Jews and American jazz

Jewish musicians, composers, and entrepreneurs played a leading role in the rise of jazz and American popular music in the twentieth century, in a fertile encounter with the African American creativity that was its source. Clarinetists and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman, nicknamed the "King of Swing" and a pioneer of mixed orchestras integrating Black and white musicians, and Artie Shaw, were among the great stars of the swing era. In the domain of song and musical theater, composers Irving Berlin, an immigrant from Russia and author of standards such as "White Christmas," and George Gershwin, creator of Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess, effected a fusion between musical traditions and the jazz idiom. This creativity, often likened to a sensibility inherited from synagogue cantillation and Yiddish music, contributed in a major way to the definition of an American sound. The encounter between Jewish and African American artists, fertile but also traversed by questions of appropriation, durably marked global popular culture.

Sources & resources

• Jewish Virtual Library ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan