Freylekhe Lider

A Sing-Along with Jeanette Lewicki
Sunday, January 31 | 11am – 12:45pm Pacific | On Zoom
A collaboration with KlezCalifornia
By donation – RSVP to reserve your spot

Sing along with songs for dancing, laughing, clapping, toe-tapping, celebration, and warming up a crowd. We will include upbeat tunes with comical lyrics from Prince Nazaroff, Aaron Lebedeff, the Ruth Rubin collection, and some of Jeanette’s own arrangements for the gonifs klezmer band and the San Francisco Klezmer Experience (a.k.a. Klez-X)! These are great songs for a group or a band, or to sing around the house, and we will make written charts and lyrics available on KlezCalifornia’s Tune Archive.

Jeanette Lewicki performs & teaches in concert halls, recording studios, dreams & subways around the world. She has recorded seven CDs; the latest is “Harbst” with the San Francisco Klezmer Experience.

“I started singing Yiddish in my twenties, when I moved into a San Francisco commune where somebody had left an accordion behind. I tried it on &, being who I am, went to look in the mirror. It looked so good that I said: Oooh, I guess I have to learn to play this thing.”

Jeanette recently spent three years in New York, where she was commissioned to arrange the Yiddish children’s songs of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. Her other projects include a CD with Bessarabian singer Arkady Gendler, which critic Ari Davidow calls “a perfect example of how you record the music of older musicians whose knowledge and songs you wish to preserve.” As a faculty member of Yiddish Summer Weimar, she worked with a new generation of Yiddish songwriters in an innovative program run by her teacher, Alan Bern (music director of the band Brave Old World). Before leaving Brooklyn, Jeanette also performed in a four-accordion ensemble, led by composer Guy Klusevcek, on a sunny hillside in Green-Wood cemetery, attended by dozens of dragonflies.

Ms. Lewicki currently lives, teaches, sings and plays in Oakland, CA.