Mordechai Ben David (Mordechai Werdyger) or MBD for short, is an American Hasidic singer and songwriter popular in the Orthodox Jewish community. He has been referred to as the ‘King of Jewish music’. He has produced many popular Jewish albums over the past 40 years. He also starred as a frequent performer in the popular [...]
The Miami Boys Choir (MBC) is a contemporary Jewish religious music boys choir. Formed in 1977 by Yerachmiel Begun, the Miami Boys Choir was part of a larger surge in popularity of Orthodox Jewish choral music. While the group was formed in Miami Beach, Florida, after releasing the first few albums, Begun moved the choir [...]
It isn’t often that an artist in the Hasidic world gets a remix, but Diwon isn’t your typical producer/DJ. In his innovative remix of Hasidic superstar Lipa Schmeltzer’s song “Acharon, Acharon, Chaviv” (Hebrew for “last but not least), he bridges the gap between hipster-DJ style and the deep spiritual longing of Hasidic music. Add to [...]
The Klezmatics take one of the wildest approaches to klezmer, the traditional dance music of the Eastern European Jews. Although their music is heavily influenced by the recordings of Abe Ellstein and Dave Tarras in the 1940s and 1950s, their lyrics comment on a wide variety of political and social issues and have led the [...]
Matisyahu initially seemed a novelty: a Lubavitch Hasidic Jew rapping and singing over a reggae groove. Except it became clear under further inspection that his music was not a novelty, but a careful construction of the various elements that had influenced the young man as much as his religion. His first volume of recordings from [...]
Sephardic Roots: Jewish Music from Spain A new generation of singers from Israel, the U.S., and Europe has rediscovered these ancient cantigas and reveals their haunting beauty. Gerard Edery (Morocco) and Yasmin Levy (Israel) play up the Spanish roots, folkies like Judy Frankel (U.S.) explore the poetry, and ensembles such as Sarband and the Sephardic Experience [...]
Anthony Coleman’s Sephardic Tinge, a trio of New York’s finest avant-garde musicians, takes traditional Jewish music and mixes it with doses of straight-ahead jazz, be-bop and Spanish music. (Sephardic is the name given to the Jews who colonized the southern portions of Spain; hence the album’s title.) The result is an eclectic amalgam of intensely [...]
This CD features Mark Dresser (bass), Marty Ehrlich (tenor sax, clarinet), Diane Moser (piano), Benny Koonyevsky (percussion), Elizabeth Schwartz (vocals) and Yale Strom (violin, viola). Strom has composed all the tunes on this CD. He has pushed open the klezmer umbrella even wider, taking klezmer nuances and weaving them through pieces that range from avant-garde [...]
Jewish Travels is the only recording of the Massel Klezmorim, a small impromptu outfit of musicians collected together by German cabaret performer Lutz Cassell (aka Lutz Elias) and guitarist Peter Wolfgang Fischer for a concert in the Hamburg Music Hall for a Hanukkah festival in 1986. The basic attempt is to collect music from throughout [...]
Here’s what the renowned Dutch daily paper NRC has to say about the Amsterdam Klezmer Band: “This group has very little to offer to ‘Klezmer-purists’ since Klezmer was never meant to be polished and perfected for concert halls. With their festive approach they take the music out of the conservatory corridors into the street.” It [...]
London-based collective Oi Va Voi makes it hard to pin them down — while their music easily allows for such diverse labels as “dance,” “rock,” “electronica,” and “world music” to be applied to them, none of these labels describes the sound of the band to the fullest. Oi Va Voi was able to achieve this [...]
Yaron Herman is an Israeli jazz pianist from France who began his recording career at a young age and was roundly acclaimed. Some even referred to him as the Keith Jarrett of his generation. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, on July 12, 1981, he began learning piano relatively late in life as a teenager and, [...]
A bop-oriented guitarist, Roni Ben-Hur emigrated from Israel in 1985. Since that time he has hooked up with pianist Barry Harris (whose trio appears on his 1994 TCB CD Backyard), often utilized pianist Chris Anderson in his quartet, and married singer Amy London, with whom he recorded Two for the Road for the Fivecat label. [...]
Master pianist Eyran Katsenelenbogen continues to thrill and inspire audiences throughout the world. In 2009 released his tenth album, titled 88 Fingers. Eyran’s previous recordings have been enthusiastically reviewed by major jazz publications such as Jazziz, Jazz Times, Jazz Journal International and All About Jazz, which stated in its review of Eyran’s last release, Solotude: [...]
The New York-born Debbie Friedman, legendary American Jewish composer and singer, died in her late 50s after a few days of hospitalization. Debbie is credited with creating a whole new genre of contemporary, accessible Jewish music. She is best known for her composition “Mi Shebeirach,” a prayer for healing that is sung in many North American [...]
