Judith Berkson

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Judith Berkson (* 1977 ) is an American musician ( vocals ( mezzo-soprano ), piano , keyboard , organ , arrangement , composition ) and cantor who works in the fields of jazz and contemporary music as well as Jewish music.

Live and act

Berkson took piano lessons from the age of five. Her father is a cantor in a Chicago synagogue, where she received lessons in Jewish liturgical music . She took an interest in opera and art song during high school, then studied singing with Lucy Shelton, piano with Judith Godfrey and Viola Haas, and music theory and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory in Boston . From 2001 she came to New York through her circle of friends in the local jazz scene, where she made her first appearances as a singer and keyboardist and was involved in recordings by Justin Mullens , Steve Coleman ( Lucidarium , 2003) and Jacob Garchik . She also played with The Four Bags , Gerard Pape , Ken Thomson , Joe Maneri, Matthew Welch , Ohad Talmor , Hans Breder , Carlos Cuellar and Julia Werntz .

In addition, she worked in the field of classical and new music with the Wet Ink Ensemble and performed at the International Bruckner Days St. Florian , the American Festival of Microtonal Music and the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, and she wrote and arranged for the Kronos Quartet . Her main job is as assistant cantor and Hebrew teacher at the Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation in New York. In the 2000s, she concentrated her activities primarily on solo performances and exploring the possibilities of the voice with the accompaniment of keyboard instruments. In 2006 she recorded her debut album Lu-Lu , followed by the ECM album Oylam (2010), on which she Yiddish cabaret and jazz standards such as Cole Porter's " All of You " and George Gershwin's " They Can't Take That Away from Me " Songs such as the Jewish cantor song “Ahavas Oylam” and “Huyet, Huyet”, a piece by the Yiddish-Polish poet and composer Mordechaj Gebirtig , juxtaposed with his own compositions and a jazz version of the song “Der Leiermann” from Franz Schubert's Winterreise . In 2012, Berkson's chamber opera The Vienna Rite premiered at Roulette (Brooklyn), which themed the life of the Viennese cantor and composer Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890). In the field of jazz, she was involved in seven recording sessions between 2003 and 2012. Berkson lives in Brooklyn.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / player.ecmrecords.com
  2. ↑ a b Tom Lord The Jazz Discography (online, accessed March 19, 2015)
  3. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/may/13/judith-berkson-cd-review
  4. ↑ http://www.jazzecho.de/aktuell/news/artikel/article:102303/verwirrend-abvarilungsreich
  5. ↑ Allan Kozinn : Mash-Up of Schubert and Synagogue tradition - Judith Berkson's New Opera, "The Vienna Rite". In: The New York Times . 2012
personal data
SURNAME Berkson, Judith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musician and composer
DATE OF BIRTH 1977