Jordan Wax: Contemporary and Traditional Yiddish Music (with a dash of New Mexico)

Jordan Wax is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and traditional musician based in New Mexico. For the past twenty five years he has studied intergenerational music traditions with elders from a variety of cultural lineages in the Missouri Ozarks, Central Mexico, Ecuador, Northern New Mexico, and Greater Yiddishland, Wax’s innovative compositions are rooted his own deep Diaspora communities and in three decades of friendships with elders who have imparted the subtleties of spoken secular Yiddish and the musical sensibilities of the of the professional klezmer–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but as pathways to Yiddish continuity, vitality, and relevance which must be renewed in each generation through radical creativity and cross-cultural pollination with the rhythms of Yiddish’s diasporic homes.

All Ages $20/adv $25/door

More about Jordan Wax

In 2024 Jordan participated in the Center for New Jewish Culture’s year-long fellowship with an interdisciplinary cohort of groundbreaking Jewish artists, and in 2025 received the Freed Fellowship for rising leaders in Yiddish and Jewish culture in conjunction with his work performing and curating programs for KlezKanada’s summer retreat in Montreal. In 2024 he served as a New Mexico Humanities Council Speaker and, along with his fellow Lone Piñoneros, present in rural communities across New Mexico about cultural abundance and complexity in New Mexico’s traditional music legacy. In 2022 his work to revitalize creativity and community around a rare Northern New Mexico figure dance called el taleán was funded by the Northern Río Grande National Heritage Area, and his effort to renew community dances based on the unique repertoire of Northern New Mexico social dance figures was sponsored by New Mexico Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019 Jordan received the Parsons Award from the American Folklife Center, which brought him to the Library of Congress in Washington DC to study the Library’s collection of field recordings of Northern New Mexican musicians, and was invited to teach and perform Northern New Mexico fiddle and dance alongside traditional masters from across North America and Europe at Centrum’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA. In the same year his work with Lone Piñon was endorsed by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, who described the project as “Truly exceptional… A leading ensemble committed to the preservation and elevation of the traditional musical forms of the Northern New Mexico region….an ensemble that embodies cultural integrity for the purpose of continuing treasured art forms that keep our communities thriving.”