Research

Cover of Transcultural Jazz

My music making and pedagogy also inform and are informed by my research activity, especially with respect to Transcultural Jazz. My book titled Transcultural Jazz: Israeli Musicians and Multi-Local Music Making is now out with Routledge’s Transnational Studies in Jazz Series. The book studies jazz performance and composition through the examination of the transcultural practices of Israeli jazz musicians and their impact globally. An impressive number of Israeli jazz performers have received widespread exposure and worldwide acclaim, creating music that melds aspects of American jazz with an array of Israeli, Jewish and Middle Eastern influences and other non-Western musical traditions. While each musician is developing their own approach to musical transculturation, common threads connect them all. Unraveling and analyzing these entangled sounds and related discourses lies at the center of this study. This book provides broad insight into the nature, role and politics of transcultural music making in contemporary jazz practice. Focusing on a particular group of Israeli musicians to enhance knowledge of modern Israeli society, culture, discourses and practices, the research and analyses presented in this book are based on extensive fieldwork in multiple sites in the United States and Israel, and interviews with musicians, educators, journalists, producers and scholars.

Publications

Lemish, Noam. 2024. Transcultural Jazz: Israeli Musicians and Multi-Local Music Making. Routledge, UK.

Lemish, Noam. 2022. “Just Making It Up: Structure and Spontaneity in Music and Teaching”. Critical Studies in Improvisation/ Études critiques en improvisation Vol. 15, No. 1.

Lemish, Noam. 2020. “Audiotopias of the Multi-Local Musician: Israeli Jazz Musicians, Transcultural Jazz and the Polyphony of Style”. Jazz perspectives 12, no. 2: 227–245.

Lemish, Noam. 2018. “Israeli Jazz Musicians in the International Scene: A Case Study of Musical Transculturation in Contemporary Jazz Performance and Composition”. DMA Dissertation, University of Toronto.

Lemish, Noam, Peter Lemish, Dan Deutsch, Parisa Sabet. 2017. “’In Toronto 
Iranians and Israelis make music, not war’: Political Communication via Engaged Musicking”. (p. 127-148) Music as a Platform for Political Communication. Ed. Uche Onyebadi. Hershey: IGI Global. 

Lemish, Noam. 2015.  “Between Utopia and Destruction: The Making of  ‘Jazz Rhapsody on Soviet Jewish Themes’”. University of Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought. Volume 1, No. 5 (pp. 43-51). 

Lemish, Noam. 2013. “Review: Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening”. MAKE: Literary Productions, NFP.