In New York Noise, Tamar Barzel chronicles a six-year period from 1992 to 1998 in which avant-garde musicians in New York's “downtown scene” were intensively engaged in exploring issues related to Jewish culture and identity. Barzel focuses on the music of the composer and free jazz saxophonist John Zorn, the No Wave band God Is My Co-Pilot, singer and spoken-word artist Shelley Hirsch, and the free jazz pianist Anthony Coleman, but one of the many strengths of the book is her interviews with a number of important musicians in the downtown scene. The book is published as part of the Ethnomusicology Multimedia project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which provides access to music and videos that introduce the artists and music Barzel discusses. The multimedia is a tremendous benefit to the reader and will enhance the book's success in the classroom. New York Noise will likely appeal to fans of the music, scholars working at the intersection of Jewish culture and identity, and musicologists.

One challenge Barzel faces in the book is how to frame her subject: a diverse group of loosely affiliated musicians incorporating Jewish themes into their work over an extended period of time. Similar to the way in which Allen Ginsberg's 1955 reading of “Howl” catalyzed the Beat movement, the Jewish downtown musicians coalesced around a series of concerts that John Zorn curated for the 1992 Munich Art Project under the banner “Radical New Jewish Culture.” After the festival, the phrase “Radical Jewish Culture” (RJC) stuck and it remains the title of a massive and ongoing series of recordings on Zorn's record label, Tzadik. Both fans of the music and scholarly readers will appreciate the critical spotlight that Barzel shines on her subject. She argues persuasively that the artists associated with RJC are too diverse to constitute a movement. Her interviews testify to this fact with a number of important contributors expressing resistance to the phrase “Radical Jewish Culture,” arguing that their music is neither radical in a political sense nor authentically Jewish. Barzel's solution is to speak of RJC as a moment, but it is a solution that she stumbles over throughout the book. As she readily admits, the RJC musicians began incorporating Jewish themes into their work prior to 1992, and some of the musicians reached a height of productivity and success well after 1998. Barzel argues that what she has designated as the RJC moment represents a particularly fertile period in which the musicians were in conversation with each other and were defining their musical approaches to Jewish topics. On my reading, the periodization seems artificial and Barzel struggles to justify it. This issue may prove to be an irritant to some readers, but I suspect many will find this to be a small flaw in an otherwise extremely rewarding book.

The early chapters address the emergence of the RJC moment and discuss central issues, such as the difficulty of defining Jewish music, jazz and race, and the adequacy and fit of the phrase “Radical Jewish Culture.” Barzel gives a detailed account of the origins of RJC, particularly the Munich concerts. Her interviews capture insightful comments from a wide range of musicians, which she then weaves together into an engaging and critical analysis of RJC. To name just a few of these musicians, fans of the music will enjoy hearing how the Jewish backgrounds of the drummer Joey Baron, the multi-instrumentalist Marty Ehrlich, and the guitarist Marc Ribot influence their approach to their RJC-inspired music. In these chapters, Barzel establishes the interpretive framework for the book, an important feature of which is that the RJC musicians are not naively striving after authenticity. As Barzel describes it, the avant-garde sensibilities of the musicians compel them to get “Jewish music wrong” with the goal of creating a new “Jewishly usable aesthetic” (10, 16). Coming to the book among the benighted class of fans, I enjoyed these chapters immensely. My only criticism is that I believe there is more to be said about the relationship between RJC and African American free jazz, particularly the Black Artists Group in St. Louis (where Zorn studied with Oliver Lake) and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which began in Chicago but branched out to New York and beyond.

The three chapters that follow are devoted to more intensive analyses of the music of John Zorn, God Is My Co-Pilot, Shelley Hirsch, and Anthony Coleman. Barzel's musical analysis is consistently illuminating, a significant feat considering how cacophonous and challenging some of the music is. For instance, she offers an extended discussion of Zorn's piece Kristallnacht, which premiered at the 1992 Munich festival followed by a US premier at the Knitting Factory two months later. Zorn carefully composed Kristallnacht and planned its performance to have a powerful physical and experiential impact on its audience. One movement uses a waveform oscillator to create piercing tones that Barzel describes as a “physical assault on the audience” (98). Similarly, the Knitting Factory performance simulated Nazi transport trains by being held in a standing-room-only space with no exit and beginning the performance with train whistles. Barzel mocks the disparity between the horrors of the Holocaust and standing in an overcrowded downtown club, but in doing so it becomes apparent that not all of her criticisms of Zorn hit the mark. She also underplays the significance of Zorn's Masada project, claiming that this work fails to establish a “critical discourse” on Jewish themes and instead promotes a universalized mysticism (137). Later in the book, she criticizes Zorn's music for being “decidedly masculine,” a charge that I find difficult to understand (179). Barzel's ambivalent encounter with Zorn's music is at odds with the acclaim he received for recent concerts celebrating his sixtieth birthday and, thus, her analysis fails to account for the continued appeal of his music to critics and audiences. Nonetheless, New York Noise is a welcome supplement to John Brackett's well-received study, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), a work that largely brackets Zorn's Jewish-themed music.

Barzel's assessments of God Is My Co-Pilot, Hirsch, and Coleman are more affirmative but equally penetrating. God Is My Co-Pilot, a No Wave band that Barzel describes as “Dada punk,” incorporated into their performances and recordings a number of Yiddish, Zionist, and religious songs (148). Barzel praises the band's leaders, Sharon Topper and Craig Flanagin, for their “un-idealized” approach to Jewish themes, which has a “confessional” quality that is unique among the RJC musicians (146, 177–9). Spoken-word artist Shelley Hirsch stands out for being the first artist in the downtown scene to address Jewish themes with her 1981 O Little Town of East New York, a reflection on her childhood that introduces personal and historical elements into the music of the RJC scene. Pianist Anthony Coleman is the last figure Barzel discusses and she seems to share many of his perspectives, particularly his refusal to infuse his music with a “wished-for relationship to Jewish tradition” and his view that the period under discussion was the pinnacle of RJC creativity (209).

Barzel presents the RJC moment through the music and perspectives of its musicians, but a richer account would also have included how the music was received by critics and audiences. The reader is left wondering whether a community arose in conjunction with the music and whether the RJC moment had any tangible cultural or religious impact. These criticisms aside, New York Noise fills an important void in the study of contemporary Jewish music and provides an array of insights into a unique efflorescence of Jewish culture that is sure to stimulate fans and scholars alike.