Philip Bohlman - ' 'Some for Laughs, Some for Tears' : Jazz, the Caberetesque, and Jewish Film Music'

Philip Bohlman's teaching and research covers a broad range, with special interests in music and modernity, folk and popular music in North America and Europe, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and religion, and music at the encounter with racism and colonialism. He has written and published extensively and among his most recent publications are 'Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity' (2013), 'Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe' (2011), 'Jewish Music and Modernity' (2008), and 'World Music: A Very Short Introduction' (2002). He also edited 'The Cambridge History of World Music' (2013) and co-edited 'Jazz Worlds/World Jazz' (2016) with Goffredo Plastino. An active performer as well as a scholar, Prof. Bohlman is the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society. The eight-member Jewish cabaret troupe is the ensemble-in-residence of the Division of the Humanities at the University. The group’s recent projects include 'As Dreams Fall Apart' (2014), a CD that draws on music from Yiddish and German-Jewish films from the 1920s to the post-Holocaust generation of the 1950s, and for which the ensemble received a 2016 Grammy Award nomination. Bohlman and the New Budapest Orpheum Society were the recipients of the 2011 Noah Greenberg Award for Historical Performance from the American Musicological Society. This event is sponsored by the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and is free and open to the public. For details, please contact kgindler@uchicago.edu.