Jordan Wax: New Yiddish Songs from the Fruitful Margins of Diaspora

An evening of original Yiddish and bilingual songs that invoke the strength, joy, and resilience hosted at BackRoom Boston.

Join Jordan Wax, visiting from Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a performance of original Yiddish and bilingual songs that invoke the strength, joy, and resilience of Yiddish to reflect on the challenges of life in America today.

Accordionist and Yiddish songster Jordan Wax comes from New Mexico’s high desert. Like the wide arroyos that capture the monsoon rain, his music gathers the tributaries of many traditions — his Eastern European family’s Yiddish songs and the old Norteño polkas, marches and chotises he inherited from elder accordionists. Wax’s compositions summon intergenerational voices with the specificity that comes from devotion to detail, dialect and cultural continuity. His music is encoded with centuries of wisdom embedded in the Yiddish language. He’s a hyper-regionalist. But that specificity opens onto something universal — a connection to the generations behind all of us.

“Brims with playful magic… multi-instrumentalist Wax crafts these pieces with attention and depth.” - SONGLINES