JORDAN WAX | דזשזאָרדן װאַקס

Accordionist and Yiddish songster Jordan Wax comes from New Mexico’s high desert. Like the wide arroyos that capture the monsoon rain, his music gathers the tributaries of many traditions — his Eastern European family’s Yiddish songs and the old Norteño polkas, marches and chotises he inherited from elder accordionists. Wax’s compositions summon intergenerational voices with the specificity that comes from devotion to detail, dialect and cultural continuity. His music is encoded with centuries of wisdom embedded in the Yiddish language. He’s a hyper-regionalist. But that specificity opens onto something universal — a connection to the generations behind all of us.

After a decade honing his voice and accordion in rowdy cantinas, concert halls and national festivals, he stumbled into a deep friendship with Misha Limanovich, a Holocaust survivor, WWII resistance fighter, soviet trucker, and enthusiastic Pizza Hut delivery driver. Limanovich was a wellspring of stories and pre-Holocaust Yiddish and he radically altered Wax’s sense of the Yiddish language’s creativity and vitality. Limanovich offered Wax a living example of how to embody his own history and farflung musical curiosity — from Ozark fiddling to Andean accordion music — into an expression of Yiddish culture broad enough to contain it all. Wax’s original songs bring a long Yiddish tradition into urgent dialogue with the present.  

Wax has released a two-album cycle of original Yiddish music on New York’s Borscht Beat label.  Both records — The Heart Deciphers and Pantakozak and Other New Yiddish Songs for Kids feature — were produced by Jeremy Barnes of Neutral Milk Hotel and feature tradition bearers from the Ashkenazi klezmer and Roma lautari communities. His forthcoming album, El Diluvio, is a multicultural collaboration with Gora Gora Orkestar, a 10-piece klezmer brass/mariachi ensemble.  No Depression called his work “a testament to survival,” and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures described his collective’s work with New Mexican traditions as “a truly exceptional embodiment of cultural integrity that keeps our communities thriving.” 

As a soloist and as a member of Lone Piñon, Wax has performed at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Hiawatha Traditional Music Festival (Marquette, MI), Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), Yiddish New York Festival (New York, NY), In the Fiddler’s House with Itzhak Perlman (Houston, TX), Centrum Kultury Jidysz (Warsaw, Poland), Yidstock Festival (Amherst, MA), Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) and more. He is the recipient of the Parsons Fund Award from the American Folklife Center, the Freed Fellowship from KlezKanada and a fellowship from the Center for New Jewish Culture. 

Press Photos

Credit: Annie Quick