Jake Shulman-Ment, 17 Apr, 2014
Jake Shulman-Ment
The Klezmer/Roma (Gypsy) Connection: A Musical Voyage in Romania
Thursday, April 17th, 6:30pm
Workmen's Circle
247 West 37th Street, 5th Floor
New York City, NY
Free and open to the public.
Join violinist Jake Shulman-Ment for a multi-media concert/presentation in which he performs both traditional music and new compositions, inspired by Jewish and Romanian folk styles. The concert is accompanied by striking photographic and video footage drawn from ethnographic expeditions in Romania taken during a year Jake spent there on a Fulbright grant. In combining virtuosic musical performance with these rare, fascinating images, and historical background of a world now mostly vacated by the Jewish people yet still the birthplace of so much of our cultural heritage, we explore the past and present relationships between Jews and Roma (Gypsies), the influence of non-Jewish neighbors on Jewish traditions (and vice-versa), questions of collective memory and how to uncover a buried past, as well as the artistic process of synthesizing these experiences into the creation of new music.