Seth Rogovoy

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Bob Dylan’s Mystical Midrash

By Seth Rogovoy

In his landmark work, “The Prophets,” theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The prophet is a person who, living in dismay, has the power to transcend his dismay.” For most of his career, Bob Dylan has channeled his dismay with the world around him into his idiosyncratic, ecstatic blend of folk, blues, country, rock ’n’ roll and, increasingly in recent years, earlier American roots genres, including swing, jazz, old-timey and classic crooner pop. In so doing, he has transcended his dismay while providing listeners with the opportunity for the communal transcendence that’s at the heart of popular music, leading some to call Dylan a prophet. Heschel also wrote, “The words in which the prophets attempted to relate their experiences were… not descriptions but songs.”Read More

Radical Music for the New Global Shtetl

By Seth Rogovoy

On Charming Hostess’s new recording, “Sarajevo Blues,” a capella girl-group harmonies blend with hip-hop beat-box techniques and Bosnian war poetry. Zohara’s new album, “Scorched Lips,” finds common ground among ancient Hebrew love poetry, the Turkish oud and contemporary space music. Koby Israelite’s “Mood Swings” is aRead More

What the Klezmer Revival Can Teach Sephardic Music

By Seth Rogovoy

At least one listener did a double take at a recent Hanukkah-themed concert when Annette Ezekiel, singer/front woman of the Yiddish/klezmer outfit, Golem, introduced the famous Hanukkah song “Ocho Kandelikas” as “another Eastern European song.” Surely Ezekiel, who is a Columbia University-trained scholar and linguist as well as aRead More

A Slew of New CDs To Take Into 2005

By Seth Rogovoy

Madonna is probably the world’s most famous quasi-Jewish musician. Next time she goes on tour, she might consider bringing along some of the following artists, thus allowing her star to cast some rays of light on them and to do for contemporary Jewish music what she’s done for her friends from The Kabbalah Centre.There’s perhaps no figure inRead More

‘Peter and the Wolf’ Gets Klezmerized

By Seth Rogovoy

After having reinterpreted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” as the “Klezmer Nutcracker” a few years ago, it wasn’t a great leap for Boston-based klezmer group Shirim to revisit Sergei Prokofiev’s classic story “Peter and the Wolf” as “Pincus and the Pig: A Klezmer Tale,” which they have done on a new CD by thatRead More


 

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