Posts from the “Press” Category
What do Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Johnny Mathis and Nina Simone all have in common? Besides stellar voices, they were among many black American artists who sang Jewish songs. This rarely told American story is chronicled on a new compilation called Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations, which uses music to …
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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 …
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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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Mitch Miller, the great producer, arranger, and musician passed away aged 99. The Idelsohn Society’s David Katznelson remembered him in the New York Times. Read the article here.…
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When he was a kid, Roger Bennett inherited his mom’s record player and with it came her collection of LPs. Among the jackpot of Beatles on vinyl was the 1959 recording “Bagels and Bongos” by the Irving Fields Trio.
That little-known gem of mostly Jewish songs set to a Latin tempo “tells us the boundaries …
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