KLEZMER NIGHT ON OL' BROADWAY

KLEZMER NIGHT ON OL' BROADWAY

with Bob Cohen, Jake Shulman-Ment & Pete Rushefsky

Saturday, December 10, 8pm

at the Old Broadway Synagogue

(15 Old Broadway between 125th & 126th Streets in Manhattan)

Suggested donation: $10

Join us for the new klezmer music series at the Old Broadway Synagogue (15 Old Broadway between 125th & 126th Streets in Manhattan) at 8pm on Saturday night, December 10, 2022.

We'll be featuring three of the contemporary klezmer scene's leading performers - Bob Cohen (violin) Pete Rushefsky (tsimbl/hammered dulcimer) and Jake Shulman-Ment (violin). For decades, an important milestone for aspiring young klezmorim has been to make a pilgrimage to see Bob Cohen of the ensemble Di Naye Kapelye in Budapest. Or even better, to accompany Cohen on a tour of Transylvanian villages in search of the last Roma musicians who played with Jewish bands before WWII. Two such pilgrim over the years have been violin virtuoso Jake Shulman-Ment, now recognized as one of the contemporary klezmer scene’s finest fiddlers, and tsimbl (cimbalom/hammered dulcimer) player Pete Rushefsky. Join the trio for a night of rediscovered melodies, Hasidic spirtuals and rollicking dance tunes. This program is presented by the Old Broadway Synagogue in partnership with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and Yiddish New York.

Biographies of performers:

Bob Cohen (violin) was born in New York in 1956 to a Hungarian mother and Moldavian father. In the late 1980s, he commenced his research on Hungary’s Jewish musical heritage, including songs, dances, and musical instruments. In 1993, he founded the influential Budapest-based ensemble Di Naye Kapelye (The New Band) with accordionist Christina Crowder and bassist Géza Pénzes. The musicians present klezmer music in the style in which it was originally performed in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. Their 2008 release Traktorist ranked high on Songline World Music Magazine’s “Top of the World” list of best new albums. Cohen served as a consultant, speaker and featured artist at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He is currently touring as part of the Brothers Nazroff ensemble, which recently released their first album on Smithsonian Folkways; the band is featured in the 2016 documentary by Hungarian filmmaker Csaba Bereczki entitled “Soul Exodus.”

Pete Rushefsky (tsimbl) A leading performer, composer and researcher of the Jewish tsimbl (cimbalom or hammered dulcimer), Rushefsky tours and records internationally with violinist Itzhak Perlman as part of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and collaborates with a number of leading figures in the contemporary klezmer scene including Andy Statman, Adrianne Greenbaum, Steven Greenman, Joel Rubin, Eleonore Biezunski, Michael Alpert, Madeline Solomon, Zhenya Lopatnik, Zoe Aqua, Jake Shulman-Ment, Keryn Kleiman, Eleonore Weill, Alex Parke, and Michael Winograd. Since 2006 he has served as Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, the nation’s leading organization dedicated to the preservation and presentation of diverse immigrant music traditions from around the world. He is a founder of the annual Yiddish New York festival, curated the Yiddish program at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and has authored a number of articles on traditional music and culture.

Jake Shulman-Ment (violin) is at the helm of a new generation of Klezmer and Yiddish music performers. He tours and records internationally in addition to being a widely sought-out teacher of the klezmer fiddle tradition at festivals around the globe. He collected, studied, performed, and documented traditional music in Romania as a Fulbright scholar, and has lived and traveled in Hungary and Greece, learning traditional violin styles. In 2018 he received the prestigious NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Folk/Traditional Arts. He was a featured subject of Csaba Bereczki’s full-length documentary film Soul Exodus, and appears on HBO’s Succession, Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, and a host of other film and theater productions. Jake’s debut solo album, A Redele (A Wheel) (Oriente Musik, 2012) was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award. His new group, Midwood, released its first album, Out of the Narrows, (Chant Records) in May 2018.