Acclaim

Review: PRISM Quartet “Generate Music”

A years long, multi-faceted project on Black and Jewish communal connection culminates in an album of new works

by Jacob Kopcienski, I Care if You Listen

“PRISM radically reimagines the saxophone quartet as a platform for facilitating cross-cultural artistry and community connections. The ambitious project transforms a visceral museum encounter with anti-Black and antisemitic Nazi iconography into an ecosystem of collaborations between Black and Jewish artists. From this, Generate Music has created a timely, stylistically rich, and utterly profound body of music, poetry, and dialogue.”
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Overdue Ovation: PRISM Saxophone Quartet

by Tom Greenland, JazzTimes

“One final collaboration, arguably PRISM’s finest offering, is the 2026 release Generate Music. The title is a clipping of Entartete Musik (“degenerate music”), the Nazi regime’s term for any music deemed subversive and/or inferior. Matthew Levy, a Jew who grew up in a mostly Black neighborhood of Philadelphia, was struck by an image of Nazi propaganda he saw while touring Croatia in 2018, an image of a Black alto saxophonist with grossly exaggerated facial features and a Star of David prominently emblazoned on his suit label.

“This crass and convenient conflation of Black and Jewish cultures eventually induced Levy to “clip the script,” removing the “de” from “degenerate” to fashion a new title for a work that explores the complexity of the two communities’ relationships. The project includes eight new commissions written by Black and Jewish composers (Ursula Rucker, Tyshawn Sorey, Fred Wesley, Diane Monroe, Myra Melford, Yotam Haber, David Krakauer, Susan Watts), performed by musicians who straddle the classical/jazz boundary.

“Watching live performances of this provocative and timely work, one is struck by the creative and potentially productive collision of musical and social cultures, particularly in view of current political crises abroad and at home. Our collective fear, frustration and ultimate anger are manifested most directly in Ursula Rucker’s vocal inflections and plainspoken poetry. On “Let Us Gather & Go All Together, Can We?” she details the pain caused by the fatal shooting of her eldest brother, Ricardo Angelo Rucker, by a Jewish pharmacist, and her subsequent struggles to forgive, her voice cracking in remembrance.

On Wesley’s “Requiem for AJ,” Rucker gives a eulogy for three civil rights activists (one Black, two Jewish) murdered by the Klan, repeatedly asking the audience, with a world-weary mixture of skepticism and hope: “Do you care? Do you?” Out of its entire oeuvre, Generate Music is PRISM Quartet’s most direct address, a breaking of the fourth wall, a call to attention (and perhaps action), a refraction and reflection of the world we live in.”
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“PRISM Quartet Explores Black-Jewish History and Connection on ‘GENERATE MUSIC’”

by New York Trend

“Co-curated by PRISM and the late Helen Haynes, “GENERATE MUSIC” is both a musical collaboration and an exploration of how art can confront difficult histories while creating space for understanding.

Rather than offering easy answers, the project embraces complexity, using jazz, klezmer, funk, poetry and contemporary classical music to examine what divides communities — and what can bring them together.”
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Let conscience ring

by Shaun Brady, Chamber Music Magazine

“An ambitious commissioning and presenting project generated not just music, but also empathy and searching questions.”
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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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