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Once upon a time there was a certain kind of person in the world—a Jewish sacred artist called a khazn (cantor) whose music was beloved in the international Yiddish-speaking Jewish world. Khazones is the Yiddish term for the work of the khazn—the spiritual sound that represented the community through a deeply desired musical expression that mirrored the soul of the collective. While the era of khazones is often spoken of in the past tense, rumors of its death may not be so true…
Two of the brightest voices in new Jewish music, Jeremiah Lockwood and Judith Berkson, have joined forces to start a new record label and cultural organization, Khazones Underground. Our recorded music series will feature work by the best and brightest of contemporary artists delving into the archive of Jewish spiritual music to speak to deeply felt needs of the present day. These new cantorial voices stun with a profound emotionalism, rigorous virtuosity and modal richness, and with the potential for trans-historic communication with the ancestors through revival and recontextualization. Khazones, with its old-world intonations and soloistic performance approach, has been rejected by the institutions of contemporary Jewish America—but its music has an indelible hold on creative artists.
It is now time for the cantor’s voice to return. Artists from around the world are finding khazones and rediscovering meaning, spirituality and expression in this rich historic rich art form. This artist-driven vision of spirituality, memory and heritage is more relevant and needed than ever.
We invite you to participate in the cantorial revival. We propose that khazones holds a place in the world of today, and that music lovers like you have an active role to play, alongside artists, as cultural activists. Your contributions will make it possible for the archive of Jewish sacred sound to speak again. Your tax deductible donations (of any amount!) will help bring this project into the light. Supporters will receive the albums on digital and vinyl platforms, as well as access to other unique offerings.
Through our recording projects, Lockwood and Berkson present the work of artists engaged in culture making projects that will reverberate in the present and into the future. Drawing on decades of experience in music production, archival research, and composition, we bring unique and radical perspectives on the cantorial tradition to the forefront, promoting new communities, devoted to creativity, celebration of outsider voices, and heritage reclamation.
Khazones Underground: Voices from the Cantorial Revival - Initial Offerings
In December 2025, Khazones Underground will begin its mission of releasing new albums of cantorial revialist artists. Our first releases will be:
Golden Ages: Brooklyn Hasidic Cantorial Revival Today This record is a reissue of the 2022 release that has been out of print for over two years!
In today’s Brooklyn, there is a remarkable music revival bubbling with life, hidden away from view of most music fans. It is located in communities in Williamsburg and Borough Park, and its key players are young Hasidic singers. In the ultra-Orthodox community, older forms of Jewish music have largely been displaced by pop-music that sounds a lot like what you would hear on the mainstream radio, but with pious lyrics in Yiddish or prayer book Hebrew. A small but vibrant group of young singers have taken up the style of pre-World War Two cantorial music as their art form of choice, performing tracks recorded almost a century ago. Featuring stars of the Hasidic cantorial scene including Yanky Lemmer, Shimmy Miller and Yoel Kohn, Golden Ages documents the raw and vital sounds of communication across the divide of time. In a community that places many limits on self-expression, Hasidic cantorial revivalists have found creative voices by delving into the past. This recording project, produced by Jeremiah Lockwood at Brooklyn’s home of soul, Daptone Studios, is a celebration of new life paths and new sounds culled from the hidden sonic world of classic cantorial records. After a release in 2022 and subsequently going out of print, this impactful album documenting a key movement in contemporary Jewish music is finally available again.
The Return of the Immortal Khazntes
Khaznte is the Yiddish language term that was used in the early 20th century to describe Jewish women who sang khazones. The Return of the Immortal Khazntes documents the work of new Jewish women’s voices who turn to the cantorial gramophone era to help build their own creative practice. This album features four artists working on personal projects of heritage reclamation: Judith Berkson, an unclassifiable singer, cantor, composer and scholar whose work tears down many barriers between worlds of sound, accompanied on this record by new music icons Kronos Quartet; Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, a musician and activist who is currently working on a research and performance project dedicated to the groundbreaking career of Madame Goldie Steiner, the only known African American woman performer of khazones in the cantorial golden age period; internet celebrity Riki Rose, a singer who has moved beyond her Satmar Hasidic community to frame a liberatory career as an artist and creative persona; and Rachel Weston, a British cantor and Yiddishist who applies her deep knowledge of Yiddish vocal music to her approach to khazones, accompanied by rising stars in the traditional music world Fran & Flora.
The Sway Machinery: The Dream Past
The Dream Past is the latest project of the “unclassifiable and uplifting” (The New Yorker) Brooklyn rock band, The Sway Machinery; it is the band’s first record to be released in a decade. The Dream Past extends the band’s long running project of cantorial revival—excavating the otherworldly potentials of Jewish sacred music and lost melodies to instigate a party, break boundaries between communities, and touch the past. Like its debut album, Hidden Melodies Revealed, which also drew upon High Holidays liturgy, The Dream Past offers an expansive vision of what can be achieved through commitment to ancestor voices and reciprocity with the dead. This new work turns to a lost and now rediscovered archive of bootleg recordings of live prayer leading as the source material for its ecstatic transformation.
What is cantorial revival?
Khazones on record was a pop music phenomenon in the early decades of the 20th century. The style of great cantorial voices captured an imagined folklore, preserving sounds of the rapidly disappearing Eastern European Jewish world. The creative genius and virtuosity of the stars of the genre were passionately desired by a mass audience and understood as an integral part of the experience of Jewish life. New rabbinically-unregulated media outlets created opportunities for women to work as khazntes (women performers of khazones), transcending boundaries that had alienated women from public leadership roles in synagogue ritual. Khazns and khazntes were artists who straddled worlds: their voices transcribed the pain and the fantasies of transcendence long associated with Jewish prayer. At the same time, they were modern artists absorbed in the political and social transformations of the day and sought to channel these themes into their music of prayer. This model of Jewish creative sacred performer has largely faded from memory.
Drawing on the recorded music legacy of the “golden age” of cantorial music, a cohort of artists today are reanimating the sonic archive of star cantors of the phonograph era as the substance of a musical revival. Driven by the pursuit of formal achievement, radical recontextualization that addresses the needs of the current moment, and spiritual commitment, cantorial revivalists are drawn from a variety of identities at the fringes of American Jewish life, including Hasidic intellectuals, avant garde composers, leftist political activists, and secular Yiddishists.
Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar, singer, guitarist and composer. His musical career began with years of playing guitar with blues musician Carolina Slim, and in synagogue singing with his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg. Lockwood is founder and frontman of The Sway Machinery, a group whose music the New Yorker has described as “unclassifiable and uplifting.” He holds a PhD from Stanford University in Education and Jewish Studies, where his dissertation fieldwork focused on young Hasidic cantors in Brooklyn, and is a 2025-26 fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Michigan. Lockwood has recorded 14 albums as leader, toured internationally, and been the recipient of numerous academic honors including the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater.
Judith Berkson is a mezzo-soprano, pianist, accordionist, and composer. She is a second-generation cantor who grew up performing liturgical music with her father and family. She studied classical voice at New England Conservatory with additional studies in jazz, klezmer, and Yiddish song with Hankus Netsky. She received her master’s in composition from Wesleyan University and a doctorate from California Institute of the Arts. Along with her work as a cantor, she has an international career as a composer and performer and has presented her music at Picasso Museum, Malaga, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, BrucknerTage, Carnegie Hall, and at Lincoln Center. Her opera The Vienna Rite, about 19th century Viennese chief cantor Salomon Sulzer and his collaboration with composer Franz Schubert, was performed by the ensemble Yarn/Wire and presented by Roulette, Six Points Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Judith has also sung Schubert and new commissions with Kronos Quartet and has arranged classic recordings of khazones for the quartet. Her interest in cantorial music is focused on “golden-age” gramophone era recordings of cantors, working to revive this art of chant and improvisation with roots in pre-Holocaust Europe. She also calls attention to the khazntes, female cantorial singers who recorded and performed during this period despite being restricted from traditional synagogue leadership. Judith was a fellow at the YIVO Institute where she revived pieces from their archives and wrote a new work based on their collection which featured Frank London and Cleek Schrey. Judith has served as a synagogue cantor for over twenty years including in Quincy, MA, Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, NY, and Plainview Jewish Center in Plainview, NY. She is currently the cantor at Congregation Beth Shalom in Santa Clarita, CA.
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