The new album, טײַטש [The Heart Deciphers], from New Mexico-based musical and linguistic polymath Jordan Wax may focus on his love for the Yiddish language, but it’s also an exploration of larger Jewish concepts of identity in a world gone mad. The songs on the album, nearly all of which Jordan wrote, are deeply contemporary, speaking to apocalyptic climate change, the ravages of capitalism, the bloodlust of power, the loss of culture, even the current violence in Israel/Palestine. It’s also a deeply personal album, drawn from Wax’s own Jewish heritage and filled with his thoughts on some of the most difficult topics of our current time. Co-produced with fellow New Mexican Jeremy Barnes of Neutral Milk Hotel and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, the album melds klezmer instrumentation with larger indie rock arrangements, all tied together by Wax’s multi-instrumental skills (he plays nine instruments on the album). The album also features the surprising diversity of Yiddish itself. Half the songs are written in the Litvish dialect of Yiddish, while the other half are in klal-shprakh (secular literary Yiddish) and one incorporates a mish-mash of Yiddish dialects that reflects its transmission among displaced Jews of different regions in partisan camps during the Holocaust. Though a non-Yiddish speaking listener might miss this, it’s a hallmark of Wax’s work in music and language to look this deeply into the complexities of a regional language or musical dialect.
To call New Mexico-based roots musician Jordan Wax a polymath doesn’t quite begin to get at the scope of his work. He grew up around the fiddle and dance music of the Ozarks, loved Woody Guthrie, and formed a teenage garage rock band with his cousin, David Wax (of David Wax Museum), which included some early klezmer music influences. Moving to Santa Fe, he dove into New Mexico’s little-known Hispanic traditions. His acclaimed band playing this music, Lone Piñon, is responsible for reviving many of these nearly lost songs and tunes. He expanded his understanding of Spanish music by living in Ecuador and studying in Central Mexico. Even though he came from a Jewish background in Missouri, it wasn’t always easy to connect with the Yiddish and klezmer of his own heritage. The vibrant square dance culture that made Missouri old-time fiddling so much fun for Wax was not as much a part of klezmer at the time. The Holocaust had caused so much loss on a cultural level, and then the twin poles of Zionism and American assimilation drove the rest of the loss. Wax’s grandparents, for example, spoke Yiddish but his parents did not, though his dad had English translations of Yiddish literature. Retreats like KlezKamp, which has been a deeply immersive experience for many young Jewish musicians, does create community, but some aspects of the klezmer revival had felt to Wax more like an effort to save something from the past, rather than a living, vital tradition today.
To find that living tradition of Yiddish took a chance encounter in New Mexico at an organization that supports Holocaust survivors. There he met Holocaust survivor Misha Limanovich, a retired Pizza Hut driver. Misha spoke Litvish, a Northern dialect of Yiddish, but more than that he was a walking encyclopedia of folklore and information. “He had a photographic memory for stories,” Wax says. “He could remember songs and rhymes and jokes and tons of details from his life.” After escaping from two concentration camps and three ghettos in Nazi territory by the age of 15, Limanovich became a partisan fighter in what is now Belarus. After the war, he was a Soviet truck driver and then continued truck driving after he emigrated to Israel. Immigrating to New Mexico in the 2000s, it was a stroke of luck that Wax was able to find him so far from any centers of Jewish community. ”The odds of meeting someone who was born before the Holocaust in Europe and lives in Albuquerque,” Wax explains, “and we get along and have the same political and religious views and stuff, it must have been close to zero.” Limanovich gave Wax many songs, some of which appear on this album, like “Goles-March (March of the Refugees)”, a lament for Jewish statelessness and alienation that Misha had sung in his Yiddish-speaking elementary school in Poland. But Misha also gave Wax a larger perspective on Yiddish culture. “He didn’t live in Yiddish speaking environments after the Holocaust,” Wax says. “He lived in Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Polish speaking environments, but he always carried the perspective that he was living his life in Yiddish. I had never seen that and that made a huge change in my life. I saw what it feels like to have the sense of freedom that it takes to embody that even in the face of a lot of alienation and odds against you.”
Though Wax has a deeply intelligent perspective on the world and approaches the study of language and music like an outsider academic, there’s never anything fussy or pretentious about this music. He’s trying to bridge worlds with these songs. The title of the album, טײַטש, which translates to “Taytsh” is an old concept in Yiddish that refers to “meaning” or “interpretation” in language. It refers to the kind of world bridging a translator needs to use, and it references the context of language that is impossible to directly translate. No language can be torn from its cultural context without losing meaning, and Wax understands that better than most. “The songs on this album are the same songs I would have written in any language,” he says, “but they weren’t written in any language–they were written in Yiddish. And that changed them deeply.” The songs are embedded with cultural references, with Jewish religious concepts, with ancient ideas. “ In order to say those things,” he explains, speaking about writing songs in Yiddish, “you have to pull on these strings that are connected really deeply in culture and history and are a thousand years old or more.” But the songs are also informed by his own world view too, by his own perspective as a Jewish-American in the South at a time of assimilation.
Growing up Jewish in the American South is a uniquely alienating experience that other songwriters, like Mark Rubin, have talked about. Assimilation didn’t just mean leaving Yiddish behind or hiding aspects of Jewish culture, it was also reflected in non-Jewish populations that were ashamed of their regional traditions, like Missouri fiddling, which was seen as lower class. ”It was seen as rude or uncomfortable to express any specific cultural traits,” Wax explains. “So I think in that absence, I got really curious as an early teenager in anything that conveyed those kinds of languages and musical dialects and was just really attracted to it.” This is what originally drove Wax to learn the regional languages and musical traditions of the other cultures that surrounded him, from Ozark square dances to New Mexican Spanish language songs and beyond. Now that he’s learned to embrace his Jewish and Yiddish roots and has developed ways to push back against this kind of conservatism that forced people into boxes, Wax is looking to a deeply beautiful Jewish concept for his current work, doikayt or “hereness”. As he says, it’s the “ idea that Jews don’t belong in the Jewish homeland, we belong wherever we already are. We can face these issues together with our neighbors and that’s actually the best place for us to do it.” This concept helped Wax embrace the fact that he was making exhaustively researched Yiddish music in the middle of New Mexico, and it tied to his understanding of regionalism and his dedication embracing other cultures as a Jewish artist.
Wax recorded the album in New Mexico with Barnes as the producer. ”He’s just incredibly skilled in everything that has to do with engineering and the sound aspects and creating the way all the sounds fit together,” Wax says. Barnes drummed on the album, but Wax played nearly most of the other instruments with the exception of fiddle, which came from noted klezmer fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment, and clarinetist Margot Leverett of the Klezmatics. He even traveled to Moldova in Eastern Europe to record an ensemble of Romani lautari musicians for the album. These artists, who mostly spoke Romanian, brought a sound rooted in Roma music and tied to a key influence on the album, the vinyl records of Romania’s Electrecord label. Both Wax and Barnes loved the vintage aesthetic of the label’s recordings of Eastern European Romani music. Barnes’ band A Hawk and a Hacksaw have deep ties to Hungary, and part of the reason Wax wanted to work with him was because of his experience in Eastern European music. “He has a lot of non-Jewish-specific Eastern European, in situ cultural music experience,” says Wax, “which I really liked because I think I’ve been really interested in exploring the connection of Jewish music to all these other traditions. Those divisions are pretty artificial and were created later after the fact, and really, music is something that pervades boundaries of identity easier than almost anything else.”
Jordan Wax’s debut album in Yiddish may be a homecoming of sorts, a return to his own heritage after many years spent studying and performing the music of other communities. But ultimately, this album wouldn’t have been possible without having spent so long learning other cultures. And it wouldn’t feel as contemporary either. ”I feel like a lot of the work I’ve done with other traditions,” Wax says, “is a part of this, because it has all contributed to the amount of immersive learning and attunement to cultural nuance that I needed. Left to Yiddish alone, I might not have had enough access points of reference to walk that whole journey. I just feel like I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’m able to use all that knowledge to inform the creativity so that the creativity is rooted in the tradition and is a continuation of the same creativity that’s always been happening.”
טײַטש [The Heart Deciphers] is out now on Borscht Beat.
Available on Digital, 12″ Vinyl LP + 7″ Vinyl EP bundle, + 24 Page Risograph Lyric Book
Bandcamp: https://borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/album/the-heart-deciphers