JORDAN WAX | דזשזאָרדן װאַקס

Jordan Wax is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and traditional musician based in New Mexico. For the past twenty five years he has studied intergenerational music traditions with elders from a variety of cultural lineages in the Missouri Ozarks, Central Mexico, Ecuador, Northern New Mexico, and Greater Yiddishland, and directed his own collaborative ensembles in the context of Ashkenazi, Ozark, and Indo-Hispanic cultural revitalizations.  He performs traditional Yiddish songs and new compositions as a soloist, norteño and Central-Mexican traditions with Mariachi Sonidos del Monte and his own ensemble, Lone Piñon, and creates bilingual children’s programming that helps families and infants establish a positive context around linguistic diversity and regionalism in partnership with the Santa Fe Public Libraries.

Wax’s innovative compositions are rooted his own deep Diaspora communities and in three decades of friendships with elders who have imparted the subtleties of spoken secular Yiddish and the musical sensibilities of the of the professional klezmer–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but as pathways to Yiddish continuity, vitality, and relevance which must be renewed in each generation through radical creativity and cross-cultural pollination with the rhythms of Yiddish’s diasporic homes.  The linguistic and musical dialects of his work align his original songs with the stories and embodied memories of his ancestors, voices which are summoned to reflect on climate collapse, perpetual war, the epidemic of abuse, the moral ambiguity of social media, and the complexities of cultural resistance and objectification in late-stage Capitalism.  His debut album, The Heart Deciphers, released in January 2025 by Borscht Beat, blends the sounds of klezmer/lautari ensembles from Moldova with rock aesthetics from the American Southwest.  As a rare full-length studio album of songwriting to come from his generation in America, the album and live show are testaments to the magic that has sustained secular Yiddish creativity and cultural continuity in the face of incredible odds and a prayer for its availability to future generations. In late 2025 he followed the release with Pantakozak and Other New Yiddish Songs for Kids, a collection of songs for children and families based on oral history work and collaboration with preschoolers that was recorded as part of the same cycle as The Heart Deciphers

Press Photos

Credit: Annie Quick