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The Cracow Festival for Jewish Culture starts today, and will end with the legendaray Open Air at Szeroka Street next Saturday (July 6)!!
www.jewishfestival.pl
(or, english: www.jewishfestival.pl/index_en.php)
This event may be of interest to musicians and enthusiasts who wish to
explore the art and repertoire of classic East-European Hazzanut "from the
inside".
Kutshers Country Club, New York
The "Rozhinke Retreat" is an effort to preserve and continue the great Cantorial art tradition of yesteryear. At the turn of the Millenium, we have seen many Jewish cultural revivals: Yiddish, Klezmer... and Hazzanut is due a revival of its own.
This retreat has its roots in the great Cantorial stylings of such renowned Hazzanim as Yossele Rosenblatt, David Kousevitsky, Zavel Kwartin and many others--with an emphasis not on historical examination, but rather living reproduction of an art form which is so intrinsically Jewish, and so passionate, so filled with pathos and sweetness, that it can only be described as "Rozhinke" --the sweet sound of raisins and almonds.
For further info:
rozhinke.org
The band is interviewed by NPR's Maria Hinojosa in the last segment on this week's Latino USA show. Nice introduction to the band, and some nice clips. These guys are my favorite Jewish hip hop band, obviously.
Elliott Simon spotted this one - a review of Paul Shapiro's Midnight
Minyan by Celeste Sunderland, from All About Jazz-New York June 2003.
I raved about the same album, myself, not to long ago.
Well, it's official. The old calendar was so dysfunctional that no one appears to miss it at all. Many people seem not to have noticed that it was there. So, even though it will take some time to get all of the pieces configured to include all of the information that was technically present, if not findable on the old calendar, I've launched the new calendar.
Listings are still bottlenecked by time - I list what I have time to list - but I like to think that now, at least, when an event is listed, maybe the listing will help pull people in to the event.
Bookmark, www.klezmershack.com/calendar/
Note that the calendar is global. We have events listed this week from Turkey to Denmark to California and Victoria Island in Canada. To help people find events they might actually be able to attend, we categorize, first, by location. (We also categorize by type of event and type of music.) So, if you are using an RSS Newsreader like Sharpreader, you can quickly see what events are listed for your area by viewing the XML 2.0 feed (the "2.0" version is Dave Winer's renamed 0.92) or the RDF-based XML feed (officially version 1.0)
Judy Caplan Ginsburgh writes to the Jewish-music mailing list about this new recording:
"It is
called Yahudice (the name for the Ladino language of the Jewish people in
Ottoman times). The CD presents Ladino repertoire that deals with urban
music from Istanbul, Izmir, Thessalonika, and Jerusalem. The songs have
been extensively researched by Hadass Pal-Yarden who is a singer and a
doctoral student of Ethnomusicology. She has painstakingly researched these
songs and preserved 14 of them on this CD in as authentic form as possible
using mostly Ottoman instruments and the typical clear, ornamental vocal
style of this music. Not only is the music on the CD lovely and an
historical record, but it comes with a book which contains 160 pages of
educational material about each song, its style, background, audio archival
sources, bibliography and discography)."
The recording is available now, although for outrageous postage to the US, from www.kalan.com. Simon, of Hatikvah Music, in Los Angeles, has announced that he hopes to be providing this to American customers in the near future.
I've just encountered a promising new Jewish website called "Nextbook," www.nextbook.org. The web manifestation of the organization provides a daily(?) digest of interesting Jewish arts and cultural reviews and articles on the net. There isn't much about Jewish music (although they did feature a review of the latest Klezmatics album, "Rise Up".
The site also is a prime candidate for a weblog, but that doesn't seem to have sunk in yet--write them and ask them to add an RSS feed.
In the meantime, I had a great time browsing, and found a link to a very, very interesting fiction piece in the current Zoetrope on Jewish music from Sarajevo, and even found a couple of links to Divahn, live!
The Weblog software I use for this site is quite versatile. For months I've been meaning to use it for the calendar, as well as for the main page. I now have a "beta" calendar, with events for the next week or two.
How does it compare with the current calendar?
Let me know what you think. Once I finish making the calendar pages look like part of the KlezmerShack, I'm going to work on setting things up so that people other than myself can add events. If there are other calendars online that work especially well, let me know about them and I'll see if I can add more features. Also, note that there is a major upgrade to Moveable Type due late this summer. Features that I can't add now (or don't have time to figure out now) may still be added then.
Elliott Simon writes to the Jewish-Music mailing list:
"Hi...just wanted to make those interested aware of a website that
caters to NYC experimental/improvisational music and as such does
feature/promote a fair amount of Jewish influenced jazz CDs/concerts.
It is run by Kurt Gottschalk who I met at the recent NYC visions
festival. At which, BTW, Erik Friedlander, Greg Cohen and Mark Friedman
performed an incredible set as the Masada String Trio. They were
conducted by John Zorn who sat on stage in front of the trio. Anyway,
Kurt asked me to review the new Koby Israelite CD (which has generated
some discussion in here already)...so check out the site
www.squidsear.com
Simon's first review for Squids Ear is of the nearly-ubiquitous Koby Isaelite "Dance of the Idiots" (which I reviewed last week, and Richard Sharma reviewed a few weeks earlier)
In addition, he suggests checking out Eyal Hareuveni's review of Borah Bergman: Piano Meditations
I got carried away. CDs were falling off the shelf, so I sat down this weekend and stayed sat down until I got several reviewed. We've got some great new Jewish music, some avant garde and jazz, some klezmer (lots of klezmer), some Sephardic and Mizrahi music, more klezmer and Yiddish folk.... That's not the whole gamut, but odds are that something in this weekend's stack will be just what you were looking for:
Den Flygande Bokrullen / Tarrschwein, 2002, headbanger klezmer
The amazing Margot Leverett is at the Tonic this Sunday. This is a short notice show to fill in. It would be a major bummer for the audience to be limited to the two folks who happened to wander by due to late publicity. Here's the scoop:
Margot Leverett and Ruslan Agababayev present a very special program of klezmer and jazz improvisation. Ruslan is a young prodigy with a startlingly original take on klezmer and jazz. This will be an unforgettable afternoon!
Tonic is at 107 Norfolk St in Manhattan (F train to Delancey), or take Williamsburg bridge to Delancey and turn right on Norfolk. Shows are at 1:30 and 3pm, $10 for one show, $15 for both. Brunch available and optional. (212) 358-7501
See you there!
And don't forget Seth Rogovoy's recent interview with her at www.rogovoy.com/447.shtml
Irwin Oppenheim's "Chazzanut Online" is such a wonderful site. He has updated it with loads more material - do take a look!
Solomon Rozumni (1866-1904) was one of the famous cantors in Odessa,
noted for his capability to improvise recitatives.
We are very grateful to Jeff Forman, who scanned Rozumni's beautiful
collection of recitatives, and made it possible to present this
important material online.
www.chazzanut.com/rozumni/
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Sam Weiss contributed two articles on the musical history of "Ein
Keloheinu" respectively "Mah Nishtanah"; Jacob Birnbaum contributed an
article on the history of "Am Yisra'eil Chay."
www.chazzanut.com/articles
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Sheet music for the "Chupah" or Jewish wedding ceremony.
www.chazzanut.com/wedding
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Singable translations of popular Israeli songs
www.chazzanut.com/songs.html
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