With their highly accessible ethnic world music mix and their ability to get an audience on its feet, The Afro-Semitic Experience is emerging on the festival scene and redefining the jazz concert. This is a band beyond category—a mix of spiritual, world-beat, funk, jazz, cantorial, gospel, salsa, swing . . . soul-driven music. Their concerts are celebrations where they play great music, tell stories, and offer a positive and meaningful message: Unity in the Community.

Co-founded by African-American jazz pianist Warren Byrd, and Jewish-American jazz bassist David Chevan for an interfaith Martin Luther King memorial service in 1998, The Afro-Semitic Experience has gone on to share their music at concerts, workshops, and worship services all across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Their music is an intricate tapestry of the distinct cultures and heritages of the members of the group. They weave stories and music together as they celebrate and explain the Jewish and African-American sacred traditions.

Whether it’s Gospel, Klezmer, Nigunim, Spirituals, or Swing the Afro-Semitic Experience rocks the room with its intricate infectious melodies and its solid grooves. This is a group that is as comfortable playing a freylakh as they are swinging a blues, that knows how to playing either a bulgar or some funk. Multi-cultural soul.  Through their concerts, recordings and workshops, they are actively creating an artistic response to anti-Semitism and racism of all forms.

More info: http://afrosemiticexperience.net/

Rain date: July 6

Sponsored by the Friends of Forbes Library and the Hosmer Gallery.