Join violinist Zoe Aqua (NY/Romania) and accordionist Jordan Wax (Santa Fe) for an acoustic concert presenting Zoe and Jordan's compositions. Both artists are based in decades of study of Ashkenazi musical traditions and have recently created bodies of contemporary work that explore how those traditions can be renewed and recontextualized in conversation with the diverse cultures they neighbor in diaspora.
$20 suggested donation, no one turned away.
From 2021-23, Aqua was a Fulbright scholar in Romania, living in Cluj and working as a folklorist studying folk music traditions in the multi-ethnic Transylvania region and developing relationships with elder fiddle players with whom she studied and conducted field research. Her recent album, "In a Sea of Stars" (Adyaropa Records 2025) synthesizes her experience as a klezmer fiddler with a deep involvement with poly-ethnic traditions in Northern Romania, bringing a Jewish voice back into dialogue with a landscape from which it has been absent since the Holocaust.
Wax lives in Santa Fe County, where for the past 15 years he has studied heirloom music and language traditions in the context of Hispanic New Mexican, Mexican, and Ashkenazi cultures. His 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 professional klezmer–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but as pathways to 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. His recent album, "The Heart Deciphers" (Borscht Beat 2025), features original compositions that comment on contemporary issues from a secular Yiddish-language perspective rooted in New Mexico.