Between the Letters
“Between the Letters” is an offering toward a diasporist aesthetic that values fragmentation, hybridity, and imagination as generative space.
I’m a Jewish trumpet player and composer based in Colorado, where I live with my wife, dog, and cat. By day, I work in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and am an epidemiology graduate student. By night, I create music that reflects my values and identity. I’m also a member of the International Jewish Labor Bund, which grounds much of my thinking on culture, justice, and identity. I’m especially interested in how sound can express ideas of belonging without borders, and how music can speak to Jewish life that isn’t tied to nationalism, nostalgia, or a single tradition.
“Between the Letters” is my first release grounded explicitly in that exploration: Jewishness as something lived, fragmented, plural, and unresolved.. The trumpet became my voice for that space: sometimes raw, sometimes ornamented, always searching. Performed with keys, bass, and guitar, this instrumental EP has no lyrics, no liturgy, and no slogans or doctrines. Just melody, silence, and the space between them.
This music wanders on purpose, refusing the pull toward resolution. Drawing from Middle Eastern modes like Freygish/Phrygian Dominant – a scale whose distinctive pattern gives it a bright yet mournful edge, often heard in Jewish and Middle Eastern melodies – the sound leans into tension, ornamentation, and repetition without ever returning to a fixed “home.” The result is something cinematic and unsettled.
The title, “Between the Letters,” gestures toward diasporic creativity. It’s music made in exile, not about exile, resisting nationalism by refusing musical tropes of return or triumph. Each track reflects a diasporist logic: blending influence without collapse, drawing from Jewish sound without confining it. This is doikayt in sound: hereness, not as comfort, but as clarity.
“Between the Letters” is an offering toward a diasporist aesthetic that values fragmentation, hybridity, and imagination as generative space. This isn’t music that longs for a center, that revives old forms or strives for “authenticity.” It lingers in the periphery, where imagination and exile meet.
