Daniel Barenboim, KBE (born 15 November 1942) is an Argentine-born pianist and conductor. He has served as music director of several major symphonic and operatic orchestras and made numerous recordings. Currently, he is general music director of La Scala in Milan, the Berlin State Opera, and the Staatskapelle Berlin; he previously served as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris.
A Detroit area native, Daniel attended the University of Michigan where he studied acting, directing, playwriting and poetry, winning the University’s most prestigious writing award, the Hopwood, three times and publishing Daylight Savings, a collection of his poems, with Ornithology Press. In 2001, he settled down from travelling in New Orleans to focus on music and theatre. There he did everything from late night piano lounge lizard gigs to bluegrass jams...
Welcome to the eclectic world of master mixer, cratedigger, musical continent-spanner SoCalled, AKA Josh Dolgin. Looking beyond the usual pantheon of samples for hip hop artists, Socalled explores the shtetls of Eastern Europe and the Yiddish vaudeville stages of 2nd Avenue for inspiration. Armed with his Akai MPC, heritage and love for genre-bending music, SoCalled is a yiddish rapping, accordion wielding, klezmer hip hop maestro. Heralded by jewish, Klezmer, and hip hop musicians alike, he builds Jewish music from the bottom-up.
Israeli-born Koby Israelite, now based in London, is a highly gifted and versatile multi-instrumentalist.
He studied piano at the Tel Aviv conservatoire from the age of nine, and became interested in playing percussion at fourteen, at first playing on a make-shift kit of old drums and a broken cymbal. He started playing with local bands at school, playing punk covers with Hebrew lyrics. At seventeen, Israelite started studying drums with "The David Rich Drumming School" in Tel Aviv, studying for a full two years.
Kroke is a band based in Kraków, Poland. They play a mix of klezmer and other music, especially jazz. Moving from playing traditional melodies to their own compositions, Kroke have invented their own style, achieving wider fame after their fourth album, The Sounds of the Vanishing World in 1999. The name of band comes from the Yiddish name for Krakow.
web: www.kroke.krakow.pl
Chicks on Speed are a female electroclash band, born when Alex and Melissa met at the Munich Art Academy in 1997. Chicks on Speed's core members are Melissa Logan (Upstate NY, USA) and Alex Murray-Leslie (Bowral, Australia), who collaborate with amongst others Anat Ben-David (Tel Aviv, Israel), Kathi Glas (Berlin, Germany) and A.L. Steiner (NY, USA). Around Chicks on Speed there is grouped a large and ever-changing collective of musicians, producers, fashion and graphic artists, designers, film and video makers, and so on.
Jonathan Aasgaard is the principal cellist of The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since 1999.
“Mor’s voice fills the room. It's got a range and fluid flexibility……. It's rich and warm with a finely delivered emotional intensity. The Beauty and the Sea is a remarkable debut.” FRoots March 2008
Described by London’s Jewish Chronicle as a purveyor of “Spine tingling Gypsy Music”, young London-based Israeli singer Mor Karbasi sings in Ladino, Spanish, Hebrew and on rarer occasions, English. Fortune has brought her a wonderful singing voice to add to her classically trained piano playing..
