The Intersection of Jewishness and Competing Identities in the Contemporary New York Jazz Scene

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This project, building on my MRes on Jewish identity in the British jazz scene as a pilot study, investigates the roles that Jewish identity plays in the careers of musicians currently working in and around the New York jazz community. The central aim of this project is to examine the diverse, multicultural contemporary (defined here as musicians who are alive and working today) jazz community of New York in search of the ways in which Jewish musicians, and Jewishness, interact with the wider scene. This will identify the role of Jewish eclecticism in an increasingly identitarian jazz landscape. Topics explored as part of this research will include the significance of klezmer revivals; how musicians perform Jewishness, looking at John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture movement; Uri Caine and Béla Fleck's mediation between high and low art through jazz-art music fusion. It will also confront the intersection of Jewish and African American identities, both of which are inextricably linked to the cultural history of New York and its jazz scene. In particular, I will investigate how the perception of those communities as competing for recognition of victimhood is negotiated through jazz and through the individual experiences of Black-Jewish musicians like Joshua Redman. I will also tackle head-on how modern antisemitism, political discourse and the Israel/Palestine debate impacts Jewish engagement with New York jazz and mainstream Jewish communities, particularly given the recent rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city, debates around left-antisemitism and the influx of up-and-coming migrant Israeli Jazz musicians to the scene like Tal Yahalom and Gilad Hekselman.