The Boston Festival of New Jewish Music is a free monthly concert series presenting original music drawing from the Jewish cultural experience.

Hosted by  BackRoom at The Boston Synagogue, co-presented by  JArts, and live-streaming everywhere, the Boston Festival of New Jewish Music highlights the best in Jewish-influenced music by composers and performers who live right here in our own backyard.

All concerts will be performed live at the Boston Synagogue and live-streamed.

Join us for the 2nd season of #bfnjm!

The 2nd season of the Boston Festival of New Jewish Music will feature our “Beregovski’s Kholem” series. “Beregovski’s Kholem” brings together artists from three music cultures – Mozambican, Puerto Rican, and Yiddish – to explore the legacy of forgotten Jewish tunes from Ukraine found in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky archive. Over the course of this spring, Albino Mbie, Fabiola Méndez, and Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band will create three concerts of new music drawing upon these materials.

The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky archive comprises hand-written sheet music collected by Zinovy Kiselgof during the 1912-14 An-ski Expeditions and the Makonovetsky Wedding Manuscript, long thought to be lost but preserved in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. A selection of the tunes contained in the archive were edited and published by the ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky in the 1930s and 1940s, but most have been neither performed nor presented for a century.

These materials are now accessible to us thanks to the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project, an international digital humanities project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We are exploring the sheet music in the archive, finding melodies that speak to us, and using them to create new compositions in our own styles. For Albino, that means incorporating them into Afro-pop and jazz, and building them into the improvisations of his body of work.

Want to hear what that sounds like? So do we!

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