Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Mahmoud Darwish, the greatest living Palestinian poet, died after open heart surgery in Houston.  He was 67, a heavy smoker, and had previously undergone similar surgeries in 1984 and 1998.  He had a near death experience during his last operation.  His loss is a deep and severe blow to all who loved his magnificent poetry [...]

Thanks to former NPR reporter and former ABC news producer and bureau chief Deb Amos, who forwarded to me this wonderful YouTube video which I’d never seen before. The graphic technique has been used often before, but it tells a wonderful story of Arab-Americans who are just like you and me, while being of [...]

A few weeks ago I read that Seattle’s Medieval Women’s Choir would be performing Sephardic music tonight. That was a good reason to go since I love early music and Sephardic music. But an even more important reason was that I saw my old band mate, Shira Kammen was performing as accompanist. [...]

The bodily function that dare not speak its name in the pages of the NY Times
Pissed, pissed, PISSED. There, I’ve said it and I feel so much better. But Ben Ratliff can’t say it in the NY Times. The music critic wrote a review of a rock concert that contained one of the [...]

Haaretz just featured a profile of Mira Awad, an Israeli Arab Christian who appears in a new hit TV comedy called Arab Labor. Awad began as a professionally trained musician and recorded demos which no Israeli record company wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole because they are petrified of Arab music. [...]

KBCS has been playing Tracy Grammer’s cover of The Waking Hour (hear it) in heavy rotation and it is ravishing. David Francey, who wrote it, is a fine Scottish-born singer-songwriter who now lives in Canada. Among his other extraordinary songs is Redwing Blackbird. While Francey’s version is entirely serviceable, Grammer’s takes it [...]

Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese superstar, has a new album that came out two weeks ago, Rokku Mi Rokka. Robert Christgau, writing in his breezy style for Rolling Stone says:
…Here his strategy of moving a few favorite musicians north to Mali changes up the Senegalese mbalax he invented without surrendering its Sahel gestalt. Translations from [...]

Great day on Eldridge Street–klezmer musicians (Eldridge Street Project)

I wrote a post few weeks ago about a project organized by one of my favorite Jewish musicians, Yale Strom called Great Day on Eldridge Street. Yale gathered together every serious klezmer musician he could find and took their picture in front of the historic Eldridge [...]

My Brit friend living in Japan, Michael Furmanovsky, who first introduced me to Alison Krauss (and African music) sent me an mp3 from her new collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand (album website). I listened to it and thought: “Well, that’s very nice.” But to tell you the truth it didn’t send me [...]

I was listening to a music program of Middle Eastern music on KEXP the other day when this incredibly jaunty, joyful song aired. You don’t hear Hebrew too much on the public airwaves so I was immediately struck by this lovely Israeli song. After calling the DJ, I discovered that it was Mosh [...]