An Exciting Time for Yiddish Music
I’ve been returning to my old work at the Forverts, aka the Forward but in Yiddish or on Yiddish subjects, but rather than take on the stress of my old position as Deputy Editor, I am now assigned as a freelance writer to write about music in English.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my articles. Do I present them as critiques? Are they purely promotional? From my point of view, the most essential service I can provide our readers is an explanation of what these records actually are and why the artists made them. As music, they are not terribly mysterious albums, but as pieces within Jewish cultural history, there are layers to uncover.
We are living in a very exciting time for Yiddish music because there are things people are creating that have either never happened before or haven’t happened in living memory. Much of this music, I am also delighted to report, you will get a chance to hear at or through Der Nister.
The first article that got me going was about our friends at Khazones Underground. Jeremiah Lockwood and Judith Berkson are scholars and performers of high caliber, and in creating a record label devoted to the specific “Golden Age’’ sound of cantorial music, they were able to become a platform capable of breaking new ground in this very old artform. Jeremiah was able to inhabit these melodies and styles passed down by his grandfather in form of an internationally touring rock band The Sway Machinery; he also recorded a ring of Hasidic cantors who formed their own underground circles. Judith was a ringleader on an album of female cantors, or khazntes, that relies on the model provided by women cantors who stand up to gender norms in their time and ours. And these are just albums they are releasing now — in the future will come unreleased recordings of great cantors and many other fascinating projects.
A preview of The Return of the Immortal Khazntes
The second article was about our friend Jordan Wax’s children’s music album. The truth is that I could have written about both of his new albums, one for adults (Taytsh, The Heart Deciphers) and the children’s album (Pantakozak). But that wasn’t the assignment. In a way, I was grateful, because the breadth of explanation that would have forced me to cover would have been a little too extreme.
What they have in common is that they are rooted in Wax’s devotion to roots and ethnomusicology, his fateful trip to Moldova, and his late friend Misha Limanovich, who had a sharp memory of the songs and stories of his childhood in today’s Belarus. And also, Wax’s own serious study of Yiddish and creativity. I really can’t say enough about Jordan’s devotion to both music and Yiddish.
It was really interesting though that he had spent so much time with preschoolers and developed so much interest and respect in him for them that he devoted a lot of valuable time inventing songs in Yiddish for them, including, as I was excited to point out, a ballad to Lionel Messi, the soccer player. I was especially excited for this because many of the verbs used to describe soccer in Yiddish are relatively obscure, and was the subject of some significant research of my own. But what I wasn't really able to point out in my article about this was this may be the first album in living memory to be almost all original Yiddish children’s music. The fact that it is so thoughtful and filled with so much quality is a whole different thing.
Oy Hundert, a counting song, from Jordan Wax's children's album Pantakozak.
There is another article that I thought I would have finished this week, but I never fully got around to it. This one is concerning an album by Sarah Myerson and Ilya Shneyveys, aka Electric Rose, which is the culmination of a monumental effort to make an interview in YIVO’s folksong archive come alive. More on that when I get the article out. You should also make sure you’re in town to watch them play here in mid-February.
