More in ‘jazz’

There’s a long tradition of Jews embracing others’ musical traditions. Some of these people—including perhaps the most famous example, the Jazz Age clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), who fully renounced his Jewish heritage and identified as an African-American instead—were running away from something; namely, Jewish music and Jewish identity. Others, however, were running toward ...

When Cioma Schönhaus fled to Switzerland from Berlin on his bicycle in 1943—a story he tells in The Forger, a memoir of the four years he spent living by his wits as a Jew in the heart of wartime Germany—there wasn’t much that he could take with him. Not much that he could touch, at ...

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, ...

Jazz and Jewish music have been talking to each other for a long time.
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- ...

Israeli-born musician Oran Etkin fell in love with jazz at age 10, when his parents gave him his first CD—a Louis Armstrong record. Later, he would fall in love with the clarinet, then with the polyrhythms of Malian music, and, later still, with the plaintive sounds of klezmer. In his new album Kelenia, ...

I used to love Passover. Now that I have two small children, I tend to rush through the seders, hoping to tie things up before bedtime. But when I was a child myself, I savored those long nights: the special foods, the table packed with visiting cousins, and the songs, many of which we only ...

There was a moment during an event last month at New York club Jazz Standard—featuring former poets laureate Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic reading their work accompanied by live jazz—that had the recursive quality of an Escher lithograph, like a man looking into a mirror seeing himself looking into a mirror.
Pinsky was about to ...

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 ...

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, ...

Essen, the title of the latest album by Paul Shapiro, means “to eat” in both German and Yiddish. And as the saxophonist, clarinetist and singer recently explained in a lexicographical aside from the stage of the Cornelia Street Café in lower Manhattan, it applies specifically to people. The word “fressen,” on the other hand, applies ...