The Birth of an Israeli Sound: From Harlem to Jerusalem

Our friends at the Online Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y present:

The Birth of an Israeli Sound: From Harlem to Jerusalem

Join ASF Director of Publications, Dr. Aryeh Tepper, at the Online Roundtable by the 92nd St Y to trace the journey from Harlem to Jerusalem, from Jazz Master Clark Terry to a generation of Israeli musicians who followed jazz wherever it led, including back to their Sephardi and Mizrahi roots.

Innov Ganawa with Itamar Borochov, Recipients of the ASF Pomegranate Award for Musical Conservation, Creativity, and Coexistence, at the 21st Sephardic-Jewish Film Festival, Center for Jewish History, 6 March 2018.

Overview

For four decades, Israel has produced a disproportionate share of the world’s top jazz musicians. Israeli jazz musicians helped set the NYC “downtown” scene on fire during the 1990s, and they have contributed their own original sound to the jazz tradition. In this class, Aryeh Tepper traces the transmission of the jazz tradition from America to Israel and explores what the migration of this American-born artistic path teaches us about Israeli identity and the relationship between tradition and innovation.

We will begin by following the line that links Harlem to Jerusalem: from Clark Terry, one of the giants of American jazz, to Arnie Lawrence, who founded the Jazz Department at the New School in New York and the International Center for Creative Music in Jerusalem. Lawrence’s Israeli students answered the jazz tradition’s imperative to find their own sound by turning, among other paths, to their Sephardi and Mizrahi roots: Moroccan-Andalusian piyyut, Yemenite cantillation, Sephardi synagogue music. The class reflects on what jazz and Jewish thought share: an understanding of mastery as disciplined apprenticeship that culminates, paradoxically, in radical individuality.

On Mondays 10:00-11:00AM ET:

30 November
Session 1
How Israel Became a Jazz Powerhouse

For four decades, Israel has produced a disproportionate share of the world’s top jazz musicians. This session traces the pedagogical line from the master educator Clark Terry through his student, Arnie Lawrence — who founded the Jazz Department at the New School in New York and the International Center for Creative Music in Jerusalem — to two generations of Israeli musicians. We will explore the artistic path transmitted by Terry and Lawrence and the manner in which it took root in the State of Israel.

7 December
Session 2
Uniting East and West: An Israeli Musical Dream

The dream of uniting Eastern and Western musical traditions has animated Israeli culture since the pre-state period. This session traces that history — the musicologists who theorized it, the composers and folk singers who pursued it, the ethnic music pioneers who gave it artistic form — and closes with the jazz musicians, who arrived at the same dream as the natural consequence of following the tradition’s imperative to progress from imitation to original expression.

14 December
Session 3
Jazz, the Jewish Tradition, and the Art of Articulating Your Own Voice

After listening to the distinctive sounds of Israeli jazz, we will return to where we started, Clark Terry’s distillation of the artistic path of jazz: imitate, assimilate, innovate. We will consider Terry’s words in light of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook’s teaching about the purpose of study and its relationship to innovation. This session works through the Kook-Terry parallel, drawing on jazz history, Jewish thought, and the music itself — two traditions sharing a path of artistic-spiritual progress.

Sign-up Now!

Join this live, instructor-led class on Zoom, with real-time Q&A.
Session recordings will be provided afterward.

Dr. Aryeh Tepper is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work sits at the intersection of jazz studies, Jewish intellectual life and Israeli cultural history. He holds a doctorate in Jewish Thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of “Progressive Minds, Conservative Politics: Leo Strauss’ Later Writings on Maimonides” (SUNY Press, 2013). He is currently completing “From Harlem to Jerusalem: The Birth of an Israeli Sound,” a cultural history tracing how the jazz tradition traveled from America to Israel, and how Israeli musicians, following the jazz tradition’s imperative to innovate your own sound, used the jazz vocabulary to extend and elaborate Sephardi and Mizrahi musical modes. Aryeh is Director of Publications at the American Sephardi Federation, co-director of the Omni-American Project and editor of “The Omni-American Review.” He is a Senior Fellow at Polyhymnia and is affiliated with the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.