If you are not familiar, The 6th Annual Sephardic Music Festival will be lighting up the eight nights of Hanukkah in venues around New York from December 1st through 8th. The kick-off event of the festival is an Art Rave and Fashion Show at 7pm on Wednesday, December 1st (the first night of Hanukkah) at 220 36th street in a 20,000 square foot loft with a view of the East River in Brooklyn’s Industry City. The Sephardic Music Festival is the first Jewish music festival to focus on the untapped musical culture of Jews who trace their roots to Spain, Portugal, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Check out the audio player and more info on the official SMF CD!
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.