May/June 2016 – Jews & Jazz Music

I hope you are planning to be with us on Friday evening, May 13th, at 6:00, when we will present our third annual Friday Night Jazz.  We are extremely fortunate in that Mr. Gap Mangione will, once again, be our featured artist and add his incredible musical talent to our service.

In preparation of this special Shabbat service and in case you missed this article I include it for you. It is from the Encyclopedia of Jewish Music.:

Jews & Jazz Music

At the turn of the last century, Jewish immigrants from Europe mixed in New York and Chicago with black immigrants from the Deep South.  Soon they lent their own unique ingredient to America’s greatest single musical innovation – jazz.  Popular music was seen as a chance to escape from the ghettos.

Jazz probably originated in New Orleans in the late 19th century.  Meanwhile, Jews started writing popular tunes in New York’s Tin Pan Alley (28th Street).  In time, the two streams met, and urban jazz began to blend klezmer riffs with black gospel harmonies and African rhythms.  Some Yiddish melodies became jazz standards (eg. Bei Mir Bist Du Shein turned into Burton on the Ritz).  Al Jolson popularized jazz and eschewed traditional Jewish music.  His story is told in The Jazz Singer.  Harry Kandel mixed jazz and klezmer (1917-21).

Classically trained and musically innovative, Benny Goodman was also one of the first major white musicians to play openly with black colleagues during the swing period, so flaunting an unofficial ‘color bar’.

George Gershwin incorporated jazz motifs in compositions like ‘American in Paris’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.  His brother Ira continued with the Tin Pan Alley tradition.

With Lee Konitz on the alto saxophone, Al Cohn was central to the bebop revolution.

Stan Getz became one of the most popular jazz players of the 1960s and 1970s.  He blended the ‘cool school’ of Lester Young with Brazilian bossa nova.

Many Jews were modern pioneers such as saxophonist Kenny Gee, the Brecker brothers, 52nd Street Saxophone Quartet (two Jews and two blacks), saxophonist Herb Geller, Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin, pianist Stu Katz, and Brazilian singer Flora Purim.  Jewish rock stars with a jazz background include Billy Joel and Harry Connick Jr.

The klezmer revival of the 1970s has led to hybrids like klezmer/jazz in a traditional Chicago style (Maxwell Street Band), and more avant-garde jazz fusion (East of Eden, UK; Kabology, USA).  Additionally, there is Andy Statman’s Hassidic Jazz; Jewish/Arabic/jazz fusion (Israel’s Bustan Avraham and Eve’s Women); and jazz from the Black Hebrews of Dimona. US black musicians often pay tribute to jazz’s Jewish inheritance: clarinetist Don Byas revived the Catskills idiom of the 1950s, and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Gershwin’s World’ album of 1998.

As performers, producers and educators, Jews remain deeply involved with jazz.  Yet it is still hard to define the genre (despite its new acceptability) – or its Jewish content!

I hope that you will bring your family and friends as we welcome Shabbat with a bit of a “jazz twist”.

Until then, and as we look forward to celebrating Shavuot, I wish you and yours good health and Hag Sameiach!

B’Shalom,

Hazzan Martin Leubitz