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Sufi Jazz Jam
Rafi Zabor's spiritual kaleidoscope of a novel is given its first public reading. This Sufi jazz jam will combine sung settings of Ibn 'Arabi and Jelaluddin Rumi, and short compositions based on characters in the book.
Co-presented by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
$15 (includes admission to the Museum's exhibition "Female Buddhas: Women of Enlightenment in Himalayan Art".
RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART
150 West 17th Street
New York NY 10011
212.620.5000 ext. 344
Musicians: Glenn Patscha, pedal organ; Doug Weiselman, bass clarinet; Byron Isaacs, bass; Maura Ellyn, vocal;
Aaron Cass and Rafi Zabor, percussion.
Booklist Review:
"In Africa, people who drive Mercedes are called the Wabenzi, a tribe Brooklynite Zabor hopes to join at the outset of this polyrhythmic remembrance as he plans to revisit Turkey in style. But his entrancing, tragicomic story covers so much rugged and mysterious terrain, from his father's exodus from Nazi-occupied Poland to Zabor's fraught childhood (when he was still called Joel) to Sufi teachings, he hasn't yet left on his journey at the conclusion of this gorgeously jazzy autobiography, the first of four planned volumes. Swinging deliriously from the elegiac to the ecstatic as he riffs on traumatic family history and three years of hell in the early 1980s when he cared for his catastrophically ill parents, Zabor's hard-driving composition is so charged with fantastic characters, improbable events, and resplendent metaphors, it possesses the same rambunctious and uncommon power as his PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel The Bear Comes Home (1997). Zabor's ravishing style derives from his experiences as a jazz drummer and his immersion in the practices of the whirling dervishes of Turkey, and for sheer soaring beauty of imaginative language and illumination of the plexus between the mundane and the spiritual, Zabor's pyrotechnic recollection is glorious."
-Donna Seaman
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