Black Sabbath: Musical History of Jews, Blacks
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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 reveals an unsuspected crossroads that confounds easy expectations.
For David Katznelson and his three fellow cultural spelunkers in the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, discovering the long-out-of-print Mathis recording was an epiphany that led to “Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations,” a beautifully produced CD with a 40-page booklet slated for release on Sept. 14 that includes cross-fertilized jazz gems like Billie Holiday swinging “My Yiddishe Momme,” Cab Calloway wailing on “Utt Da Zay” and Cannonball Adderley’s searing “Sabbath Prayer” from “Fiddler on the Roof.”
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