long tradition of South American and Central American Jews who have their own culture, not necessarily as well-defined in many cases, and a lot of cases it's actually submerged and hidden. Their own families don't talk about it much. We can have a discussions at some other point about the whole Converso tradition, but here's a great example of a L.A. based Latino Jewish group.
• [00:17:57.98] This is not a nice, friendly, lyrical group, these guys are hip-hop, they are sarcastic, they are great fun.
• [00:18:07.30] [MUSIC]
• [00:18:47.37] First thought here is that the Ashkenazi Jewish experience in Jewish music is amazing and wonderful, but it's one narrow slice of what's going on in the musical landscape right now. So moving past Sephardic and Mizrahi, I'm going to take a step back from these cultural splits and talk about high brow versus low brow music.
• [00:19:07.91] To some degree, all of what we just heard is low brow stuff. Right? We're talking folk music, we're talking about hip-hop, we're talking things that are more popular culture as opposed to high art culture. But Jewish music has got a very strong activity in higher culture, and always has. Two pivotal points in that, over the last ten years, have been the Radical Jewish Culture label, and the Milken Archive of Jewish Music.
• [00:19:34.14] So the Radical Jewish Culture is a record imprint put out by jazz saxophone player John Zorn. John Zorn is almost the definition of avante guard jazz. In fact, he's so avante guard that half the time when he's playing it doesn't sound like jazz, that's I you know he's avante guard.
• [00:19:52.78] A while ago, he got religion. Not necessarily in a religious sense, but he started, for a variety of reasons, becoming more interested in his own Jewish past and his own Jewish culture. And put his money where is thoughts were. And started doling out chunks of money to musical groups, to put out a Jewish album and to push the bounds of what Jewish music could sound like an should sound like.
• [00:20:18.86] At this point, there's well over a hundred albums. I have yet to hear one that isn't outstanding. I don't like them all equally, you know, I have my own taste in music. But they're all phenomenal. So I'm going to give you a couple brief clips of what John Zorn thinks.
• [00:20:36.63] We're going to start with one of my personal favorites. I'll betray my own background is listening to a lot of punk music in this.
• [00:20:44.20] [MUSIC]
• [00:20:45.69]
• [00:20:52.76] This is a band called [? Kut Karez ?].
• [00:20:53.59] [MUSIC]
• [00:21:11.17] And a nice counterpoint to that, here's more of a spoken word performance kind of sound. Shelley Hirsch.
• [00:21:17.87] [MUSIC]
• [00:21:18.53]
• [00:21:52.46] This is a group called Bar Kokhba playing some of John Zorn's compositions. He himself has composed now almost 300 different pieces on Jewish themes.
• [00:22:06.29] [MUSIC]
• [00:22:20.21] So the avant guard crowd has picked up on Jewish music in a big way more. There's more of these records coming out all of the time. I get emails on a regular basis from these folks about new stuff coming out. It's truly, truly a staggering amount of new cultural material being put out.
• [00:22:38.33] The Milken Archive has a slightly different take on this. While they're encouraging of new work, and I'm going to play you in a moment of an example, what they are trying to do is catalog and inventory the output of jewish classical music over the last hundred years. This is not a small undertaking. They have 300 recordings out at this point, something along there.
• [00:23:01.15] I keep getting an advertisement here to buy all 300 in one big block. I'm this close. I actually already have 30 of them, so it's harder still. They are one by one -- these are all new recordings. These are all new performances of music over the last hundred years. Some brand new music some older pieces. This is a personal favorite of mine by a composer named Ofer Ben-Amots.
• [00:23:30.83] [MUSIC]
• [00:24:11.89] Here I'm going to play you one other one. A track from the album Jewish Music of the Dance. This track it from a suite called the Man from Midian by Stefan Wolpe, I believe was the composer.
• [00:24:25.45] [MUSIC]
• [00:25:13.45] To kind of close this off, I have to talk about jazz. So John Zorn, jazz musician, but his label isn't particularly focussed on jazz, though it offers a lot. We talked a little bit about some of the art music, the classical music repertoire, that's growing and developing. The jazz music scene is exploding as well. There are countless jazz groups that are bringing in Jewish themes at one level or another across the United States.
• [00:25:42.39] I'm going to show you two quick examples of some of the their output. First one of the great Klezmer / jazz musicians is a trumpet player named Frank London, who has played here in the area many times. This is a group of his called Hasidic New Wave. He has about five groups, this is one of them.
• [00:26:05.66] [MUSIC]
• [00:27:04.66] I'm going to play you one more example and this is one of my personal favorites. So, in addition to Frank London, who is part of the more organized avante guard jazz community, one of my favorite Jewish jazz musicians is a fellow named David Chevan, out of Connecticut, which is where I grew up. A little nod to my home town. He has a wonderful band call the Afro-Semitic Experience, where he had and a fellow named Warren Byrd, who's a keyboard player, have done an amazing job on fusing Jewish and African musical traditions. While I absolutely adore their musical output, even more I love David Chevan's solo work, which still plays for the same group but where David really is able to bring forth his Jewish experience even more.
• [00:27:56.77] So now I'm going to pick one at random because I forgot which one I was going to pick. But here's an example of David Chevan's work from his Yizkor Suite.
• [00:28:04.54] [MUSIC]
• [00:28:42.85] High art is booming, right? From the avante guard to the jazz to the classical, more and more Jewish musicians, and more and more labels, and more and more venues, are bringing forth the Jewish cultural experience onto the main stage, the high art stages.
• [00:29:03.17] And again, that's not the end of the story, though. So we've had low art, we've had high art, now the no art scene. The downtown scene. The rock club, the folk club. What's going on, on the streets. The people who aren't deliberately tying themselves to any particular tradition, but want to go out, have a few beers, play a few songs, and makes the music happen. This is, for the record where I come from.
• [00:29:28.09] I spent an awful lot of my life hanging out in bars, with beers, listening to great bands that no one else will ever hear of because the band will break up the next day. That's my favorite style of music. If a band has been around for two albums I'm already starting to worry that they've sold out.
• [00:29:43.50] Here are a couple of wonderful examples of current bands who are coming at pop music from a Jewish experience of one kind or another. The first one that I'm going to place is a wonderful punk group out of Boston, called the Shondes. The Shondes are, if you know Yiddish, Shondes is a disgrace. They're very proud of it right. Shondes basically thumb their nose at pretty much everything that high art, mainstream Judaism would say is the importance stuff. They're gay. They're political. They don't like Israel, particularly. At least they're particularly against the Israeli government.
• [00:30:27.81] They've got a lot to say and they say it really eloquently when they get going. They're also wonderful people, if you ever get a chance to meet them. This is a song specifically coming from that perspective. It's called I Saw the Temple Fall.
• [00:30:42.78] [MUSIC]
• [00:31:21.11] Now imagine hearing them in a small club in Ypsilanti, the volume cranked up to ten, with the crowd just slam dancing, going crazy and that was me about a year ago seeing them. You should all have been there, because it was a fabulous show. But they'll be back, they promised me. Fabulous, fabulous folks.
• [00:31:38.92] So the next one I want you to hear, is the band in the lower left corner, Sway Machinery. Jeremiah Lockwood, the guy who's got the guitar and the mic there. Grandson of a cantor. Grew up loving and listening to Delta blues, as much as to his grandfather seeing cantoral music. Started a very promising career playing Delta blues guitar, he's wonderfully good. And somewhere along the lines made the connection that his own musical tradition, his grandfather's musical tradition, somehow was getting shut out when he was just playing the Delta blues and something was missing. So this is what happens when a Delta blues guy, who's the grandson of a cantor, figures on how to put them together.
• [00:32:21.04] [MUSIC]
• [00:32:32.54]
• [00:33:12.57] The thing that I always find amazing I when I listen is how absolutely effortless the connection is between the two musical forms. This is another one of my heavy rotation bands. So I've had lots of chance to listen to them. And a lot of times fusion music, to me, comes off tasting bad. I can get somebody who plays a gypsy violin, playing with somebody who plays something like a jazz saxophone and the combination is less than the individual musics are.
• [00:33:47.32] When fusion's done right, as in what we were just hearing, it just sounds inevitable. It doesn't sound like a fusion music anymore, it's just that's the way the music works and comes out. It takes somebody like a Jeremiah Lockwood to show us the inevitability of those connections.
• [00:34:05.40] I'm going to skip Girls in Trouble, just because I don't want to play everything. But I do want to say that Girls in Trouble will be playing here in a couple of weeks. So there's another great band you should hear. But I want to jump right to the last one, Hebrew School. This is a fellow named David Griffin, who is the guitar play and trumpet player here on the track. They're fascinating because he comes from a whole other world, as far as I'm concerned.
• [00:34:30.59] He plays, when he's not playing this, he plays in a faux french pop band. For him, the best music ever written was written in the 1960s, the kind of 1960s mod, bubble gum music that most of us are embarrassed to know about. But he hears that, and for me when he curates it, and he sent me a mix of some of his favorite stuff, I'm like this is amazing. How come I had no idea? But, oh yeah, because I'm a loser, that's why.
• [00:34:59.58] You know, we all come at this with our our own musical biasis. You just heard mine. My vice is all that stuff is really weak and mediocre. And he showed me exactly how much of an idiot I was. Which, realistically, is not hard to do. This is what happens when he takes on Jewish music.
• [00:35:19.77] [MUSIC]
• [00:36:27.59] The joy and the beauty in that just kills me, and partially because fo how surprising I said, for me, it is. That that particular musical perspective can just come alive in that way. So to close out talking about some popular music, I want to mention really quickly something that I referred to as fringe. I have to explain this, because these are not musicians who are on the fringe in any normal sense.
• [00:36:58.57] What I mean by the fringe, these are all pop musicians, is there's this world of Jewish music, and people who know that they're playing Jewish music, and want to go see Jewish music and hear Jewish music. Then there's mainstream pop, America pop, you know Beyonce. Whoever the latest top of the charts is. These worlds don't overlap all that much. The four bands that I played on the last slide. None of them are going after Beyonce's slot as top pop.
• [00:37:29.50] There absolutely play on stages with non-Jewish pop bands. They wouldn't ever develop an audience if they -- our community, at this point, is just not large enough. One of the reasons why I'm standing here it to help grow that. They're coming at it from a very specific Jewish perspective. Every once in awhile, in the history of Jewish music in the United States, we hit a bubble where Jewish musicians are comfortable being Jewish on stage.
• [00:37:57.89] I never begrudge anybody their stage performance. This is all this theater. Doesn't matter what kind of music you're doing, what kind of performance you're doing, when you get up on stage it's theater.
• [00:38:09.38] No one's asked you to bring your home culture, your home religion, your home perspective on to the stage. You're doing a show. So I don't begrudge a Jewish musician who gets up on a pop stage and doesn't ever mentions that they're Jewish. That's just not part of their theater.
• [00:38:24.47] But, every once in awhile, we get a bubble where we get a bunch musicians who feel comfortable and strongly enough that they actually do that. A lot of people remember, are p;d enough to remember when Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Bette Midler were very comfortable being Jewish on stage. They're also very comfortable recording Christmas albums. Theater. They're allowed their theater. They sold a bunch of albums. They were great albums.
• [00:38:47.55] I grew up in the 1970s. I didn't want hear Barbra Streisand, I didn't want to hear Neil Diamond. I have since learned that Neil Diamond is, in fact, amazing. But it took me 30 year before I was able to publicly acknowledge that. I still haven't gotten that with Barbra, but that's alright.
• [00:39:04.78] Right now, we're in one of those bubbles again. And it's happening for a lot of reasons. But the important thing is that we've got musicians on the pop scene who are unrepentant pop musicians, who are being Jewish in public. And letting that influence their music.
• [00:39:19.03] So Matisyahu, obviously, is probably the best known, best recognized for this. For people in the audience who haven't had a chance to hear of him, he is an Chassidic Jew. He does reggae, and hip hop music. He is phenomenally talented. One of the songs was just used as the unofficial theme song of the Winter Olympics by NBC, the television station that filmed it. He's making lots and lots of headlines.
• [00:39:47.50] A slightly lesser known, but equally talented musician, is Regina Spektor. She is a cabaret piano player style pop musician. She comes from Russian Ashkenazi Jewish stock. And she is a fascinating example of somebody who doesn't wear it on her sleeve -- Matisyahu, you take one look at him, you're, like, OK, he's Jewish. It's no question. Regina has every opportunity to not make a big issue of it, and makes a big issue of it anyway. I want to show you a video of hers from a recent songs, just to give you an idea of how somebody who doesn't have to be Jewish on stage is anyway.
• [00:40:26.88] [MUSIC]
• [00:43:38.58] OK, so that's half way there. This is a wonderful religious themed video, that has actually taken a lot of the religious community, both christian and jewish, by storm. In fact, I've been interested to see exactly how many -- if you start looking around for information on this song, how many times it turns up in Christian Pastor's sermons. It's kind of an interesting perspective. How Jewish is Jewish?
• [00:44:05.26] This is Regina Spektor, on stage at one of her concerts, last year, blowing the shofar, the day before Rosh Hashanah.
• [00:44:35.73] If I was 18 years old, and I knew there was a musician out there, named Regina Spektor, who's playing before Rosh Hashanah and is going to be blowing the shofar, I would have driven hours to see that concert. I drove hours for much less, lots of hours for much less. I think 17 was my record for one show. They were a good band.
• [00:45:02.37] For me, the amazing thing is that were at one of those bubbles right now. Not just Yiddish folk, not just these [UNINTELLIGIBLE], not the high art music. But the pop musicians are starting to make an issue of it, and starting to be bery comfortable with it. I knew I was on to this when my brother, who's not a Jewish music fan, even in the slightes, even remotely, even accidentally. Called me up, he's actually a Phish fan. If you guys know the band Phish, they just pulled the curtains on themselves recently. They were kind of the replacement for the Grateful Dead. They were a big guitar jam band.
• [00:45:38.33] My brother, who's seen them a dozen times in concert, called me up on his way home from concerts to tell me that they just played Avinu Malkeinu. And they meant it. It wasn't a joke. Like toward the end of the set. When they were loose and winding down, and getting into a more serious mode in the show, they took one of the deepist Jewish prayers and did a jam band version of it on stage, and meant it.
• [00:46:04.30] Something's happening in the zeitgeist when that starts to happen. So this has all been popular music, folk music. But jewish music is religious, too. Judaism is a religion, it's not just a culture. Depending on who you are one is more important then the other. I kind of stand firmly planted in both.
• [00:46:25.22] Another big mainstain of Jewish music, another big bubble that's happening right now, is the songleader community. Jewish liturgy has changed, grown a lot over the last couple of decades. Not that any of the classic liturgy has gone away, but there's a lot of new contenders for the top slot of how Jews should be praying. Probably the most notable is the reformed songleader community.
• [00:46:53.17] And it's not strictly reformed. There are conservative and orthodox musicians who are involved in this, but it's predominantly reformed, for a variety of reasons. Which are a great discussion for later on. I'm to give you a couple examples, I'm being sneaky about this, I'm being publicly sneaky. Specific ones that I'm taking, are actually going to be playing here at the Jewish Music Festival in Detroit in two weeks.
• [00:47:19.31] So this is Rabbi Joe Black, who is a wonderful, wonderful musician and song writer, you'll hear in a second. This is a Michigan, remember I said Jewish music actually does happen here in Michigan. [? Jillian Sterling, ?] she is not as much of a liturgical songwriter, as much as a family folk songwriter, but a wonderful musician in her own right. I'll play you a couple quick examples of this.
• [00:47:43.83] I realize it's getting onto two, I'm taking a little longer than I had meant. I'll try to speed things up a little bit. So here's something from Rabbi Joe Black from a few years ago.
• [00:47:57.79] [MUSIC]
• [00:48:09.42] It's important when you hear this to understand, he doesn't want you to clap, he wants you to sing.
• [00:48:14.45] [MUSIC]
• [00:48:46.51] So I want you to imagine, someone standing at the front of temple, playing guitar and singing that way. If you haven't actually been to that experience, you come to Temple Beth Emeth, on a regular basis, particularly when they do Friday Night Live, Shabbat Live. What's the actual phrase that -- Shabbat Alive, you'll get a whole prayer service exactly like that.
• [00:49:09.71] And that kind of a prayer servive, led like that, is becoming more and more common across the reform community. Not in exclusion of traditional liturgy, but as a supplement to it. Depending on what temple you're at, one or the other maybe by vying for prominence. And there's a whole history where this came out of. It came out of the reform summer camp movement, it came out of influences of Hasidic [? Lubavian ?]. It's really taking the liturgical world by storm.
• [00:49:35.20] I'm going to give you one more example, just because it's one of my personal favorites. This Is Craig Taubman's Romemu, which is the melody that is used a TBE all the time. This is the music for taking out the Ark. If you can think of a more jouful way to do it, I'd like to hear it.
• [00:49:57.81] [MUSIC]
• [00:50:08.54] Imagine a whole line of people carrying the Torah around the temple, singing this.
• [00:50:15.87] [MUSIC]
• [00:50:23.92] I get a lot of practice with that one. I still don't sing well, but I get a lot of practice. So the reform songleader movement is another big, big anchor point in Jewish music right now. But even it doesn't hold a candle to the orthodox Chassidic music community.
• [00:50:41.83] This is the one of the things that took me by total surprise when I got started writing and learning about Jewish music, because I'm not orthodox or Chassid. If you're not Orthodox or Chassid, you probably don't know very many people who are Orthodox and Chassid. You probably don't go to very many events or services that are in the those communities, and so what's going on in those communities can be surprising when you start getting into it.
• [00:51:08.71] Sometimes the communities are referred to as being insular and I think that's totally unfair. I'm using the term because I want to make sure everyone understands that it's not true. It's not, in any sense, insularity, it's the sense that they just are under the radar of most American Jews, because we are much more focused on mainstream media and larger American culture. And these guys are much more focus on their own internal groups. They're defining their own culture on a daily basis. And, boy, do they go out at it with gusto.
• [00:51:40.73] I could give a two hour talk just on all the variance and energy going on in that community and still not have nearly enough time. So let me give you a couple quick examples. This is an example of Shiny Shoes.
• [00:52:01.54] Imagine a bunch of guys in black hats, up on stage, looking disturbingly like a 1970s lounge act. That's what this would look like. They're very serious about it. This is what Hasidic and Orthodox music on the big stage looks like right now. [MUSIC]
• [00:52:22.57]
• [00:52:38.37] It's sort of like the French pop music, where I was, like, you're kidding me, when I first learned about it. The more I've listened to it, the more I've gotten addicted to it. A lot of the Jewish music I get because people have mailed it to me. These guys don't mail me much, but I bought a ton of it. You can ask my daughters, they have to listen to it way more than they probably want to. At least more than they'll admit to liking it.
• [00:53:09.33] So I mentioned Shlomo Carlebach, a moment ago, big Hasidic rabbi in the 70s and 80s, introduces whole 1970s folk music to the Hasidic community. He has since passed on, but there is a whole generation of musicians that are following after him. Yehuda Green, who's the second one there. This is a great example of neo-Carlebach folk music approach.
• [00:53:37.80] [MUSIC]
• [00:53:41.77] The Orthodox and the Chassidic communities, they've got pop bands, boys choirs, which are absolutely fascinating. This is what happens in a community where women aren't allowed to sing in public, and you've got to really well-organized boys schools, the Yeshivas, the religious schools. What you end up with is a community that has very, very popular boys choirs, both in terms of all boys on stage singing, but also of a lot of the best of the boys end up singing along with the Shiny Shoes' musicians, acting to get you a wider vocal range.
• [00:54:24.16] You've got the adult baritone or tenor singing with it a 15 year old soprano. You get a very interesting musical sound.
• [00:54:33.19] Cantorial. In the conservative and reformed movements, when we say cantors, there's almost quotes around it. The cantors don't often sing in what would be considered a classing cantorial style. They're performing the function, they're singing, they're leading the communities. But there's a defined style. In the Hasidic world that still exists.
• [00:54:54.54] By the way, this is Blue Fringe, a modern Orthodox pop band. Cantorial is alive and well in those communities. Big barrel chested guys belting it out and in full operatic style. And they can pack Madison Square Gardens, and they do. All of these things pack Madison Square Garden. I don't mean that as hyperbole. That's a standard place that gets rented out for these shows.
• [00:55:26.30] one Of these days I'm going to go to one, because I really, really have come to love this music. I just haven't had opportunity yet. Almost there with the music, and then we'll be wrapping this up. Tow last bits.
• [00:55:39.38] One, kind of closing off American Jewish music, family music is always been pivotal. This is the music that if you walk into your average Judaica shop, whether it's at Temple Beth Emeth, at Beth Israel, you go to the suburbs of Detroit into a Judaica shop, this is what's going to be on the shelves.
• [00:56:01.02] What we're talking about is Jewish American lifestyle, and life cycle. Talking about kids albums. We're talking about wedding music. We're talking about Hanukkah music. Purim, there is Purim music. What's been amazing is, this is always been out there. Every few years a few new albums have come out, it's rotating. But the amount of new material that's coming out over the last few years, it's just staggering.
• [00:56:28.16] Including stuff of really high production value, and really high songwriting quality. So I'm going to point to two or three here I think hit a particular node. Oy baby at the top right hand corner, absolutely fabulous pair of kids albums. The producer got two sisters, awesome voices, to record a whole bunch of Jewish music. And this was standard rotation in my car for about four years. I could probably listen to every song on there, and I still like them. For me, that's the testament of a good kids album. Is that as the adult, I still like it. I could tell you have not always the case
• [00:57:06.79] By the way, Jewish kids music is not a just in New York. The photo in the bottom right some of you may recognize, this is Gemini, there Ann Arbor, two brothers, fabulous. If you ever get a chance to see them, do. They don't sing strictly Jewish music. They do a lot of secular folk music. They're wonderful no matter what they're doing. It's one of those kids of all ages things, I fully qualify as a kid of all ages so I get to say that.
• [00:57:35.62] Holiday music, I'm going to crank up one of my daughter's favorite songs. Eva, this one's for you. So this is Aaron Baron Cohen. This album right here, which is a fabulous jazz, hip-hop, electronica Hannukah album that came out last year. got a fellow named Y-Love, who is a Orthodox Jewish hip-hop musician singing.
• [00:58:04.86] [MUSIC]
• [00:59:05.32] Again, we've been doing this kind of music for a long time. Judaica stores have always been well-stocked, if you want to walk in and get a Hannukah album, they're there. But the quality of the performancs, the production and the songwriting has just gone up astronomically in the last 10 years. There's always been a couple of really outstanding albums. Now it's becoming hard to find ones aren't outstanding albums.
• [00:59:30.83] We're on this rising bubble. And the last slide of the music, before I get to my pitch, you're going to be pitched to to in a minute. Brace yourselves. Is israel. You can't talk about American Jewish music without mentioning Israel. It's not American Jewish music, but the connection between American Jews and Israel is deep in a lot of different levels and American Jews are listening to Israeli music. If you go to a Jewish music festival there's going to be Israeli musicians or Israeli music being performs. It's just part of the cultural landscaping, and the cultural zeitgeist. I can't go through all of the amazing Israeli bands, there's not nearly time. And I can't go through all the styles. Every style you've heard me talk about here, also exists in Israel. Plus a whole bunch more stuff that hasn't made it across yet.
• [01:00:21.51] These are just a couple of my personal favorite musicians. On the top left, you've got David Broza, who I actually saw for the first time at Seattle Jewish Musical Fest, about 10 years ago. Frank Chillik, who's a Klezmer clarinet player. In israel, Klezmer does not mean all what I was talking about earlier. So as I was saying about different terminology. The word Klezmer, or what's associated with Klezmer musician is totally different. Overlapping, but different.
• [01:00:46.70] Noa. Bottom right. Who is right now probably the leading ticket sales of any is Israeli music performer. She just got be out on the Eurovision song contest this past year. Israel was heart broken. And at the top right, I'm going to play you a quick track. This is one of my absolute favorite Israeli bands. They're called Hadag Nachash, which roughly translates to snake fish. They're a hip hop group, and the reason why I want you hear it, is they're a great example of what happens when Israelis take on An american form. It sounds the same, but not. It's a good example.
• [01:01:23.40] And then we're going to get to the pitch. If you know the Hebrew, all of the expressions come from bumper stickers that you would see in Israel. I don't know the Hebrew, but this is what I'm told.
• [01:01:40.65] [MUSIC]
• [01:02:13.39] I love -- remember we were talking about the Mizrahi music, which has a deep connection to Arabic music. You can hear that flowing underneath the more American, urban, hip hop vocals. I remember back, this shows you my age, back when rap and hip hop just first burst on to the cultural landscape. There was a big argument in that community about whether there should be a Grammy for rap music.
• [01:02:36.22] And a lot of people in the rap community said there shouldn't be, because it's a vocal form, it's not a musical form. You can rap over any music, therefor how could you have a rap grammy? They lost. There ended up being one. But this is a great example, where they're taking a particular vocal form and putting it over local music.
• [01:02:53.27] So I hope that over the last hour, I have kind of given you a road map. I haven't shown you 1/10 of the great stuff that's going on out there, but there's just so much amazing music coming from so many different angles right now, that we really are on a wonderful bubble that I am calling, and I've gotten some other people in the community to refer to, as the Silver Age of Jewish music. Saying that it's the Silver Age kind of asks the question, how come it's not a golden age?
• [01:03:22.35] So I'm going to wrap up in a couple more slides, and I'm going to explain to you why it's not the golden age, and point you toward how I think it can become a golden age. Because you all need to help.
• [01:03:34.54] First of all, when was the golden age of Jewish American music? It was that, right? It was the tenemants, it was the 1920s. It was the great wave of immigration into New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Vancouver, Montreal. And Jews were living in tight quarters, Ashkenazi Jews were living in tight quarters. And the result of living in tight quarters is that you had amazing cultural dynamics. A people who are desperately trying to hold on to their cultural identity that they brought, at the same time trying to radically assimilate to the new world that they found themselves.
• [01:04:06.95] There was a study done once about the rate of time of which it emigrating communities lost their native language and adopted English as the dominant language. The [? Yiddishkeit ?] kind beat out everybody in terms of how fast Askenazi Jews got rid of Yiddish. Almost immediately when they got here. It was amazing.
• [01:04:29.50] My grandparents, who spoke Yiddish, refused to teach my parents Yiddish and would only sort of acknowledge that they spoke Yiddish in my presence. But while this was happening, there was this amazing sense of possibility. There was a new world. There's a lot of energy. You had amazing bands playing the old world music while incorporating it into the new world music, and it created this wonderful dynamic where everybody was listening to music.
• [01:05:02.50] And not just music. They were going to theater, there were Yiddish theaters, there were Yiddish radio stations, there were newspapers. This was all in a couple of blocks. We still have a wonderful Yiddish newspaper in the United States, but we have one. In the 1920s, there'd be one on every block. And so everybody was tightly wrapped in their local communities, and because of that word of mouth spread that there's a new band, a new thing going on. Everybody knew about it immediately.
• [01:05:28.02] This was the defining culture. It wasn't a secondary thing in their lives. But that's gone. We don't live in that world anymore, and we haven't lived in that world for almost a hundred years, at this point. We don't, as American Hews, have that kind of defining culture. We are much muh more part of the old global American culture.
• [01:05:50.56] For me, growing up this was critically true. I grew up in a small forest town in Connecticut. The nearest synagogue was twenty minutes and we went all the time. I didn't actually get along with most of the kids there. I didn't have much of a Jewish community, but even talking to my family and friends who grew up in suburbs that were definingly Jewish, their experience wasn't all that much different than mine.
• [01:06:12.78] They went to a lot more Bar Mitzvahs than I did. And they actually liked the kids at the Bar Mitzvahs more than I did. But in terms of feelings that they were jewish on a daily basis, and being surrounded by a Jewish culture on a daily basis, not so much. Not in that kind of sense.
• [01:06:31.54] Now that isn't true everywhere. Rememeber what I said about the Orthodox Chassidic communities. They never lost that, that's what defines them, in fact. Is that they push the rest of the U.S. away as much as they can possibly do, to hold onto that sense of tight community. It's partially based on religious orientation. There's whole sets of religious rules that if they were to follow, they need to be able to push the rest of the world away.
• [01:06:55.72] But also it's helped preserve, deliberately to preserve, that sense of tight community. They're very, very conscious of that. And very successful at it. Jewish music didn't die, I don't want to give you that opinion, that somehow around 1935 Jewish got wiped off the map and wasn't reinvented until yesterday. That's certainly not true. In the 1950s and 60s, there was Jewish music but it was marginalized. It was self-referential.
• [01:07:23.11] While there were a couple of bright spots, there wasn't much going on. As the great Catskills resorts started to close up, the whole notion of Jewish entertainment started to die. You had a couple of interesting albums pop up, the Latin Jewish craze of the 50s. Desi Arnaz, all of that kind of stuff. But not a lot.
• [01:07:43.48] It started to rebound in the 70s. The 70s is when the Klezmer revival hit. When people like Henry Sapoznik started to dig into the dust bins, literally into the dust bins, to pull out old 78s, and to try to find the few remaining musicians who had actually played with the musicians of the 20s, to try to rebuild the knowledge of that cultural landscape.
• [01:08:04.83] You had people like Shlomo Carlebach putting a whole bunch of new energy into the Chassidic community, with his folk style. Debbie Friedman, helping to kick off the songleader movement, that I mentioned. And then you had, coming up later, folks like the Diaspora Shiva band and Flory Jagoda.
• [01:08:22.14] Flory is a Sephardic Jew from the Balkans who help put a lot -- composing new materials in the Sephardic tradition. And folks like her, and the Diaspora Shiva band and were able to making things happen because of the World Music movement of the 80s. In the 80s we reached this point where all of a sudden, the music industry was globalized. If you were a local band from Spain, Ireland, wherever, it wasn't good enough to be the best band there, you were now competing on a world stage.
• [01:08:52.83] And if you sounded just like the band in New York, you were going to always lose to the band in New York. So the whole idea of world music had nothing to do with, let's -- it's music industry was not all about let's honor local traditions, at all. It was all about musicians being able to market themselves. If you were a rock band who played with a Spanish sound, cool, nobody in New York is doing that. You now get a place on the main stage.
• [01:09:16.51] In fact, if you go into Borders, or if you go into any music store, and look for Jewish music, 100% guaranteed it's all going to be in the world music category. Unles you happen to be in one of the few that actually has a religious, Christian and Jewish, section. It'll always be in the world music community and that's why.
• [01:09:33.93] So that get us back to now, but like I said, growing up up in middle America, I didn't know anything about it. For me jewish music and mainstream media was Adam Sandler singing the Hanukkah Song. Wooh00. Great song, I don't want to knock it, but that was about it.
• [01:09:47.91] The internet's help change all of this, because now distance doesn't matter. I can go out and find things that aren't in my local community. I can go out and go get stuff. This is why my blog is possible. My blog wouldn't have been possible pre-internet. I couldn't have written a weekly column in a newspaper 15 years ago that does what my blog does, because I wouldn't be able to find out about all of the stuff. Because while there is Jewish music going on in Michigan, lots of, it most of it isn't. Michigan's just one corner of all of this.
• [01:10:22.50] That's a word of mouth problem. If we don't have a big mainstream media, which we don't. Unfortunately, Jewish media such as it is, I'm talking about things like the Forward Moment magazine, typically are aimed at an older population. Not a 20 old right. As a 20 role year old, I would never have read those -- they're great magazines, newspapers, but I wouldn't have read them. And they don't typically look at new hip interesting things going on, because that's typically not that age demographic is interested in. That age demographic tends to be interested in politics, in the politics of religion, than it is about the latest indie pop band coming on.
• [01:11:03.32] That's not a bad thing, it's just -- you're not going to find out by reading the Moment. At least not up until very recently. But your friends can tell you. The great thing about the internet and social networks is my friends do tell me. And I tell them.
• [01:11:16.72] So this is me coming back from Daniel Kahn show, remember he was the Yiddish socialis anarchist that I mentioned earlier. He's from Michigan. He actually lives in Germany now, but he comes back and plays all the time. And so I came back to tell everybody on facebook that I'm friends with about what an amazing show it was. Two of the people who responded that they like the show, where people from my Jewish music scene.
• [01:11:39.52] They already like Daniel Kahn, they alread knew about him. But two of the people are friends of mine from college who had never heard of him, never would've heard of them but now know of. Do they like him? Are they going to go see him in a show? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. But they know about him now.
• [01:11:54.80] That;s the thing. Media is about having people know stuff. If you don't know it, you can't act on it.
• [01:12:03.68] Two great examples of bands trying to make people know about it that happened. So Stereo Sinai and Can Can. Stereo Sinai, Chicago. Almost local, they qualify in my world. Bible Gum Pop. That's what they refer to themselves as. They get on social networks, they talk to people and they're making stuff happened. They got hooked up with an Israeli charity, Pioneers for a Cure, got a track on their CDs.
• [01:12:34.12] All of this happened by word of mouth. Each place where they are connecting, or telling people about it. They talk to me, I tell people through my blog, and people are getting to know about them.
• [01:12:44.70] Can Can, punk band from Atlanta. Patrick starts at weekly video blog, called Punk Torah. He gives a Dvar Torah every week. This is a punk band, and he's giving a Dvar Torah every week. The word of mouth starts to build. He gets connected with the Jewlicious Festival. His group gets flown out to California last week to play at the premiere Jewish concert series for the 20 to 30 olds out of L.A. A fabulous concert series.
• [01:13:20.92] Importantly, they're telling us about all of the stuff. Which leads to me, andn to you. Because I write a blog, I find out about this stuff. My only reason for doing this blog is to help tell people about this stuff. I mean, me learning about it is great, but I can do that without writing a blog. For me, it's all about telling people. Because if we want the silver age turn into a golden age, we need to have people know.
• [01:13:46.40] So my parting shot to everybody here is, go buy a Cd, if you heard one that you like. Go to a concert. There happens to be -- it just so happens that the Jewish Music Fest in Detroit is in two weeks. There are flyers at the door,
• [01:14:02.76] Rabbi Joe Black, that I played, is going to be there. Matisyahu won't be there in person, but he will be playing in New York. We're going to get a satellite feed of the show, so if you come to the music fest, you get to see him and actually email and talk back and forth with him through a satellite feed.
• [01:14:20.18] You can go online and hear -- there's internet radio stations from all over the world. From South America, from Israel. I was talking to some folks from ChaiFM, which is a 24 hour Jewish radio station out of Johannesburg, South Africa, just this week. All of this is available.
• [01:14:36.20] So if you heard anything that you thought was interesting, anything that you liked, just go out and look for that one thing. But even more important than that is tells someone. There's great stuff happening, but nobody knows. Not nearly enough people know. Just go tell somebody that you came to the talk, say that you heard some stuff that sounded interesting and maybe they would like it. Send them to my blog, or not, send them to somewhere else, or not. Just tell people this stuff is going on, because that's how we make this into a golden age. Thank you.
• [01:15:11.73] SPEAKER: Anyone have any questions for Jack?
• [01:15:27.47] JACK ZAIENTZ: If you grab, so I mentioned informally before, I'll mention it formally now, I made a cheat sheet of todays talk. Every band that I mentioned is listed on here, and the very first thing that's listed is the address of my blog. So you can get in touch with me or look at it. They're over by the door. Any other questions? Sure.
• [01:15:53.89] SPEAKER: In the spirit of your talk, I want to let people know that Saturday, March 20, an Israeli born clarinetist, Anat Cohen will be at Twin Fellows Jazz Club in Detroit.
• [01:16:03.06] JACK ZAIENTZ: Awesome
• [01:16:03.51] SPEAKER: She [? used to play ?] with Django Reinhardt. She's one of the rising stars of jazz right now. She moved from Israel, Tel Aviv, to Brooklyn and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Her brother is a trumper player and they play Jewish composed music combined with a jazz.
• [01:16:28.31] JACK ZAIENTZ: That's cool. What was her name? Anat Cohen. Great, thank you. Because one of the things I do on my blog, is I try to publicize Michigan and upper midwest Jewish music events. That will go right on my list, so I appreciate that thanks.
• [01:16:48.45] SPEAKER: I just watned to mention that many of the people that you referred to here have appeared at the music festivals at the JCC in Detroit. That;s the quality of --
• [01:17:00.16] JACK ZAIENTZ: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mentioned at one point earlier, and I'll mention again, that Ann Arbor is a great place to hear Jewish music. With the venues like the Arc, the University music series, and the whole set of jazz and rock clubs that are playing in the area. There's a steady stream of events for me to go to, so many that I actually don't get to go to all of them. Which is really sad.
• [01:17:23.70] I missed the Shandas on the last tour, it was very depressing. Hi, you. This is Lila, this is my younger daughter. She was. We're going to go to Purim in a few minutes. Thank you very much everybody, I really appreciated the chance to talk to you.