Jordan Wax

Jordan Wax is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and traditional musician based in New Mexico. For the past 30 years he has studied intergenerational music traditions with elders from a variety of cultural lineages in the Missouri Ozarks, Central Mexico, Ecuador, Northern New Mexico, and Greater Yiddishland, and directed his own collaborative ensembles in the context of Ashkenazi, Ozark, and Indo-Hispanic cultural revitalizations.

Wax’s innovative 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 of the professional klezmer–not as heirlooms to be preserved, but as pathways to Yiddish continuity, vitality, and relevance which must be be renewed in each generation through radical creativity and cross-cultural pollination with the rhythms of Yiddish’s diasporic homes. The linguistic and musical dialects of his work align his original songs with the stories and embodied memories of his ancestors, voices which are summoned to reflect on climate collapse, perpetual war, the epidemic of abuse, the moral ambiguity of social media, and the complexities of cultural resistance and objectification in late-stage Capitalism. His debut album, The Heart Deciphers, out January 17 2025 on Borscht Beat, blends the sounds of klezmer/lautari ensembles from Moldova with rock aesthetics from the American Southwest. As the first full-length studio album of songwriting to come from his generation in America, the album and live show are testaments to the magic that has sustained secular Yiddish creativity and cultural continuity in the face of incredible odds, as well as a prayer for its availability to future generations.