Eleanor Reissa
July 17, 2017
The soulful “Yiddish diva” Eleanor Reissa (currently on Broadway in the cast of Indecent) and the Grammy Award-winning “mystical high priest of New Wave Avant-Klez jazz” Frank London (just back from Havana where his Yiddish/Spanish opera premiered ) have been inspiring each other and their audiences in widely-acclaimed concerts for over a decade. Finally appearing at Feinstein’s/54 Below to celebrate their first collaborative album, Vilde Mekhaye (Wild Ecstasy), they are backed by London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars, featuring the best of a new generation of Klezmer artists: Michael Winograd, Brian Drye, Ron Caswell, Aaron Alexander, Brandon Seabrook and Patrick Farrell.
“Eleanor Reissa is the Jewish Beyonce … the world-class interpreter of the Great Yiddish Songbook … with a great voice, an expressive delivery and an endearing style and entrancing stage presence . Frank London, a cross between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, blows the most powerful and versatile horn since The Angel Gabriel.” – Huffington Post
“The inimitable actor-director-singer Eleanor Reissa performs both solo and backed up by the ear-shattering, kishke-churning pyrotechnics of Klezmatics founder Frank London and the Klezmer Brass All Stars…taking the audience on an unforgettable, joyful journey.” – The Forward
Reissa and London’s music transcends language and combines the blessed with the blasphemous, pulling the past into the future and sending it into the heavens.