Posts from the “Music” Category
The alternately fraught and affectionate history of Jews and African Americans is one of those cultural intersections that seems so well traversed there can’t be much new to say on the topic. But hearing Johnny Mathis croon “Kol Nidre,” the lamenting Aramaic prayer that opens Judaism’s most solemn and holy service on Yom Kippur, suddenly …
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Thank you, San Francisco, and to everyone who came out to see our sold-out show at Yoshi’s. Grammy award winning Arturo O’Farrill oversaw a dazzling recreation of Mazeltov, Mis Amigos, the 1961 album we unearthed and re-released last year. The gig rocked. Larry Harlow, “El Judio Maravilloso”, jousted with The Sway Machinery’s Jeremiah Lockwood. …
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In 1961 the legendary jazz label Riverside Records released Mazeltov, Mis Amigos, an album of “Yiddish favorites in Latin tempo,” by Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen. The band who performed these mid-century dance floor fusions was an only-in-America supergroup that wasn’t as Jewish as their name made them sound. Juan Calle was John Cali, …
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Last night was a magical evening for all of us at the Idelsohn Society. We were honored to honor the legendary Johnny Mathis, who became the first performer to enter the Idelsohn Society’s Canyon of Heroes due to his 1958 recording of the Yom Kippur opener, Kol Nidre. Mathis referred to the song which was …
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At a time when the relationship between African Americans and American Jews seems largely irrelevant to the national conversation, the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation is directing its gaze back at a different era. Not the early 1990s, when tensions between the two communities exploded into riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, but to the days …
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