Music

It is purely coincidence, no doubt, that Allen Ginsberg wrote his epic poem “Kaddish” three years after the death of his mother Naomi, and eclectic jazz guitarist Bill Frisell began work on his musical accompaniment to that poem three years after the death of his mother Jane.

No one can seem to get over the fact that Ben Marcus, the scion of avant-garde literature and its most impassioned defender, recently published a fairly traditional novel, “The Flame Alphabet.” It has all the trappings of normative fiction — a plot, emotionally developed characters, even some good old-fashioned drama.

It is a long way from pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

For Michel Hazanavicius it is highly likely that the trip will only have taken three generations.

Listening to Jewish-American music from the 1950s and ’60s is frequently a bewildering experience. Jewish cha-chas? Israeli fuzz-tone guitar bands? Johnny Mathis singing “Kol Nidre?”

“This [cross-cultural] music fascinated us,” says Roger Bennett, one of the co-founders of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. “Each track is a footprint through history. They pose a set of eclectic questions about Jewish-American identity and community, and how they changed in the post-war era.”