Frank London’s A Night in the Old Marketplace is a “folk opera,” a 90-minute musical re-imagining of I.L. Peretz’s sprawling 1907 supernatural drama. The score mixes folk, jazz, classical, rock and world beats with a dose of Kurt Weill cabaret. Beware, the players are some of the most versatile musicians, whose credits include salsa, radical Jewish “downtown” jazz, punk, and thrash-klezmer bands. Then there are the vocalists Manu Narayan (star of Broadway’s Bombay Dreams), Craig Wedren (of Shudder to Think), Irish singer Susan McKeown, pop geniuses They Might Be Giants, and The Klezmatics’ Lorin Sklamberg, to name a few. We’ll sample from the recording of “A Night in the Old Marketplace” on this edition of New Sounds.
Shemspeed is an independent recording label and promotional agency highlighting cross-over music artists with positive and unifying messages. Founded by Erez Safar, an American-Israeli DJ/Producer, Shemspeed promotes over 15 dynamic artists representing a wide range of genres including hip-hop, reggae, and rock. These artists include Y-Love (revolutionary Jewish hip-hop), Diwon (Yemenite / Sephardic hip-hop, Israeli music and more), DeScribe (soul-awakening dancehall, hip-hop, & soul), and Electro Morocco (Israeli rock, dance music.) Shemspeed artists, collectively showcasing the diversity in world Jewish music, have performed with musicians as varied as Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Idan Raichel and Eminem; they’ve been profiled in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The New York Times and XXL; and they’ve been seen and heard around the world on various TV appearances (Conan O’Brien, CBS and BBC World) and global radio. Shemspeed’s mission is unifying people through culture and education, celebrating diversity and common ground. By way of this work, we add a public Jewish voice to multi-cultural, inter-faith, creative and collaborative bridge-building.
Frank London’s A Night in the Old Marketplace is a “folk opera,” a 90-minute musical re-imagining of I.L. Peretz’s sprawling 1907 supernatural drama. The score mixes folk, jazz, classical, rock and world beats with a dose of Kurt Weill cabaret. Beware, the players are some of the most versatile musicians, whose credits include salsa, radical Jewish “downtown” jazz, punk, and thrash-klezmer bands. Then there are the vocalists Manu Narayan (star of Broadway’s Bombay Dreams), Craig Wedren (of Shudder to Think), Irish singer Susan McKeown, pop geniuses They Might Be Giants, and The Klezmatics’ Lorin Sklamberg, to name a few. We’ll sample from the recording of “A Night in the Old Marketplace” on this edition of New Sounds.