Paul Shapiro’s Holiday Brunch

The band plays like a juke joint combo used to dodging beer bottles and bullets. Shapiro’s nasty tenor sax breaks would have qualified him for duty at Duffy’s Gaieties on Cahuenga Boulevard, when Lenny Bruce emceed for the peelers in the ’50s.    Kirk Silsbee 

A heaping platter of rhythm and blues and jazz served with a schmear of classic Yiddish culture is the special of the day for this joyful outfit. Led by the exuberant saxophonist Shapiro, the Revue is always willing to time warp to an era when sympathetic musical genres regularly shared the same table.  The New Yorker
 
Cilla Owens has been called “as smooth as Nancy Wilson, as authoritative as Sarah Vaughan, and as informed as Carmen McRae” Jazztimes. In addition to appearances in Europe and the Caribbean, her credits include performances at Lincoln Center, the Blue Note, Symphony Space, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Museum, AUPAC, and NJPAC. 

Eleanor Reissa is a Tony-nominated director (Those Were the Days), a Broadway, film and television actress (Indecent; Minyan; and HBO’s The Plot Against America), an award winning playwright, and a soloist in every major concert hall in New York City and in festivals around the world. She is the host of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive Podcast – Those Who Were There: Voices of the Holocaust.

Paul Shapiro, saxophonist, bandleader and composer, has been a mainstay of New York’s creative music scene since the 1980’s. His recordings for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, starting with Midnight Minyan in 2003, proved to be transformative, as he reimagined traditional synagogue melodies through a jazz lens.