Despite an obvious indebtedness, Zorn banned all references to Ornette Coleman in discussions of his incendiary quartet Masada. In truth, Bar Kokhba sounds more Jewish simply because many of the instruments it features -- violin, cello, even classical guitar -- fit more into traditional Jewish music than into a contemporary jazz quartet. Here Zorn ("anger" in German) relegates his often belligerent presence offstage, like violence in a Greek tragedy. There was certainly some inspired violence at Masada's last appearance at Tonic. Zorn and drummer Joey Baron traded clangorous klez lines with trumpeter Dave Douglas and bassist Greg Cohen, who responded with cool licks straight out of Miles circa '59. It was Jewish radicalism raking over jazz traditionalism, not the other way around.

While I was listening to Anthony Coleman's "Sephardic Tinge" at the Knitting Factory, a number of musical conversions came to mind. Coleman's Middle Eastern-inspired fist-pounding might evoke comparisons to Brubeck, but Duke Ellington's really his man. Ellington could swing with the strains of Egypt as much as the wails of Harlem, and the Semitic musical conceptions are not too far apart. Just listen.

Moreover, several events at "Klezmer Sundays" and the Jewsapalooza festivals achieved the cleverness of Coleman's title (a play on Jelly Roll Morton's observation that jazz needed a "Spanish Tinge"). Krakauer imagined a clarinet jam featuring New Orleans jazz founding father Sidney Bechet and klezmer king Nauftale Branwein. At Uri Caine's Mahler treatment at the Knitting Factory, classical met jazz met klezmer met electronica. (Caine, along with Anthony Coleman, will perform at the Jewish Alternative Movement House Party at the Knitting Factory on April 26).

Now the Jews have arrived; does anybody above Houston Street care? Not the major record labels, which have yet to sign a klezmer player. If one lesson can be learned from the transformation of jazz clubs into music shuls, maybe it's that for music that looks to the future, you have to go back to the very thing you thought you'd left far behind. "We need to desecrate the Temple, know what I'm sayin'?" Don Byron used to say in his Mickey Katz gigs at St. Ann's. Byron knew quite well that it wasn't a desecration at all but a reclamation that others would come to embrace.

Related:

• Archive: “Music Review”
• Articles by David Yaffe
• Table of Contents: Apr 12, 1999 issue of New York | Subscribe!