The Heart Deciphers by Jordan Wax

This album marks Jordan Wax’s Yiddish recording debut, though it builds on decades of work as a performing and recording artist in multiple intergenerational music traditions in the Missouri Ozarks, Central Mexico, Ecuador, Northern New Mexico, and Greater Yiddishland. Wax is currently based in New Mexico where he performs with Lone Piñon, a traditional New Mexican string band, and leads bilingual children’s programming that helps families establish a positive context around linguistic diversity and regionalism in partnership with the Santa Fe Public Libraries.

”טײַטש [The Heart Deciphers]” was produced in Albuquerque by Jeremy Barnes of the legendary indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel (currently Hawk + a Hacksaw) and features Barnes on drums, Margot Leverett, co-founder of The Klezmatics and star of the Klezmer Mountain Boys on clarinet, and acclaimed klezmer violinist Jake Shulman-Ment on violin. Wax concurrently recorded a full length children’s album with the same band, and later recorded an EP of additional material in Kishinev with Moldovan lautari master Marin Bunea and his taraf (folk ensemble).

Lyrically טײַטש is an incisively political and thoroughly contemporary work. Each track directly addresses specific social challenges of our time, from climate change, to the COVID pandemic, to class struggle and inter-ethnic conflict. Wax tackles each of these subjects with sensitivity, authenticity and emotional presence.

This is a stylistically broad work, featuring in equal parts emotionally punchy indie rock stylings that Barnes is known for, deeply earnest, timeless ballads, and klezmer melodies that showcase Leverett and Shulman-Ment’s unique voices. These styles integrate seamlessly and create a whole that transcends time and place, mixing the ultra-contemporary with the ancestral and timelessly familiar.