The unlikely story of the Jews who made jazz

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.

“Jews made jazz because they understood improvisation — it’s what you do when the script of history keeps changing,” he said. In other words, long accustomed to adaptation, Jews found natural kinship with a genre built on constantly changing things up.

Jews and Jazz features mini-biographies of 140 figures drawn from across the musical spectrum, including musicians, singers, composers, lyricists and business figures. Of those profiled, 136 were born Jewish, though Seeff is careful to note that religion often played a minimal role in their professional lives and artistic identities.

The book’s pages are populated with legends, including clarinettist Benny Goodman, who according to The Forward had his first lessons at a Chicago synagogue, and composer George Gershwin.

It also features four non-Jewish individuals with significant cultural links, such as Louis Armstrong, who was raised in poverty and worked for the Jewish Karnofsky family as a child. Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton is also included for his support of Israel, which included donating tour proceeds to build a hospital in Jaffa.

Seeff himself is a man of eclectic passions. He’s a former statistician and magistrate who made aliyah in November 2020, and his love affair with jazz stretches back more than 55 years, beginning at a pub in Bournemouth.

In the book’s dedication, he reflects that jazz has “only been around for just over hundred years”, yet in that time it has become one of the world’s great art forms. While many contemporary players continue to find inspiration from the golden era of the 1920s through the 1960s, Seeff insists that jazz remains, in his words, a living and “evolving art.” And with the Jewish community having been “involved in every aspect” of the genre since its very birth, that evolution is far from over.