Arts & Culture | Music

Madoff, The Song Cycle

11/01/2012 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Music

Just a few years ago, Alicia Jo Rabins didn’t know much about the workings of Wall Street; she hadn’t yet heard of Bernard Madoff. But when the story of the largest Ponzi scheme in history unfolded, the musician, poet, Jewish educator — and admittedly broke artist — was captivated by the details of Madoff’s fraud.

Grooving The Cantorial Tradition

11/01/2012 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Music

Jack Mendelson remembers well the words of his principal teacher, the great cantor Israel Alter.

“He would always say, ‘Hazonos iz improvizatya,’ hazanut is improvisation,” Mendelson, himself a great cantor today, recalls with a laugh. “All the really great ones would go off on the pulpit, and the cantors who were really musically trained would improvise on the concert stage as well.”

Getting The Jews Up And Singing

10/17/2012 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Music

It’s a most unlikely place for a musical revolution, a studio tucked into an apartment building in a quiet block in Carroll Gardens, at the intersection of a residential neighborhood and a string of mom-and-pop stores of the sort Brooklyn still has in its quieter corners.

A Heavenly Noise

10/10/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Music

Jacob Garchik is back where a lot of his family roots are. Although the brilliant young trombonist-composer was born in San Francisco, he “realized that New York is the musical center of the world” when he was 17. He now lives in Brooklyn, “not that far from where my mom and grandma spent their lives until they moved to California.”

He gladly admits, “It’s a homecoming, that’s a very good way to put it.”

A New Big Band Voice

08/28/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Music

Ezra Weiss received his first keyboard as a bar mitzvah present from his parents.

Twenty years later, he’s among the top 14 vote-getters in the Rising Star category as an arranger in this year’s Downbeat magazine critics’ poll, and a pianist-composer whose sixth CD, “Our Path to This Moment,” showcases his evocative writing in an imaginative big band context. It’s an elegant recording with echoes of Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider.

An Eclectic Musical Hevreh

08/21/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Music

On a casual hearing, one might be hard-put to describe much of the music of the Hevreh Ensemble as “Jewish music.” Although the tunes on their new CD, “Between Worlds,” have titles like “Lost Tribes,” “Galicja” and “Negev Sunset,” the elegant, restrained music that is fit to those names bespeaks a wide range of influences, and Jewish music is only one of them.