Seth Rogovoy via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Seth Rogovoy:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Seth Rogovoy
- City: Hudson, New York
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Seth Rogovoy is an author, award-winning critic, and cultural journalist.
Seth sometimes moonlights as an editor, radio commentator, lecturer, teacher, cultural programmer, marketing consultant, talent buyer’s agent, record producer, theatrical producer, artist manager, songwriter, and amateur photographer and musician.
Termed “American Jewry’s greatest Dylan scholar” by Religion News Service, Seth is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet(Scribner, 2009) a full-length analysis of Bob Dylan’s life and work, and The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books, 2000), the all-time bestselling guide to klezmer music, and which has been translated into Chinese and Korean.
For over a quarter century, Seth’s work has appeared in the English-language national Jewish newsweekly, the Forward, to which Seth is a contributing editor.
Seth is the recipient of a 2016 Simon Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for excellence in arts and criticism, for his portrait of musician Leonard Cohen published in Hadassah Magazine in its April/May 2015 issue.
Seth is editor and publisher of The Rogovoy Report – an online magazine of cultural and critical news and observations. The Rogovoy Report also produces daily and weekly e-newsletters — BerkshireDaily and HudsonValleyDaily — five-day-a-week e-newsletters aggregating news, features, and commentary from around the corner and around the globe, and weekly cultural preview e-newsletters, BerkshireWeekend and HudsonValleyWeekend. (All of these newsletters are available for free signups by clicking on the links.)
Seth also does cultural, editorial and marketing consulting. He is the programming consultant for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., where he curates the center’s annual YIDSTOCK: Festival of New Yiddish Music, which debuted in summer 2012, and which continues under his artistic direction. He is the producer of FROM SHTETL to STAGE: A Celebration of Yiddish Music & Culture, debuting at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2019.
Seth’s weekly cultural commentary can be heard on WAMC Northeast Public Radio Network on Midday Magazine on Fridays between 12:50 and 1 p.m.
Seth was editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Berkshire Living, a perennially award-winning regional lifestyle and culture magazine that served the greater Berkshire region of western Massachusetts, southwestern Vermont, eastern New York, and northwestern Connecticut faithfully for six years. He was also editor-in-chief of Berkshire Living‘s spinoff publications, including BBQ: Berkshire Business Quarterly and Berkshire Living Home+Garden, as well as Berkshire Living’s online platforms and social media feeds. Seth’s regular column of music and cultural criticism, “The Beat Goes On,” that ran in every issue of Berkshire Living, garnered him four consecutive awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association for General Criticism.
For nearly 30 years, Seth has been a rock and jazz critic, primarily for Berkshire Living and the Berkshire Eagle, and also for dozens of other newspapers and magazines. Seth’s cultural journalism – including essays and reviews on dance, books, theater, film, and visual arts – has appeared in newspapers and magazines including Newsday, the Boston Phoenix, Haaretz (Israel), Jewish Quarterly (UK), Jewish Press (UK), Tablet, Chronogram, the Woodstock (N.Y.) Times, the Bennington (Vt.) Banner, the Register-Star (Columbia County, N.Y.), the Berkshire Jewish Voice, Edutopia, Gastronomica, Moment, Leak CD Magazine, Audition, On the Tracks, the Black and White City Paper of Birmingham, Ala., and others. He is also a regular contributor to WBUR’s online arts and culture magazine, The ARTery, and to Kripalu’s wellness and yoga blog, Thrive.
Seth frequently writes about Jewish music and culture for publications including Forward, Pakn Treger, and Hadassah Magazine.
Seth writes, teaches, and lectures extensively about klezmer and Bob Dylan. His live, one-man, multimedia programs about klezmer, The Essential Klezmer, and Bob Dylan, The Kabbalah of Bob Dylan, have been presented at universities, JCCs, museums, cultural centers, and synagogues across the U.S. and in England, where he has been an invited presenter at the renowned Limmud Conference three times.
Seth is currently working on Rockin’ the Shtetl, a multi-platform project exploring the affinities between 19th-century Eastern European Yiddish songwriters and musicians and 20th-century American folk-rock poets and protest singers. This is simultaneously being created as a multimedia program with live music (which received a work-in-progress showing at CR10 Arts in Linlithgo, N.Y., in summer 2015, and at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., in summers 2016 and 2017) and as a long-form written narrative.
Seth has taught a variety of college-level and adult-ed courses on klezmer, Jewish music, and Bob Dylan, about whom he has written extensively.
Seth produced the eponymous debut album by Ryder Cooley & Dust Bowl Faeries, which Chronogram magazine termed “brilliantly produced.”
Seth is also a singer-guitarist and has led several bands, including the Rolling Rogovoy Revue, Rumble Strip, and Seth Rogovoy and the Grove Street Band. He has performed at Club Helsinki in Hudson, N.Y., and Great Barrington, Mass.; at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England; in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass.; at Rafi’s Steakhouse in Tiberias, Israel; at Pini’s Pub and on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem; and at Bob Dylan tribute concerts throughout the Northeastern United States. He has also read performance poetry at The Stone in the East Village, N.Y.C.
Seth is an amateur photographer. His photos have been published in the Albany Times Union, Berkshire Living, and all over Facebook. He is also a devoted practitioner of Ashtanga yoga.
Seth served two terms as a member of the Board of Selectmen in Pownal, Vt., and is a past president of a food co-op and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Williamstown, Mass. Seth was the founder and lay leader of the South Berkshire Minyan, a traditional Jewish prayer group, based at a shtibl in Great Barrington, Mass., from 2003 to 2006.
A native New Yorker, Seth was born in Jackson Heights, N.Y., lived briefly in Bay Shore, and grew up in Islip, N.Y., where he attended public schools.
A graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where he has taught courses on Bob Dylan and klezmer, Seth lived in the Berkshires, where he raised a family, for about three decades. His daughter is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, and his son, based in Los Angeles, is a rock star who performs under the name Barely Alive.
Seth lives in Hudson, N.Y., and New York City.
Contact Information
- Email: seth@rogovoy.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: rogovoy
- ▶ Instagram: srogovoy
- ▶ Website: http://rogovoyreport.com
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Seth Rogovoy is available for talks, classes, and seminars about Bob Dylan, in addition to presenting his multmedia program, in which he distills the essence of BOB DYLAN: Prophet Mystic Poet into an hour-long journey through spoken word, digital video, recorded music and live music.
Seth is also available to do all of the above (lectures, classes, multimedia program) about klezmer music, based on THE ESSENTIAL KLEZMER: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, the all-time bestselling guide to klezmer.
Reach me at seth@rogovoy.com
Visit my author page at Simon & Schuster
Thanks,
Seth
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
