Klezmer fans and Deadheads: How Ashkenaz Festival is merging musical styles this summer

This interview originally aired on Culturally Jewish_, The CJN's podcast covering Canadian Jewish arts and culture. Hear the full episode and subscribe at thecjn.ca/culture._

There’s a certain type of Jew, usually Ashkenazi, sometimes Israeli, with a mop of curly hair, an acousitc guitar and an affinity for marijuana, who will inevitably love bands like The Grateful Dead and Phish. Those groups are collectively known as “jam bands”, which play lengthy, musically complex songs, often in concert, always with a hefty reliance on improvisation.

Once synonymous with psychedelic drugs, the jam band scene has gone mainstream in recent decades—and for a myriad reasons we’ll dissect on today’s episode of Culturally Jewish, Jews are buying front-row tickets.

This summer, the Ashkenaz Festival and Magen Boys Entertainment are putting on their first-ever summer jam concert series. Producer Michael Fraiman visited the first show to ask concert-goers why they felt Jews loved jam bands; after that, Ashkenaz artistic director Eric Stein joins Ilana and David for a discussion about the surprisingly deep connections between Deadheads and Yiddishkeit.