The Asheville Jewish Community Center has been awarded the Making Music Happen grant, funded by Marvin J. Pertzik and the Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary
Griggs Burke Foundation and sponsored by the JCC Association’s Making Music Happen Centennial Grant Initiative. The Making Music Happen grant supports JCCs and their communities as they explore Jewish meaning through music. The grant affirms and celebrates the centrality of music to Jewish life in North America.
The Asheville Jewish Community Center’s Music Specialist, Penny White, and Lael Gray, Asheville JCC Executive Director, submitted an Asheville Jewish Folk Music Collection Project proposal to the JCCA’s Making Music Happen in July of this year. The proposal was chosen from a pool of competitive applications, and the grant was awarded to the Asheville Jewish Community Center in September.
The vision of the Asheville Jewish Folk Music Collection Project is to bring together local Asheville Jewish musicians and singers to record original compositions and public domain songs – all with Jewish content and themes – and professionally produce a CD that will be shared with the community at a concert and CD release event.
The project will bring together Jewish musicians from all across the community to collaborate and share both Jewish musical heritage and some new, original voices. These recordings will also serve to document a musical “snapshot in time” that will be preserved and available for future generations to understand the story of Jewish Asheville through music. The concert and CD release will allow the entire community to enjoy and share a local Jewish folk music experience.
For the Asheville Jewish Folk Music Collection Project, participating Asheville musicians will select an original composition with Jewish and/or Hebrew content or a piece of Jewish music that is in the public domain to record for the CD. Musicians will also be invited to collaborate with each other on their recordings, and one of the recordings could include all of the participating musicians and singers in a “We are the world” style recording that is relevant to our Jewish community’s history and identity. Musicians will spend two days at Echo Mountain Studios creating a digital master of the recordings that will be used to create a CD and approximately 300 copies.
We’re excited to announce a live performance of the Asheville Jewish Folk Music Project on May 21, 2017 at New Mountain at 3 pm! We hope you can join us on the 21st to help us celebrate the story of Jewish Asheville told through music!
