Jewish Music

Two years after joining John Zorn’s prestigious New York label, Gabriele Coen presents his new album for Tzadik as part of the “Radical Jewish Culture” series that John Zorn dedicated to the best expressions of new Jewish Music at the international level.

The Russian composer Joel Engel (1868–1927) is unofficially considered ‘the father of Jewish music’. He paved the way for a nationalist movement that used Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs as the basis of a serious art-form. Well before Kodály and Bartók in Hungary, Engel went out to the shtetls of eastern Europe, writing down the villagers’ songs and then composed music inspired by his excursions. This first-ever album of his music reveals the melodic immediacy of these songs and instrumental pieces, capturing the soul of a people and a centuries-old vanished culture.