CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Seth Rogovoy
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City/Place:
Hudson, New York
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Country:
United States
Life
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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.
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 [email protected]
Visit my author page at Simon & Schuster
Thanks,
Seth
Integration is a superpower...
This technological matrix originating in Bahia, Brazil closely integrates creators around the world with each other and the entire planet. It is able to do so because it is small-world (see Wolfram):
Bahia itself, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place on earth throughout all of human history, refuge for Lusitanian Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition, Indigenous both apart and subsumed into a brilliant sociocultural matrix comprised of these three peoples and more, is small-world.
America is small-world. Mozambique is small-world. Central Asia is small-world. Ukraine is small world...
Human society, the billions of us in all the complexity of our relationships, is small-world. Neural structures for human memory are small-world. Neural structures in artificial intelligence are small-world...
In a small world great things are possible. In a small-world matrix they are universal.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (JOHANNESBURG): piano, Blue Note recording artist
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
Dear friends & colleagues,
Having arrived in Salvador 13 years earlier, I opened a record shop in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for Bahian musicians, many of them magisterial but unknown.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Bahians and other Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix (people who have passed are not removed), then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
* I renegotiated sync rates for Earl and for The Flamingos. Now when I hear "Speedo" in a movie soundtrack (Goodfellows and others), or "I Only Have Eyes for You" (a million films), I remind myself that the artists (and now their heirs) were/are getting double what they were getting before.
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Recent access to this matrix and Bahia are from these places (a single marker can denote multiple accesses).
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Nduduzo Makhathini
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX