Jews and Jazz: A Musical Bond That Shaped American Sound

Two Outsider Musics Walk Into a Club

Here is a scene from 1920s New York: A young Jewish clarinetist from the Lower East Side, raised on the wailing melodies of klezmer bands at family weddings, walks into a Harlem jazz club. He hears something that sounds both foreign and familiar — improvised, emotional, bent and twisted notes that cry and shout. He sits in. He plays. Something new is born.

This scene — or versions of it — happened hundreds of times in the early twentieth century, in dozens of American cities. Jewish and Black musicians, both outsiders in white Protestant America, discovered each other’s music and created something that neither could have made alone.

The Jewish contribution to jazz is one of the great untold stories of American music.

The Neighborhood Connection

The connection began in geography. In the early twentieth century, Jewish and Black communities in America’s great cities lived in close proximity — sometimes on the same blocks. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in South Side Chicago, in parts of Philadelphia and Detroit, immigrant Jewish families and migrating Black families were neighbors.

They were also fellow outsiders. Both groups were excluded from mainstream American institutions, discriminated against in housing and employment, and confined to neighborhoods that the white Protestant majority had abandoned. This shared marginality created opportunities for cultural exchange that wouldn’t have happened in more rigidly segregated settings.

Jewish children heard jazz and blues from neighbors’ windows. Black children heard klezmer and cantorial singing from the synagogue down the street. Musicians from both traditions played in the same clubs, recorded for the same (often Jewish-owned) record labels, and learned from each other.

George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (and Jewish)

George Gershwin (born Jacob Gershowitz, 1898-1937) is perhaps the supreme example of the Jewish-jazz fusion. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side surrounded by the sounds of Yiddish theater, cantorial singing, and the emerging jazz and popular music of Tin Pan Alley.

His masterpiece, Rhapsody in Blue (1924), opens with a clarinet glissando that sounds like both a jazz riff and a klezmer wail. The piece fuses classical structure with jazz harmonies, Broadway showmanship with concert hall ambition. It is American music’s declaration of independence — and it was written by a Jewish kid from the ghetto.

Gershwin went on to compose An American in Paris, the opera Porgy and Bess (one of the few great operas about Black life, written by a Jewish composer — a fact that has generated both admiration and controversy), and hundreds of songs that became American standards: “Summertime,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

He died at 38 of a brain tumor, having already changed American music permanently.

Benny Goodman: The King of Swing

Benjamin David Goodman (1909-1986) grew up in a poor Jewish family in Chicago. His father, a tailor from the Russian Empire, enrolled him in free music classes at a local synagogue. By fourteen, Goodman was a professional musician. By twenty-five, he was the most famous clarinetist in the world.

Goodman didn’t just play jazz — he desegregated it. In 1936, he hired pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton for his small group, creating one of the first racially integrated bands in American music. He did this not as a political statement but because they were the best musicians available. When challenged, he simply said: “I don’t care what color a musician is. I just want to hear him play.”

His clarinet style blended technical precision with the kind of emotional expressiveness that came from his klezmer-influenced musical DNA. Listen to his version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” and you can hear the wedding-band energy of a klezmer freylekhs transformed into big-band swing.

The 1938 Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall — the first jazz concert in that hallowed venue — is considered one of the most important events in American music history. A Jewish kid from the ghetto brought jazz to the temple of classical music and brought the house down.

Artie Shaw and Stan Getz

Artie Shaw (born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, 1910-2004) was Goodman’s great rival — a clarinetist of extraordinary technical skill and restless musical ambition. Shaw’s hit “Begin the Beguine” was one of the bestselling records of the 1930s. Like Goodman, he led an integrated band, hiring Billie Holiday as his vocalist in 1938 — which created such controversy in the segregated South that Shaw sometimes needed armed protection.

Shaw was tormented by the gap between art and commerce, between jazz as creative expression and jazz as entertainment. He retired and un-retired multiple times, eventually abandoning music entirely to write novels. His autobiography is one of the most intellectually honest books by any musician.

Stan Getz (born Stanley Gayetzsky, 1927-1991) was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia. His tenor saxophone sound — warm, pure, almost vocal — earned him the nickname “The Sound.” Getz was instrumental in popularizing bossa nova in America through his collaborations with Brazilian musicians, culminating in the album Getz/Gilberto and the hit “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Songbook of America

The connection between Jews and jazz extends beyond performance into songwriting. Tin Pan Alley — the name for the New York-based popular songwriting industry — was largely created by Jewish composers and lyricists:

• Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin) wrote “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” and hundreds of other standards
• Jerome Kern wrote “Ol’ Man River” and pioneered the integrated musical
• Richard Rodgers (with Lorenz Hart, then Oscar Hammerstein II) created Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music
• Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck, son of a cantor) wrote “Over the Rainbow” and “Stormy Weather”

These Jewish songwriters provided jazz musicians with their raw material — the “Great American Songbook” of standards that became the foundation of jazz improvisation. When a jazz musician plays “Autumn Leaves” or “My Funny Valentine” or “All the Things You Are,” they’re playing Jewish compositions.

The Jazz Singer: “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”

In 1927, Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson (born Asa Yoelson, the son of a Lithuanian cantor). It was the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue — the film that killed the silent era and launched the talkies.

The plot is pure Jewish-American drama: Jakie Rabinowitz, a cantor’s son, rebels against his father’s wish that he follow the family tradition and instead becomes a jazz singer. The film dramatizes the tension between Old World Jewish identity and New World American ambition — a tension that every Jewish musician of the era lived daily.

The film is also deeply problematic: Jolson performs in blackface, a practice that horrifies modern audiences. The racial dynamics of a Jewish performer adopting Black performance styles while literally wearing a Black mask raises questions about appropriation, power, and the complex relationship between Jewish and Black cultures that scholars continue to debate.

The Bond That Persists

The Jewish contribution to jazz didn’t end with the swing era. Jewish musicians have remained prominent in every phase of jazz:

• Dave Brubeck (not Jewish himself — he was Presbyterian, later Catholic — but deeply connected to Jewish musicians) created “Take Five,” one of the most famous jazz compositions
• Herbie Mann brought the flute into jazz and pioneered world-music fusion
• Michael Brecker was one of the most influential tenor saxophonists of the late twentieth century
• John Zorn has spent decades fusing jazz with klezmer, punk, and Jewish experimental music in his Radical Jewish Culture series

The connection between klezmer and jazz continues to inspire musicians who see both traditions as expressions of the same thing: the outsider’s need to transform suffering into beauty, to improvise a life when the old script no longer works, and to make music that — in the words of Duke Ellington — goes “beyond category.”

For Jewish musicians in America, jazz was never just entertainment. It was a language of belonging — a way to be both Jewish and American, both rooted and free, both inheritors of an ancient tradition and inventors of something entirely new.