ABOUT JORDAN

Missouri-born Ashkenazi-New-Mexican Jordan Wax’s music draws on a quarter-century of research: apprenticeships with elders in the communities he’s lived in and the cultures he’s lived with, and twenty years of directing ensembles in the context of cultural revitalization movements across North and South America. He brings his work in a variety of cultures together into his family’s own Yiddish as a continuation of a centuries-long tradition of Yiddish poly-culturalism and cross-cultural fertilization.

Wax’s new album, The Heart Deciphers (coming November 2024), applies deep scholarship of Yiddish language and musical dialects to a contemporary American songwriting. The album celebrates the cultural continuity and survival of secular Yiddish in diaspora and reflects our contemporary world through the eyes of Ashkenazi Diaspora in the borderlands of empire in the American Southwest/Norte Mexicano. Produced by Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeremy Barnes, the studio album (two years in the making) presents a rich and meticulously crafted soundscape that features master Jewish-American klezmer musicians Margot Leverett (clarinet), Jake Shulman-Ment (violin) as well as lautari virtuosi Marin Bunea (violin), Mihai Sorocan (accordion), Vladislav Tanas (cymbalom), and Ion Croitor (upright bass), who Wax recorded with in Chisinau, Moldova.

Wax released his first solo album in high school, and since then has gone on to record an extensive discography with his own projects (People’s Republic of Klezmerica, the S’matterchew Boys), with La Rocola Bacalao (Quito, Ecuador), David Wax Museum (Virginia), and his current New Mexico roots collective, Lone Piñon.

In 2019 he received the Parsons Award from the American Folklife Center, which brought him to the Library of Congress in Washington DC to study the Library’s collection of field recordings of Northern New Mexican musicians, and was invited to teach and perform Northern New Mexico fiddle and dance alongside traditional masters from across North America and Europe at Centrum’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA. In the same year his work with Lone Piñon was endorsed by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, who described the project as “Truly exceptional… A leading ensemble committed to the preservation and elevation of the traditional musical forms of the Northern New Mexico region….an ensemble that embodies cultural integrity for the purpose of continuing treasured art forms that keep our communities thriving.” In 2022 his work to revitalize creativity and community around a rare Northern New Mexico figure dance called el taleán was funded by the Northern Río Grande National Heritage Area, and his effort to renew community dances based on the unique repertoire of Northern New Mexico social dance figures was sponsored by New Mexico Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2024 he served as a New Mexico Humanities Council Speaker and, along with his fellow Lone Piñoneros, present in rural communities across New Mexico about cultural abundance and complexity in New Mexico’s traditional music legacy.

 
SHORT BIO 200w (for other bios, please contact Jordan’s team)

Jordan Wax is a songwriter from New Mexico who performs dynamic solo-accordion/vocal arrangements of new work in Yiddish. His innovative compositions defy tropes that Yiddish culture is a backwards-gazing historical reproduction, limited to the Orthodox or religious sphere, or connected to the state of Israel. Instead, he roots his work in his own deep Diaspora communities and in three decades of relationship with elders who have imparted the subtleties of spoken Yiddish and musical sensibilities of the of the professional klezmer musician class–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but to be renewed in each generation through radical creativity and cross-cultural pollination with the poly-ethnic languages and rhythms of Yiddish’s diasporic homes. His subjects include climate collapse, response to the war on Palestine, the epidemic of abuse, the moral ambiguity of social media, and the complexities of cultural resistance in late-stage Capitalism. His debut album, The Heart Deciphers, out in November 2024, blends klezmer/lautari ensembles from Moldova with rock aesthetics from the American Southwest. As the first full-length studio album of songwriting to come from his generation in America, the album and live show are testaments to secular Yiddish creativity and cultural continuity in the face of incredible odds.