Ashkenazi Music & Song – An Illustrated History

Jordan Wax is a songwriter from New Mexico who performs dynamic arrangements of new work in Yiddish. His innovative compositions are rooted his own deep Diaspora communities and in three decades of friendships with elders who have imparted the subtleties of spoken secular Yiddish and the musical sensibilities of the of the professional klezmer–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but as pathways to Yiddish continuity, vitality, and relevance which must be be renewed in each generation through radical creativity and cross-cultural pollination with the rhythms of Yiddish’s diasporic homes. The linguistic and musical dialects of his work align his original songs with stories and embodied memories that span generations. His debut solo album, The Heart Deciphers (Borscht Beat, 2025), blends the sounds of klezmer/lautari ensembles from Moldova with rock aesthetics from the American Southwest. In 2024-5 he was a New Jewish Culture Fellow (Center for New Jewish Culture, NY) and in 2025 received the Freed Fellowship for rising leaders in Yiddish and Jewish culture in conjunction with his work performing and curating programs for KlezKanada’s summer retreat in Montreal. In early 2020 he was invited to study oral histories and field recordings as a Parsons Fellow at the American Folklife Center at the US Library of Congress.

Born in New York City, violinist Jake Shulman-Ment is “considered one of the finest klezmer fiddlers on the planet” (Jon Kalish, NPR). He has toured and recorded internationally as a soloist and with Midwood, Daniel Kahn, Frank London, Di Naye Kapelye, Joey Weisenberg, Laurel Premo, Romashka, Duncan Sheik, and many others. He was featured in Csaba Bereczki’s full-length documentary film Soul Exodus, and performed on screen in HBO’s Succession and Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman. A widely sought-out teacher of the klezmer fiddle tradition, Jake has been a faculty member of KlezKamp, KlezKanada, Klezmer Paris, the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, Yiddish Summer Weimar, Fiddle Tunes, Yiddish New York, and other festivals throughout 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. Jake’s debut solo album, A Redele (A Wheel) (Oriente Musik, 2012) was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award. His most recent release, Two Strings (Borscht Beat, 2025), is a ground-breaking collaborative reimagination of klezmer fiddle style with Abigale Reisman.