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Anthony Russell: Conversation, Community, and Connections
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Join GJC for an intimate evening of incredible music and deep conversation. Twelve years after making his professional operatic debut in the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Appomattox with the San Francisco Opera Company, Anthony Russell is now a vocalist, composer, and arranger specializing in Yiddish song. Anthony’s work in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish musical forms leads to an exploration of his own roots through the research, arrangement, and performance of a hundred years of African American roots music. The complexities of the Black and Jewish experience align, diverge, and inform each other in ways that are sometimes hard to talk about, but often music and culture provide space to understand things differently. Germantown Jewish Centre is pleased to offer a very special opportunity to explore the complex set of histories, identities, and connections between the Black and Jewish experience, and through the lens of music, try to understand where there are parallels that build solidarity, and where there are divergences that increase understanding.
To get to know a little bit about Anthony before the program, please consider visiting the following links:
anthonyrussellbass.com
https://anthonyrussellbass.bandcamp.com/releases
https://jewishcurrents.org/translating-black-lives-matter-into-yiddish/
About Anthony Russell: Twelve years after making his professional operatic debut in the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Appomattox with the San Francisco Opera Company, Anthony Russell is now a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in Yiddish song. Anthony’s work in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish musical forms led to a musical exploration of his own roots through the research, arrangement and performance of a hundred years of African American roots music, resulting in the album Convergence (2018), a collaboration with klezmer consort Veretski Pass exploring the sounds of one hundred years of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music.
In 2017, Anthony teamed up with accordionist and pianist Dmitri Gaskin to win the Concorso Internacional de Canciones en Idish (Der Idisher Idol) in Mexico City, eventually forming a duo, Tsvey Brider (“Two Brothers”), for the composition and performance of new songs in the Yiddish language. Over the past two years, Tsvey Brider has been featured in Berlin’s Radical Jewish Culture Festival, toured Poland and performed for culture and music festivals all over the United States.
Anthony’s work in Jewish music has brought him to stages in Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, New York, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow, Symphony Space in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, as well as Limmud Fests across the United States and Europe.
He lives in Massachusetts with his husband of three years, Rabbi Michael Rothbaum of Congregation Beth Elohim in Acton, MA.
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