The music of Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro in conversation with Jeff Janeczko

Paul Shapiro is an internationally renowned saxophonist, composer, bandleader, producer, and studio musician who has been a fixture on New York City’s jazz, improvisation, and popular music scenes for more than thirty years. His list of ensemble credits includes the Brooklyn Funk Essentials, which he cofounded, the Microscopic Septet, Foreign Legion, and the Paul Shapiro quartet, and he has performed, recorded, and toured with numerous pop stars, jazz artists, and composers. A short list of his credits includes working with Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Jay-Z, Arturo O’Farrill, and Ofra Haza in venues ranging from CBGBs and Tonic to Carnegie Hall and the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival. In addition to his studio and performance work, Shapiro has recorded four albums under his own name as a leader—all released on Tzadik records in the Radical Jewish Culture series.
www.paulshapiromusic.com

Jeff Janeczko is the Curator of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and a Visiting Researcher with the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he has taught courses on Jewish music and ethnomusicology. His UCLA dissertation explored Jewish music and identity in the Radical Jewish Culture recording series on the Tzadik label. In 2021 Oxford University Press published his essay, ‘Curating the Virtual Museum: Public Facing Ethnomusicology and the “Curationist Moment”’, in the volume, Voices of the Field: Pathways in Public Ethnomusicology.