Guest Profile
Paul Shapiro
Position: Musician/Composer
Country: United States
Paul Shapiro is a woodwind instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader whose love for jazz and his Jewish roots came together in the 2003 release of Midnight Minyan on John Zorn's Tzadik Records.
The critically acclaimed recording blended melodies from the synagogue with top-rate musicianship and creativity. George Robinson wrote in Jewish Week, "a bubbling brew of soulful Jewish traditional music re-imagined by someone who grew up playing tenor while listening to Blue Note records." Seth Rogovoy added, "Paul Shapiro's Midnight Minyan could well stand as one of the supreme achievements of creative, modern Jewish jazz."
In 2006 It's in the Twilight, Shapiro's second recording as a leader, was released on Tzadik to continued critical acclaim. The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Shapiro transforms the ritual of a Friday night Shabbat service into a rollicking downtown jam." The New Yorker stated, "It's in the Twilight displays all the turbulent beauty and tradition-bucking funk that his growing coterie of fans now expects." The Village Voice commented, "Jewish music usually runs either hot or cool, and this turns out to be a scorcher. Shapiro applies the heat to a handful of Jewish standards. Light fuse and step away."
In 2004 Paul was commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage to compose a new score to be performed alongside a silent film. Paul chose the 1925 boxing classic His People which was filmed in the Lower East Side. Performing ninety minutes of original music with a sextet of woodwinds, trumpet, cello, piano, bass and drums, the presentation delighted the audience with its strong melodic sensibility and exciting interactive performance. It has subsequently been performed at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.
You can find Paul's tenor sax and flute arrangements on recordings by Lou Reed, Queen Latifah, Jay-Z, Antony and the Johnsons, Ben Folds Five, Khaled, Yoko Kanno's Cowboy Bebop, Majek Fashek, Michael Jackson, Frankie Knuckles, Towa Tei, and many others. Paul also wrote an original score for Cheryl Dunye's award winning film The Watermelon Woman in 1996.
No stranger to New York's downtown creative scene, Paul led his own avant funk unit Foreign Legion throughout the eighties. They were featured on a compilation entitled This is the Funk which was released on Emergency Records in 1986. He was a long-time member of the Microscopic Septet, and can be heard on several of their recordings as well. In the nineties Paul was a founding member of Brooklyn Funk Essentials who performed internationally and recorded for RCA and Shanachie Records. Paul has a BA from McGill University.