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Twisting Tradition: Music, History, and Cultural Change

Jewlia Eisenberg and Frank London in conversation with Josh Kun
APRIL 22, 2007 4:30 PM
MACGOWAN LITTLE THEATER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

The history of Jewish music is the history of change and adaptation, of traditions in transformation. The development of new experimental scenes and new movements—from klezmer punk to kabbalistic free jazz to hip hop Passover seders—only makes understanding the past more urgent. Collaboration, inspiration, exploitation, re-invention, community. What does it mean to make Jewish music? Jewlia Eisenberg and Frank London offer some answers, with live musical performances and a conversation with Josh Kun.

JEWLIA EISENBERG is a composer, vocalist, lay cantor, and founder of the Diaspora girl group Charming Hostess. Her recordings include Sarajevo Blues and Trilectic. She is currently at work on The Bowls Project, an installation based on magic and sex in Babylonian Jewish amulets. Commissioned work includes Harmonices Mundi, an opera about Kepler's mother, and Red Rosa, a song cycle based on the letters of Rosa Luxemburg. Raised in a Black and Jewish commune in East New York Brooklyn, she now calls San Francisco home.

FRANK LONDON is leader of Di Shikere Kapelye and a member of the Hasidic New Wave and The Klezmatics, with whom he just won a Grammy for Wonder Wheel (lyrics by Woody Guthrie). His compositions include the musical Green Violin, the Jewish folk-opera A Night in the Old Marketplace, Tony Kushner's A Dybbuk, John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet, and Pearl Gluck's Divan. His latest recordings include Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars' Carnival Conspiracy and Hasidic New Wave's Belly of Abraham with Senegalese Sabar drummers Yakar Rhythms.

JOSH KUN is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America and a professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, and Tu Ciudad Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the non-profit Jewish record label, Reboot Stereophonic. He is currently writing, with Roger Bennett, And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl: Four Thousand LPs and the Search for the Jewish Past for Crown Books.