Asefa on Leonard Lopate Show

Feb. 29: WNYC 93.9FM - Leonard Lopate Show, 12p-1p Along with Kay Turner, head of the Brooklyn Arts Council and fellow musicians from the upcoming Brooklyn Arab Music Festival, Samuel Thomas of Asefa will be a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show, discussing Asefa and discussing the role of Arab music in the Sephardic community in Brooklyn.

"Common Chords II": A Celebration of Muslim and Jewish Music

"Common Chords II": A Celebration of Muslim and Jewish Music is a concert occuring at Temple Beth Sholom (401 Roslyn Rd, Roslyn Heights, NY 11577) on Saturday night, 3/1/2008 at 7:30 pm (5:30 pm for Mincha/Ma'ariv, followed by a 6:30 pm Lite Bite Middle Eastern Cafe). If you haven't heard the music of Salman Ahmad of the musical group Junoon & world leading klezmer artist Yale Strom, then you're missing something... You can get an idea about their styles by going to their respective web sites: http://www.junoon.com/ and http://www.yalestrom.com/

If your kids and teens were not planning on attending this concert, have them listen to the music on-line, I bet they'll want to go!!! These performers are more often at college campuses, central park, the UN General Assembly, and together they combine sufi-rock with klezmer, jazz, and Sephardic motifs.
$10 adults, $5 students Salman Ahmad worked with Madonna and Bono from U2 in 2007 and has been touring actively, and has primarily focused on performing and addressing at Universities the U.S. such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford, MIT, UT-Austin etc. Salman has been teaching a class on music titled "Islamic Music and Culture of South Asia", as a guest faculty at the Queens College of NY. Salman recently worked with Annie Lennox, Sarah McLachlan and Dave Stewart in a song for 'Green Peace'. In short, he rocks!

Yale Strom is a violinist, composer, filmmaker, writer, photographer, playwright that is a pioneer among revivalists in conducting extensive field research in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans among the Jewish and Rom communities. Strom has become the world's leading ethnographer-artist of klezmer music and history. He has been composing his own New Jewish music, which combines klezmer with Hasidic nigunim , Rom, jazz, classical, Balkan and Sephardic motifs and has performed with many world renown musicians. Strom has lectured extensively throughout the Untied States and Europe and taught at NYU for the 4 years, where he created the course Artist-Ethnographer Expeditions . He is on the advisory board of the Center for Jewish Creativity, based in Los Angeles and an Artist-in-Residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University. This is not your zadye's klezmer music!