“PRISM premieres shine light in rollicking concert”
by George Grella, New York Classical Review
“With the concept and the musicians involved, the overall style of the music was a stirring klezmer funk put together in the kind of elegant and sophisticated forms and arrangements that exemplify the greatness of American popular music and the fundamental contributions of black and Jewish musicians…. The consistent quality was great musicianship and straightforward communication and sincerity, populist and intelligent, that often expressed both joy and unresolved conflicts. Sonically this had little to do with classical music but emotionally and intellectually it was exactly the kind of feeling one can get from the likes of Mahler, standard musical molds into which one pours the sounds of different groups until it bursts into something new.”
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“Sax in the City”
by Annie Levin, Parterre Box
“The aptly named PRISM Quartet delivers a sound that, at its best, can erect new geometry in the brain. Their brass line is like no other sound I have ever heard. It can mimic the human voice, creating a sound like medieval plainsong where the singing monks have been raptured, mid-note, and turned into beings of pure energy. PRISM’s music is beautiful and not quite human, in the best possible way. What a joy it is to hear this celestial sound brought down to earth and ground firmly into our political reality… Clarinet, violin, and trumpet called out to the saxophone quartet across the stage, a leaping, spirited pandemonium, transforming klezmer, jazz, gospel, and rhythm and blues into a shimmering tapestry of sound… I got to hear some of the finest musicians in the country get together to jam and noodle with ideas and sounds. The performance overall brought me back to the nineties, specifically to nineties-era multicultural utopianism. It is prefigurative, it is the music we will make after the revolution, when there will be no walls and no borders, and we can take Zion with us wherever we go.”
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“A dream of a utopian Black-Jewish music collaboration is going forward — even after the war in Gaza complicated it”
by Allan M. Jalon, The Forward
“When Jewish-American saxophonist Matthew Levy was on tour in Croatia in 2018, he visited an exhibition about “Entartete Musik,” degenerate music, as the Nazis called work that didn’t conform to their racist ideology. He saw a poster of a Black sax player wearing a Jewish star. The poster disgusted Levy, who’d grown up in a largely Black part of Philadelphia, often playing with Black musicians.
Then, it inspired him.
He dreamed of a concert that would discredit American bigotry against Blacks and Jews with music they made together and he would call it (take that, Joseph Goebbels!): Generate Music. He’d ask innovative composers from the two groups to write new pieces about mutual connections. He’d turn that poster’s ugly purpose inside-out by offering premieres of original music written and performed by some of the best Black and Jewish musicians around.”
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