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02/01/2017 11:01 PMMusic & More at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek (CBSRZ) in Chester opens its ninth season on Sunday, Feb. 5 with jazz singer Kathy Kosins, an award-winning performer who has performed at such celebrated musical sites as Tanglewood in the Berkshires, the Newport Jazz Festival, and the Blue Note jazz club in New York City. Pianist Earl McDonald, director of jazz studies at the University of Connecticut and composer in residence at the Hartford Jazz Society, and his trio will accompany Kosins’s performance.
After Music & More series producer David Zeleznik listened to several of Detroit-based Kosins’s selections, he said was an easy decision to bring her to Chester.
“I thought we had to get her here, an artist of her caliber doesn’t come along everyday,” he says. “I think it’s fabulous that a world-class artist is coming from Detroit to a small town in Connecticut.”
Subsequent concerts feature the Maccabeats, a rap group that combines Old Testament tradition with 21st century humor and musical sophistication on Sunday, March 19, and a return appearance by classical pianist Dalia Lazar playing Beethoven on Sunday, April 30. All concerts start at 5 p.m.
“We have a varied and diverse audience and we want to present a varied program,” Zeleznik says. “Mixing it up is part of what this concert series is about.”
Kosins, whose earlier recordings including To The Ladies of Cool and The Space In Between have received high praise from jazz critics, will formally release her newest album Uncovered Soul this spring. The album features music from jazz masters like Curtis Mayfield, Gene McDaniels, Bill Withers, the Neville Brothers, and Burt Bacharach and it also has three or Kosins’s original compositions. In all her work, Kosins delights in discovering lesser-known pieces by well-known composers to which she can bring her own interpretation.
“They are songs that have been overlooked, but they are gems, completely unhackneyed material,” she says.
A review in the Village Voice noted that Kosins “looked for songs that haven’t been beat to death.”
Music first came into Kosins’s life in an unexpected place: her father Harry’s clothing store in Detroit where many of the legends of Motown shopped, among them Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations. Some wanted more than a new outfit.
“Lou Rawls asked my father to be his manager,” she recalls.
Her father, however, never wanted her to be a musician.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you go to school. Get a real job,’” she says. “He had to hustle for a living and he wanted me to have security.”
Her father died in l994, before she had made a name for herself in the music world.
“He never got to see I was a success,” she adds.
Kosins started out singing with rock bands and came to the attention of Don Was, now the president of Blue Note records, working as a backup singer with his band Was (Not Was), and ultimately touring with the group before she started her solo career.
The Maccabeats, which will perform at CBSRZ on Sunday, March 19, started in 2007 when its members were all undergraduates at Yeshiva University in New York. Julian Horowitz, one of the original group members, likes to say the name Maccabeats was a takeoff on the name of the school’s basketball team, the Maccabees.
“We couldn’t make the basketball team so we made a singing group,” he explains. (Maccabee is a reference to Judah Maccabee, the hero of the Hanukkah story.)
Much of the Maccabeats’ musical material grows from Jewish tradition, but its media approach is distinctly modern: It has gained an international following through videos on YouTube. The group’s Hanukkah video, a parody called Candlelight, had reached 12 million views as of 2016. More recently the group did a Hanukkah rap based on the music of the Broadway hit Hamilton.
The group has sung twice at the White House for President Obama and also for Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion in New York City.
Horowitz said that while audiences are usually Jewish, the group has established a following in a wider public. They did a concert in Baltimore with a black rap group, Naturally 7, for Martin Luther King Day last year.
On Sunday, April 30, pianist Dalia Lazar will be the featured artist at Music & More. She has appeared twice at CBSRZ in the past.
“People ask us to have her every year,” Zeleznik says. “She has a big following here.”
Lazar, Croatian by birth, studied in Moscow before coming to the United States to continue her career. She has performed throughout Europe and South America as well as in this country.
The Music & More series concludes on Sunday, June 25 with a free concert open to the community by Bivolita Klezmer, a group that features the folk music of Eastern Europe. Though the music is from the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, the musicians themselves come from various ethnic backgrounds.
“Who says you have to be Jewish to play Klezmer music, or Irish to play Irish music?” asks Christina Crowder, the group’s accordionist.
Crowder spent nearly a decade living in Hungary and studying the Klezmer tradition.
“I fell in love with Klezmer music and it never let me go,” she says.
All concerts start at 5 p.m., and the three ticketed concerts are followed by receptions to meet the artists. Children under 16 are free for all concerts.
Music & More
• Jazz singer Kathy Kosins, Sunday, Feb. 5
• The Maccabeats, Sunday, March 19
• Pianist Dalia Lazar, Sunday, April 30
• Free Klezmer Concert with Bivolita, Sunday, June 25
Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek,
55 East King’s Highway, Chester
For tickets and information call CBSRZ: 860-526-8920