Popular Culture
Comedian Lewis Black frequently references the Kol Nidre in some of his shows and his first book, Nothing's Sacred, referring to it as the spookiest piece of music ever written, claiming that it may have been the piece to inspire all of Alfred Hitchcock's musical scores.
Kol Nidre plays a climactic role in The Jazz Singer (1927 film), where it is sung by notable Jewish entertainer Al Jolson, and by Jewish pop singer, Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer (1980 film).
Musician and filmmaker Nicolas Jolliet uses the sitar, surbahir, tabla, oud, dumbek and other exotic instruments in his "Kol Nidre Goes East", which was recorded on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and evolves from traditional ragas into a seductive Reggae beat. It is housed in the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University.
Read more about this topic: Kol Nidre
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)