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An ahead-of-its-time klezmer album will be performed live for the first time
(New York Jewish Week) — In 1955, a group of musicians gathered in a Manhattan recording studio and committed to tape 16 tunes. When the LP, “Tanz,” was released the following year, it barely made a splash.
Over the years, however, the recording would gain a reputation as a landmark klezmer album, years before the klezmer revival of the 1970s and ’80s. Recorded by the klezmer virtuoso Dave Tarras and a handful of respected New York jazz players, including brothers Sam and Ray Musiker, the record was a groundbreaking mix of the traditional Eastern European Jewish dance music and a jazz and big band sound.
And now, nearly seven decades later, the entire album will be performed before a live audience for the first time ever. On Thursday, Brooklyn-based clarinetist Michael Winograd will lead a band of klezmer all-stars as they play the music from “Tanz” (Yiddish for “dance”) at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side.
“One of the things that I love about his compositions on ‘Tanz,’ is that they feel like they are both inside and outside the klezmer box,” Winograd told the New York Jewish Week. “They are so clearly klezmer, but they’re also pushing the boundaries so much and I think that came from his work as a jazz musician.”
Winograd completed the herculean task of transcribing all the instrumental parts of the album several years ago. He said that he originally transcribed “Tanz” as a technical exercise and initially had no plans to record or perform the material. But trumpeter Frank London of The Klezmatics convinced him to reconsider, Winograd said.
“Frank told me, ‘You have the music, you might as well perform it. It would be amazing,’” Winograd recalled.
In December 2018, he performed some of the tracks with two different klezmer bands in Berlin and New York. The upcoming JCC performance, however, is the debut performance of the album in full. Winograd is working with Aaron Bendich from the Borscht Beat record label and hopes to release a film of the JCC concert, which is co-presented by the Ashkenaz Festival, the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.
The driving force behind “Tanz” was the late Sam Musiker, a fourth-generation klezmer musician born in New York. He and his younger brother, Ray, also a member of the “Tanz” ensemble, performed klezmer extensively starting as young musicians. On the album cover, the Musiker brothers got second billing to Sam Musiker’s father-in-law, the clarinetist Dave Tarras, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine and the undisputed king of klezmer at the time.
Also playing on the album were drummer Irving Gratz, Tarras’s regular drummer; pianist Moe Wechsler, a Juilliard-trained musician who played in the big bands of Benny Goodman and Louis Prima; accordion player Seymour Megenheimer, a pianist who later became known as Sy Mann and is credited with recording “Switched-On Santa,” the first Christmas album to feature a Moog synthesizer; Mack Shopnick, a swing-era jazz bassist who was later active in the American Federation of Musicians union; and trumpeter Melvin Soloman, who played on a couple of Sarah Vaughan albums.
The musicians gathered at the former church that became Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio to make the record. The studio opened after World War II and, until it closed in 1981, it was graced by some of the greatest musical talent of the 20th century, including Vladimir Horowitz, Dizzy Gillespie and Bob Dylan. Rehearsal and recording took place over two days, according to Ray Musiker, who had to take off a couple of days from his regular gig: teaching music at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
Ray Musiker is the only surviving member of the original band, and earlier this month Winograd interviewed the 96-year-old at his home on Long Island, where they discussed how the record flopped when it was released by Epic Records in 1956. “It didn’t make an impact — there were too many things going on in the world of pop music,” Musiker told Winograd. “Judaism was Americanizing, the whole thrust was to assimilate. Klezmer music started to dwindle. They’re not living in the shtetl and they don’t want to hear shtetl music. It died out like [the Yiddish theater on] Second Avenue died out.”
And yet, in recent years, “Tanz” has been reexamined and reappraised. According to Uri Schreter, a PhD student at Harvard who studies Jewish music during the postwar period, “Tanz” is one of the most important klezmer recordings of the latter half of the 20th century. With its brass-heavy big band arrangements, “Tanz” was klezmer’s “very significant and very deep step into the world of American popular music, specifically jazz and swing,” he told the New York Jewish Week.
“Tanz” was also unique in that it featured two lead clarinetists who were both virtuosos with distinctly different styles: Sam Musiker was the American-born klezmer jazzman who could swing — he played in the Gene Krupa Orchestra and served as a sideman to Roy Eldridge and Sarah Vaughan. Dave Tarras was the epitome of the Old World klezmer tradition, Schreter said. The two styles are in a kind of a competition, Schreter said, but are also in collaboration.
Winograd, 40, is capable of pulling off both styles, he added. “You can hear when he’s playing Sam Musiker and you can hear when he’s playing Dave Tarras,” Schreter said. “He’s always playing Michael Winograd, of course. And he doesn’t sound identical to them. He doesn’t want to.”
According to Hankus Netsky, founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band of Boston and co-chair of the New England Conservatory of Music’s Contemporary Musical Arts program, Winograd is one of the most inspired klezmer musicians of his generation. “His current band is the best thing going at the moment,” said Netsky. “The level of Winograd’s cadre of musicians is kind of astronomical.”
The line-up for the JCC performance includes Marine Goldwasser on clarinet; Alec Spiegelman on saxophone and bass clarinet; Frank London on trumpet; Will Holshouser on accordion; Carmen Staaf on piano; Zoe Guigueno on bass; David Licht on drums, and Katie Scheele on English horn.
Virtuoso jazz and classical clarinetist Don Byron was in the Klezmer Conservatory Band from 1981 to 1987. He recalled when he first heard “Tanz”: in 1981, when his roommate, KCB bassist Jim Guttman, brought the LP from a used record store in Boston and asked him to have a listen.
“I listened to it once and I was, like, ‘We gotta play this,’” said Byron, who attended the Manhattan School of Music with Ray Musiker’s son, Lee. “Nobody [in the klezmer scene] knew anything about that record.”
The KCB played two selections from “Tanz” at every performance while Byron was in the band, though they removed the tunes from its repertoire when he left in 1987. Now, with Thursday’s performance, the full album will finally get its due. “Sam [Musiker] was one of my heroes,” Byron said. “To me, the tunes that he did [on ‘Tanz’] were some of the great achievements of modernism in the [klezmer] idiom.”
“Michael Winograd Plays ‘Tanz’: A Live Album Recreation” will take place at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets, $10, and information here.
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The post An ahead-of-its-time klezmer album will be performed live for the first time appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows
Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, carry a banner calling for Israel’s elimination. Photo: Reuters/Dilara Senkaya
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.
In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.
In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.
“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.
“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.
Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.
“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.
According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.
The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.
For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
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ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board
The Anti-Defamation League named Rev. Johnnie Moore, who led the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to its board of directors last week.
Moore became the public face of the foundation over the summer as it faced blame for hundreds of Palestinian civilians being killed while attempting to access aid at distribution centers that critics said were risky and inefficient.
But the ADL described the foundation, which was created with support from the U.S. and Israeli governments, as a “historic effort to provide nearly 200 million meals for free to the people of Gaza,” in a press release.
The ADL’s leadership has become more protective of Israel in recent years as it has shifted away from its historic work on civil rights issues unrelated to antisemitism. That change included a 2017 reworking of its governance structure, which had been run by a committee of several hundred lay leaders, to a more traditional nonprofit board.
The United Nations reported in August that 859 Palestinians had been killed near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, mostly by the Israeli military. Doctors Without Borders said that the centers had “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty” with children being shot and civilians crushed in stampedes.
Moore’s role involved defending the organization. He blamed Hamas and the United Nations for causing mass starvation in Gaza and presented the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as the best means of distributing food to civilians without allowing it to be diverted to militants.
“Hamas has been trying to use the aid situation to advance their ceasefire position,” Moore said during a July presentation to the American Jewish Congress.
The foundation shut down in December.
An evangelical leader and former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump’s with no background in international aid prior to his work with the foundation in Gaza, Moore brings a Christian perspective to the ADL’s board at a time when evangelicals are increasingly divided over Israel and antisemitism. “As a Christian, I consider it a responsibility to stand alongside ADL in this critical moment for the Jewish community and for our nation,” he said in the statement announcing his appointment.
He was appointed alongside Stacie Hartman, an attorney and lay leader based in Chicago, and Matthew Segal, a media entrepreneur who former President Joe Biden named to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. They join a mix of philanthropists and business leaders, including Jonathan Neman, the CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen, and Max Neuberger, the publisher of Jewish Insider.
The post ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board appeared first on The Forward.
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Man Charged With Hate Crime for Car Ramming at Chabad Headquarters in Brooklyn
Police control the scene after a car repeatedly slammed into Chabad World Headquarters in Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The driver was taken into custody. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Police in New York City charged a man on Thursday with a hate crime and other charges after he allegedly rammed his car repeatedly into Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn.
The suspect, 36-year-old Dan Sohail, has been charged with attempted assault as a hate crime, reckless endangerment as a hate crime, criminal mischief as a hate crime, and aggravated harassment as a hate crime, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny announced at a press conference on Thursday.
“The hate crime right now is that he basically attacked a Jewish institution,” Kenny explained. “This is a synagogue, it was clearly marked as a synagogue, he knew it was a synagogue because he had attended there previously.”
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement is an influential force in Orthodox Judaism that operates around the world. The iconic 770 Eastern Parkway building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn became the world headquarters of the Hassidic movement in 1940.
The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force is leading the investigation into the car ramming.
Sohail is a resident of New Jersey and has no criminal history in New York City, Kenny said. The vehicle he allegedly used on Wednesday night was registered under his name and, earlier this month, Sohail attended an event at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“We believe that he was in Brooklyn last night to continue this attempt to connect with the Lubavitch Jewish community,” Kenny said. Sohail was due in court on Friday.
Footage from the incident showed Sohail drive his vehicle multiple times into the rear door of the 770 Eastern Parkway building in Crown Heights, according to Kenny, who added that the suspect stepped out of his vehicle, removed several blockades from his path, and cleared snow away from a sidewalk before ramming into the building.
Later, when talking to police, Sohail claimed his foot slipped and that he lost control of the car because he was wearing “clunky boots,” Kenny said. No injuries were reported and the damaged synagogue door is currently being repaired, according to Yaacov Behrman, head of public relations at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“It is clear the incident was intentional,” Behrman added. “The attacker removed the metal bollards that typically block the ramp and protect the entrance shortly before driving into the building. The bollards have since been restored.”
The car ramming took place the same day as the 75th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson being chosen as the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, said in a statement on Thursday night that the incident “underscores a painful and undeniable reality: acts of hate, intimidation, violence, and antisemitic aggression are no longer isolated incidents or abstract threats.”
“Condemnation alone is insufficient. Real deterrence requires prompt, decisive action by the justice system — through swift prosecution and meaningful consequences — to discourage further incidents and ensure public safety,” he said. “As this incident occurred while the anniversary of the beginning of the Rebbe’s leadership was being observed worldwide, we reaffirm our faith that the world is meant to be refined — not ruled by fear or force, but cultivated as a place of moral clarity, responsibility, and goodness. We remain committed to that vision, even in the face of events such as this.”
The ramming incident occurred amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City.