Jewish Themes


GARY LUCAS's Jewish heritage has been reflected in much of the music he's composed and performed over many years.

Read Gary's review of Sergei Loznitsa's new documentary "Babi Yar: Context".

Read Gary's essay on Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's "Dachau Blues"—#24 on The Forward's list of the 150 Greatest Jewish Pop Songs of All Time. Two other of Gary's proposed selections also made the cut: #54 Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers's "New England", and #100, Burning Spear's "Slavery Days".

Gary performed solo acoustic before the General Assembly of the UN for International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27th 2017:

Raised a Reform Jew in Syracuse NY growing up in the late 50's and 60's, Lucas was fascinated at an early age by Judaism and Jewish culture—particularly after learning from his mother Adele Lucas about the effects of the Holocaust on their family, when Life Magazine ran excerpts from the diary of Anne Frank in Aug. 1958.

After hearing his mother read aloud from Anne Frank's diary, Gary asked her why the Lucas family (the family surname was originally Lichtenstein and was changed at Ellis Island) had no living relatives left in Europe.

She then related to Gary and his brother and sisters the story of the Jedwabne massacre in Poland: how on July 10th 1941, all the Jews of the town—including all of Gary's Polish-Jewish relatives on his mother's side who had chosen not to emigrate to America—were herded into a barn by their Polish neighbors, which was then set ablaze.

This horrifying tragedy set Gary into a lifetime preoccupation with his Jewish roots and identity from the vantage point of a secular Jew. His favorite writer to this day is Nobel-prize winning Polish-Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose stories and novels captured his imagination, particularly Singer's underlying philosophical themes and speculation concerning men and women's relationship to God, predestination and the Occult, and the concept of Free Will.

At the age of 9 Gary's father Murray Lucas suggested Gary take up the guitar, which he quickly grew to love and which became second nature to him. Gary was soon performing Hebrew folk songs and blues spirituals with his childhood friend Walter Horn, with whom he's collaborated with over the years, at several Jewish Homes for the Aged in Syracuse.

After years spent playing guitar in amateur bands at the Jewish Community Center in Syracuse and at high school mixers, Lucas brought his guitar to Yale, where he continued to play with several different bands. He made his professional debut performing the lead electric guitar with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and assorted singers and dancers in the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in July 1973.


Gary in center arriving in Vienna with the Yale Symphony Orchestra June 1973

Leonard Bernstein, his absolute hero in music thanks to Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" on the CBS TV network, gave Gary his first major compliment in music upon meeting him after the premiere of "Mass" in a reception held at the American Ambassador's residence in Vienna: "Man, you were really wailing!".

Gary Lucas first made his mark on record in 1980 as a featured soloist with his mentor Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and his Magic Band, with whom he recorded two ground-breaking albums for Virgin Records, "Doc at the Radar Station" (1980) and "Ice Cream for Crow" (1982).

His performance of Van Vliet's fiendishly complicated solo pieces put him on the musical map in the press, including a rave review in Rolling Stone. Van Vliet was proud of the Jewish band members in his ensemble, and was once quoted as saying: "Some people think it's hip to have black musicians in their group—I have Jews, man. They understand suffering."


Don Van Vliet with his "Jewish guitar army" (left Gary Lucas guitar, center Don Van Vliet, right Moris Tepper guitar

Lucas began performing solo concerts under his own name in spring 1988 at the Knitting Factory in NYC, a haven for avant-garde and alternative music. After receiving a rave review in the New York Times, Gary was invited to perform solo at the Berlin Jazz Festival that fall. Realizing his European solo concert debut fell on the 50th Anniversary of Kristallnacht—basically the beginning of open season on Jews in Nazi Germany—Lucas decided to commemorate the event in his evening concert, transforming his anger and horror at the lingering stain of this atrocious event by channeling his feelings into music.

Gary closed his concert with his original solo composition "Verklarte Kristallnacht" (Transfigured Kristallnacht—the title is a play on Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht"), which went out live from the Berlin Jazz Festival on WDR Radio all over Germany on Nov. 8th 1988. The following day the Berlin Morgenpost gave Lucas' performance a rave review under the headline "Es ist Lucas!", commenting favorably on his closing piece.

In 1989 Lucas followed this statement of first principles by creating an eerie live score, co-composed and performed with his childhood friend keyboardist Walter Horn to accompany the 1920 German Expressionist silent horror film "The Golem" (1920, d. Paul Wegener and Carl Boese), on a commission from BAM/New Music America. They premiered their live score with the film in the fall of 1989 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.

"The Golem" is based on the ancient Jewish folk tale concerning the actual 16th century Prague Rabbi Jehudah Loew, who legend has it created a living man out of clay through the use of kabbalistic magic to become a servant to the Jewish community and protect them from annihilation. The Golem had always fascinated Gary as a boy—and Lucas and Horn breathed new life into the form through their use of composed music and improvised passages, which mixed Jewish liturgical themes and folk melodies with hypnotic electronic drones and otherworldly soundscapes.

After Lucas and Horn performed their live score with the film at John Zorn's First Festival of Radical Jewish Culture in Munich in 1992, Gary went on to perform with the film solo in over 20 countries to date.


Gary plays "The Golem" at the BimHuis in Amsterdam Nov. 1999 | photo by Arjen Veldt

He opened the New York Jewish Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center in 1998, and also performed with the film in Australia at the Sydney and Melbourne Jewish Film Festivals, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Budapest, Frankfurt, Brussells, Washington DC, Los Angeles, South Korea, Berlin, at Royal Festival Hall in London, in Tel Aviv at the Next Festival—and of course in Prague, home of the Golem.

In 1993 Gary Lucas toured all over Europe performing with "The Golem" as part of the Knitting Factory's JAM Tour (Jewish Avant-Garde Music Tour), earning hm this quote from the Hamburg Morgenpost: "Lucas is the Semitic reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix".

Lucas went on to record two albums for Tzadik Records as part of their Radical Jewish Culture series—1998's "Busy Being Born", an album for children of all ages based on Jewish themes, which received excellent reviews worldwide.

The album featured among other things playful tributes to Jewish touchstones of Gary's youth, such as The Marx Brothers.

And 2000's "Street of Lost Brothers", a darker meditation on the sense of loss and displacement of Jewish communities worldwide after the Holocaust, which also received excellent reviews.

Some of the pieces from Gary's two Tzadik albums were used on the soundtrack of a film commissioned by NYC's newly established Museum of Jewish Heritage in the Battery, where it was used as a fundraiser and which is shown there regularly to this day as an introduction to the Museum.

In January 2001 MacMillan published a book by Guy Oseary entitled "Jews Who Rock", which devoted a page to Gary Lucas:

In July 2001, Lucas was invited to represent his family for the Polish Government's official apology ceremony concerning the Jedwabne tragedy, where surviving family members of the Jews murdered there in 1941 were welcomed back to Poland to lay wreaths on a commemorative headstone. Traveling to Warsaw, and then visiting Krakow where he played at the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, Lucas then journeyed to Jedwabne for the bittersweet commemoration ceremony, which attracted a huge media presence. Gary later wrote an account of his time in Poland in an essay entitled "Letter from Jedwabne".

During his time in Poland, Gary met and bonded with the award-winning Polish-Jewish documentary film-maker Slawomir Grunberg, who filmed an interview with Gary for his 2005 documentary "The Legacy of Jedwabne", which can be seen below at 27:38 in.

Gary also contributed a solo acoustic score throughout the documentary, and can be seen performing in the Jewish cemetery in Jedwabne near the end at 1:07:56.

At the urging of Rabbi Baker from Israel who attended the ceremony, Lucas also wrote a song entitled "Jedwabne" to memorialize his feelings regarding the tragedy, which he performed with his longtime group Gods and Monsters on their 2011 album "The Ordeal of Civility".

In 2008 Lucas was selected by Jewish leadership website Leadel.net to be their first interview subject for their new site:

And he was interviewed by Israeli television performing in Paris at a tribute to his late partner Jeff Buckley with Israeli pop star Ninet Tayeb:

Gary has performed several times in Israel, beginning with his 1999 appearance performing with "The Golem" at the Next Festival in Tel Aviv at the Noga Theatre. He recently was invited to perform with his Spanish "Dracula" project accompanying the film with his live solo score at the 2015 Jerusalem Film Festival, which drew a full house in the Jerusalem Cinematheque's largest auditorium.


Raising Spanish Dracula at the 2015 Jerusalem Film Festival | photo by Orli

Most recently, Gary put together his FLEISCHEREI project (a play on the German word for butcher shop) to celebrate one of his Jewish heroes, animation pioneer Max Fleischer—whose saucy and surrealistic Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons had captivated Gary at an early age growing up in Syracuse. Gary had always loved their crazy musical soundtracks in particular, a true melting pot of Tin Pan Alley songs, jazz-age swing, hot Harlem jazz, and Yiddish music hall stylings, and had recorded a solo medley of some of these themes entitled "Fleischerei" on his second Tzadik album in 1999.

"Gary Lucas' FLEISCHEREI: Music from Max Fleischer Cartoons", a 6-piece swinging jazz ensemble album, was released on Cuneiform Records in 2016, and was selected by DownBeat Magazine as one of their Best Albums of 2016.

Max Fleischer's grand-daughter Ginny Mahoney came to one of Lucas' FLEISCHEREI concerts at the Washington DC Jewish Film Festival and pronounced: "Max would have been proud of you!!"

On Oct. 1st 2016, Gary Lucas closed the Jewish Museum of Vienna's "Stars of David" Exhibition devoted to Jewish Musicians with a solo acoustic performance during Vienna's "Night of Museums", where he was interviewed by TV 24 Wien.