The unlikely story of the Jews who made jazz
What links Jewish history to the art of improvisation? Author Laurence Seeff argues the connection runs deeper than most of us ever imagined.
When you think of jazz, the word “Jewish” rarely springs to mind. Yet, as author Laurence Seeff shows in his new book Jews and Jazz, the Jewish contribution to the genre has been nothing short of extraordinary.
The numbers alone tell a striking story.
While Jewish doctors and lawyers number in the hundreds of thousands, only around 1,000 Jewish musicians have played jazz across the past century, out of a total of approximately 50,000 players worldwide.
And yet their influence, as Seeff puts it, was “massively disproportionate.” Perhaps most remarkably, between 60 and 70 per cent of the 1,000 songs comprising the Great American Songbook are believed to have been written by Jews.
But how and why? As Seeff details in Jews and Jazz, Nobel laureate Philip Roth offers a possible explanation.
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