Jazz Articles about Pitom

About Pitom

Album Review

Yoshie Fruchter's Pitom: Alive and Well

Read "Alive and Well" reviewed by Max Kutner

by Max Kutner
December 12, 2025

Yoshie Fruchter has been a presence within the Radical Jewish and Modern Klezmer music circles for nearly 3 decades. His ensemble, Pitom, showcases many facets of his deep knowledge in those scenes as filtered through the sludge-clouded lenses of grunge, doom, and just straight metal. The band has released three full length albums since its inception, including Pitom (Tzadik, 2008), a follow-up entitled Blasphemy And Other Serious Crimes (Tzadik, 2011), both housed on John Zorn 's Tzadik imprint--and now, Alive and Well ...

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Album Review

Pitom: Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes

Read "Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
August 20, 2011

Recorded for John Zorn's Tzadik Records, and sustaining the spirit of radical Jewish music, Pitom's second album is a psychodramatic crash-and-burn event. Spanning Sonic Youth-like reckless abandon, hardcore grunge, jazz improvisation and the blasphemous morphing of traditional Jewish music stylizations with jazz-rock, the unit abides by a take-no-prisoners approach. Offering an antithesis to the norm, with a titanium edge, complex unison choruses and punishing grooves, Pitom's “punkaassjewjazz" credo erves as a fitting depiction of its moving parts. ...

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Album Review

Pitom: Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes

Read "Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
April 7, 2011

The sophomore release of Pitom, of one of John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series outfits, symbolizes a dead-end in this important musical and cultural movement that began in early nineties. Pitom, led by guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, is influenced by iconic musical figures from visionary seventies fusion bands like Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as early nineties grunge/punk bands including Nirvana and The Melvins. Blasphemy and other Serious Crimes is even supposed to be a sonic homage ...