The new Jewish scene

The new Jewish scene is linked to the emergence of fusion music, a term referring to the blending of musical genres such as rap with rock. Rock is often considered to be one of the first fusion musics, in the sense that it is the fruit of the union of rhythm and blues and country music.

Since the end of the 1960s, and with the advent of globalization, music has been constantly blending. The introduction of electronic music processing accelerated this trend, particularly from the 1980s onwards.

Jewish music is no exception to this phenomenon, with the emergence of a new Jewish scene that blends Klezmer, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish and Oriental music with jazz, rock, punk, rap, Latino and hip-hop…

The playlist below presents just a tiny selection of the richness of this new Jewish scene, which is now being expressed all over the world. Among the promoters of this Jewish musical revival we can mention John Zorn and his Tzadik label, founded in New York in 1995, which to date has produced 189 CDs in the Radical Jewish Culture collection. In 2003, Claude Zwimer and Bruno Nahon founded the Jumu (Nu Juwish Music) label in Paris, which “brings the past to the present, plugs klezmer into electro, arranges unions between rappers in papillote and yid clarinet, and mixes Judeo-Arabic with hip-hop”. Jumu has produced a dozen CDs and organized several concerts with American (Matisyahu), Canadian (SoCalled), English (Sophie Solomon, Oi va voi), Dutch (Amsterdam Klezmer Band) and French (Anakronic Electro Orkestra) musicians.

Finally, some French bands, such as Horse Raddish, Klunk, … have produced albums of jazz-rock, rap or klezmer punk.

More about the artists included in this playlist: