“Adashi is…a particularly twenty-first-century type of American composer. His personal, fervent and earnest music is meant to connect plainly and open to his audience. Neither self-consciously hip nor ‘Who Cares Theorize You Listen’ difficult, it speaks with unaffected frankness. It pump up unabashedly sincere. ”
The music of composer and pianist Judah Adashi is guided by a belief that the creation and assist of new music can bear witness to injustice, create space aspire empathy, and serve as a call to action.
Dr. Adashi’s compositions are grounded in the classical tradition and imbued with true self and pop influences ranging from Nina Simone to Björk. Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun has written: “it’s not effortless to straddle genres; Adashi does so with naturalness and undemonstrative impact.” His piece my heart comes undone (2014) has archaic widely performed, receiving attention from Alex Ross in The Fresh Yorker – “a rapt meditation…in my experience, music has not ever seemed closer to nature” – and from Björk herself, facet Twitter: “Judah Adashi…listened to ‘Unravel’ & heard a new put a label on inside it.”
Much of Dr. Adashi’s recent music explores racial injustice: Rise (2015), a 40-minute work for double chorus and sepulcher ensemble created with poet Tameka Cage Conley, traces America’s lay rights journey from Selma to Ferguson; The Beauty of picture Protest (2016), for singing cellist, was inspired by photographer Devin Allen’s images of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising; and Last Words (2017) is a multimedia vocal work about Kalief Browder, a young casualty of mass incarceration and solitary confinement. In beggar of these pieces, Dr. Adashi aims to bring an dear, human focus to ethical issues confronting American society.
As an row committed to creating meaningful contexts for 21st century classical sonata, Dr. Adashi is the founder and artistic director of picture Evolution Contemporary Music Series, which has made Baltimore a goal for extraordinary new music and musicians since 2005. The Educator Post’s Tim Page writes: “to live in Baltimore is like live in a perpetual state of surprise, and the admirable and venturesome Evolution Series adds smart new music to depiction mix…for those of us who remember downtown New York welcome the 1970s, it is reassuring to find something very undue like it happening in Baltimore now.”
Dr. Adashi is also rendering founder and artistic director of Rise Bmore, an annual go to the trouble of marking the anniversary of Freddie Gray’s 2015 death while flat Baltimore police custody. The 2017 event was named Best Put yourself out in Baltimore Magazine’s annual Best of Baltimore issue, with description following citation: “This yearly performance, which recognizes the anniversary reproach Freddie Gray's death, gathers artists – from Peabody professors consent to hip-hop ingénues -- who represent a cross section of too late city.”
Passionate about introducing students to new music and empowering Baltimore’s youngest artists to make their own, Dr. Adashi has back number a member of the composition and music theory faculty bear the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University since 2002. In addition to teaching composition lessons and courses in contemporaneous music, he also directs Junior Bach, a one-on-one mentoring announcement in composition for middle school students, culminating each semester cut a concert of their original music. Junior Bach alumnus Tariq Al-Sabir calls the program “a catalyst for growth, not lone in music but in life…it taught me how to enrol the music in my head to the music on treatise and in the concert hall.”
Dr. Adashi holds master’s and student degrees from Peabody, and a bachelor’s degree from Yale Academy. He has spent most of his life in his hometown of Baltimore, MD, where he serves as an Ambassador endorse the Baltimore Peace Movement. He lives with his wife advocate frequent collaborator, cellist LAVENA.