How does music reflect the American Jewish experience? What does Jewish music tell us about our identities and history? Join us to explore these questions and more through Stories of Music, an adult education project of the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where you will have the opportunity to learn with top faculty from UCLA and the Cantors Assembly.

This Unit: Jewish Jazz Pt. 2 [Unit 9]

At the same time that Jews helped establish jazz as America’s art form, they also used it to shape the contours of American Jewish identity. Elements of jazz infiltrated some of America’s earliest secular Jewish music, formed the basis of numerous sacred works, and continue to influence the soundtrack of American Jewish life.

This lesson explores jazz sacred services composed by the artists Gershon Kingsley, Charles Davidson and Jonathan Klein. It also introduces learners to the Jewish jazz of the concert stage, with music by John Zorn, Anthony Coleman, Steven Bernstein and Paul Shapiro. It ends with a brief look at the Israeli fascination with jazz, and shares the music of Anat Cohen, Avishai Cohen, and Anat Fort.

The Stories of Music curriculum is developed in partnership with the Cantors Assembly, the American Conference of Cantors, and our colleagues at the Milken Archive of Jewish Music. Our goal is to provide prepared lesson materials on a broad range of musically related topics to engage participants in adult education programs to think about the American Jewish experience through stories of the evolving nature of Jewish music.

This program is made possible by the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.