Making Things article @ All About Jazz

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Fred Hersch, pop stars David Byrne and

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Tom Jones, among others, in addition to his own projects.

In 2022, Sadigursky inaugurated a series with accordionist

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Nathan Koci entitled the Solomon Diaries, based on his fascination with what is known as the ‘Borscht Belt’ (aka, the ‘Sour Cream Alps’), a now-defunct circuit in New York’s Catskill Mountains that was famous for hotels, resorts and bungalow colonies where—in its heyday—top Jewish comics and musicians of all stripes performed regularly for Jewish clientele on vacation from New York City. (As a bit of background, the region’s nicknames refer to a beet soup of Ukrainian origin that has long been a staple among East European and Russian Jews, in the diaspora as in the Old World.) April of 2025 marks the release of Solomon Diaries: Volume IV & Volume V (Adhyâropa Records).

The culture of the Borscht Belt called to Sadigursky. As the first-generation American son of Russian immigrants from the former Soviet Union, he grew up in a household where both parents were classically-trained musicians. His father Isaac, who became a successful piano technician in LA, played klezmer clarinet, while his mother Raya is a classical pianist and teacher. Sam’s first instrument was piano, before he picked up an alto saxophone of his father’s and discovered jazz. In an interview with AAJ shortly after the 2025 double release, he spoke of the Solomon Diaries project, his early training, composing processes and path to discovering his voice as a clarinetist. An edited excerpt is below.

Seeds, Roots, Strains

All About Jazz: Your Solomon Diaries project is so interesting. For those of us who may not be familiar with the earlier three volumes, can you catch us up a little bit on what those are about and what the seed of the project was?

Sam Sadigursky: Sure thing. I started writing it in 2019. I had been coming out of a three-year run playing The Band’s Visit on Broadway, which was a really monumental Broadway show. It won 10 Tonys and was an amazing ride for me, personally and artistically to be a part of. I say three years because there was actually an off-Broadway run that preceded the Broadway run. So, in total, it was about three years. And the music in it was very Jewish-influenced and also Arabic-influenced and it really kind of took over my ears. And I wanted to do something in that vein. I also moved to New York.

There’s a lot of strains to this. I could actually talk about it for a long time. I moved to New York as a saxophonist. I mean, I grew up and that was my primary instrument and there’s been kind of this evolution in the last, I’d say, 15 years to really putting the clarinet first, putting my energy there and then that feeling like my voice. So that’s a huge part of this. And part of that also is that I’ve played a lot of Jewish music as part of my living, you know, for the last about 15 years. I play regularly in a bunch of synagogues around New York and so it’s had a very powerful influence on me.

Not to mention that I have roots. My father was a really phenomenal klezmer clarinetist and accordionist himself. So there’s a real kind of origin of it for me and I grew up hearing a lot of this music. But I never really wanted to do it in a way that looked backwards. I wanted to take all the other things that had influenced me and see if I could bring it to this. So yeah, I’m not one, but there are people who have really studied the Jewish music tradition and klezmer music. It never called to me in that way, that it was all I wanted to do. I tend to bounce around musically. The things I really love are things that sort of fall through the cracks stylistically. So there’s a lot of influences in this music. And then a huge part of it is this collaboration with accordionist and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Koci. We have such an incredible rapport musically and it’s been a joy working with him. He brings such a varied background to it as well. So the Solomon Diaries, the first three volumes, had this theme about my fascination with what’s called the Borscht Belt.

AAJ: Like many New York jazz musicians of a certain age, I’m familiar with the Borscht Belt and have played up there myself. It was part of the “club date” situation—parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs, dances. That was many moons ago. So five volumes dedicated to the Borscht Belt is intriguing. How does the area fit into the project?

SS: It’s a humble three volumes, the first three volumes. The new records, Volumes IV and V, have some of that Borscht Belt strain to them but go to some other places. I don’t have a personal connection to the Borscht Belt at all. I grew up in Los Angeles. But somehow, it captivated me. I found this book of photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld (The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland, Cornell University Press, 2016). The photos are of the modern remnants of the region.

And for those who don’t know it, it’s a region outside of New York in the Catskill mountains that was this haven for Jews in the early 20th century and up until like the 1960s and ’70s, when it was this really thriving region. It arose because Jews were initially excluded from so many of the mainstream American vacation destinations. They really built this incredible thing themselves that thrived for many many years and then experienced a very swift downfall and, within a span of like 10 years, was almost completely obliterated and nonexistent.

So there are a lot of elements of it that fascinated me and I connected to it a lot because I’m a first generation American. My parents are immigrants from the Soviet Union, or former Soviet Union I should say. And, to me, it was also a story about immigrants in a new place and refugees and assimilation and just the things that happen.

Diverse Diaries

AAJ: Thanks, it helps to understand your approach to it. So these these last two volumes, then, are not strictly-speaking a tribute to the Borscht Belt?

SS: Yeah, they kind of go in some different places. A few compositions are kind of remnants from that initial set, so there are a few in there. One of them is “Fire at 168 Gibber,” which was one of the really early things that I wrote, that kind of sat around and didn’t make it on the first set of albums. There are a few songs by Nathan that I’m really really thrilled about. We’re actually putting out the new records under both of our names and operating much more collaboratively than we did initially.

In the first bit of albums we augmented our sound a lot with a bunch of found audio. There is chanting from the Old World that we use and there’s a testimonial from one of the people who was really a big part of the Borscht Belt. It’s just all sorts of things that we integrated into there. And then in these new records, we don’t do that. Instead, we bring in guest musicians.

AAJ: Right. I just listened to Volume V again and was struck by a few different things you put in there, including your “Love Supreme” thing (“Supreme”). Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

SS: Yes, so one of my creative projects the last three years, aside from this, has been writing what are now three books of clarinet duets [Clarinet Duets: Book 1 & Book 2 and 24 Rhythmic Duets for Clarinet, Delatour France, 2013]. So we actually kind of expand three of them here. “Supreme” is one of them, which sort of just takes the famous motif from “A Love Supreme” and messes with that. And those are expanded not just with Nathan and me, but we bring in a great violinist,

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Meg Okura, for those three songs as well.

AAJ: And all of these in Volume V are quite wonderful. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the individual pieces. What about “Favorites?”

SS: My daughter, who is now 13, a few years ago was in a production of The Sound of Music for a few months. While she was doing it, I heard that music so much and it really, so much of it, captivated me. So, yeah, “Favorites” sort of takes the theme of [Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s] “My Favorite Things,” and the very, very basic chord sequence of it, which

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>John Coltrane almost sort of diluted. I mean he basically just makes it two chords. So, instead of [sings beginning of original melody], it’s [sings an inverted variant].

And there are a lot of very Philip Glass-influenced minimalist-inspired sections in there. Playing in The Philip Glass Ensemble and being a member of it has been a huge huge influence on my music. I think it’s poking out in interesting ways. It can be very sort of cliché stuff to copy, because it’s been so influential, especially in the world of film music. So I’m trying to find interesting ways to bring things in there and that’s one of the compositions where that does happen to some extent.

AAJ: Yes. We’ve talked about about two that involve John Coltrane. What about “Lucky?”

SS: So this is just kind of a simple groovy fun tune. I tend to shy away from the traditional jazz format of just head-solo-head. I try to really integrate improvisation in kind of a compositional way and in non-predictable ways. On “Lucky” we don’t do that at all. It is just kind of head-solo-head and my friend

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Danny Fox joins us on the piano for that. It’s called “Lucky” and it’s actually 18 bars. In Jewish tradition 18 is a lucky number. It’s the number chai, so…

AAJ: Aah. Chai, life.

SS: Yes, and so I actually I met my wife Sarah on the 18th of the month and we got married on the 18th and it’s always sort of been a thing for us that we mark every month. She’s been waiting for her song for all these years very patiently.

AAJ: Oh, how wonderful. She got lucky this time. And then “Migrations” is a topical title certainly…

SS: Yes, that is one of the clarinet duets. It also borrows from the Philip Glass minimalist world pretty heavily. What was really special about that for me is that for the ones that Okura played, those duet ones…she didn’t have much instruction. She really just kind of came up with her own part and I think that the texture that she adds to “Migrations” is really really special for me.

AAJ: On “Home Theme,” do you want to tell us about the flute in there?

SS: Yeah, sure that’s

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Matt Darriau playing the Bulgarian kaval on that. This is one of two compositions of Nathan’s, something he wrote years ago for a film and we’ve been playing the last few years. It’s a pretty simple melody in five and it’s incredibly catchy.

AAJ: Yes, beautifully constructed. And “Strut?”

SS: “Strut” is, I don’t know, kind of one of the sillier tunes of mine. This is one that Meg Okura also guests on. I wrote a bunch of music a few years ago that was inspired by a very sudden love for

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Django Reinhardt that I experienced. And I called it the Django Diaries, thinking I would build on the series. I ended up not really pursuing it or recording it, or not yet doing that. But this is one of the things that came from that body of music that just seemed to kind of fit nicely in my world with Nathan.

AAJ: It does. And then “What You Sow?”

SS: “What You Sow” is a pretty folky melody in a slow three. That was one that really like took shape when Nathan and I did the music for a production called the New Manhattan Project. This was something my friend Kathleen Sullivan did. Kathleen has kind of given her life to the nuclear disarmament cause and turned it into a theater work that tracks the history, in New York, of the development and, later, the movement to eradicate the atom bomb. So we really developed this piece as we were doing that. I think the title just came from reaping what you sow.

AAJ: Fascinating. What about “Knots?”

SS: “Knots” was one of the more heavily produced songs on the record. We tracked the record in two days, which is fairly typical for—I don’t know if these are jazz records—but I’ll say self-funded records. But there was a lot of post-production and on this one we really spent a lot of time layering it and adding things and shaping it. And yeah, it’s a pretty simple melody over kind of an unending little ostinato beneath.

AAJ: Nice. And then the next one was for your father, “VNP Hora.”

SS: Correct. My father passed away in 2022. He was a huge part of this music and a huge influence on me. I was supposed to travel to LA a year later for the unveiling of his gravestone, which is traditional in Judaism. You wait a year for that unveiling and then you have this gathering. Unfortunately, one of my kids came down with strep the morning I was supposed to go and I ended up having to stay at home and miss it. There was a lot of grief and sadness around that and this song came out that morning.

My father, besides being a musician, was a very successful piano technician in Los Angeles and had this very copious database of his clients that he kept. And he had all these acronyms for his clients that he would note in it, and VNP was for very nice person. So if he felt a client was especially nice, he put that in there.

AAJ: How lovely.

SS: It being Los Angeles, there are a lot of VIP clients and then eventually there were a lot of VVNP you know very, very nice person as well.

AAJ: I’d like to talk more about your father, but since there is just more on this disk, what about “Six Miles at Midnight?”

SS: “Six Miles at Midnight” was also one of the ones that emerged when I was working on the Django Diaries. I think that one of the big inspirations there was the music of Eric Satie, who I have always just loved. For me, he was one of the really early minimalist thinkers. His music is so unique and I think he was really guided by his own whims. He worked as a café pianist almost his entire life. He lived this really monastic existence. I think he basically rented a room or a very tiny apartment and nobody went up there I think for 30 years. And he played this café every single night. I think it was six miles each way that he had to walk home. So I just kind of imagine so much of his musical world emerging in that walk home.

AAJ: Thank you, that gives us an idea of the kind of salad that this program seems to be, kind of a collection of works from different inspirations, different times.

Early Training and Migration to New York

AAJ: So you grew up in in LA. And when did you move to New York?

SS: I moved to New York in 1997 to go to college. I went to William Paterson University. Growing up in LA, I wasn’t able to see so many of my jazz heroes play live. Most of my heroes lived in New York and, from a very early age, I just kind of knew that it was where I wanted to end up.

AAJ: Yes, like so many other people. So you made the journey, the jazz pilgrimage.

SS: Yeah.

AAJ: Back to your early life and your father… When did you start playing? Was clarinet your first instrument, and did you do Jewish music initially?

SS: My first instrument was actually piano. My mom is a classical pianist and started giving me lessons when I was about seven. The parent-child relationship is not one that is very friendly to music lessons. [laughs]

AAJ: No, it’s not.

SS: Eventually, she even tried sort of trading lessons. I would go see a friend of hers and then that friend’s daughter would see my mom. We did that for a while, but I kind of quit after a year or two. But later on, when I got to sixth grade, there was a very noted and serious school band program, and I started playing alto saxophone that my father had lying around. He was primarily a clarinetist and accordionist, but he would play saxophone on society gigs. And I took to it very quickly and I think the social aspect of playing in school band really drew me in. And then I just started this love affair with jazz. Very early on.

AAJ: And who did you study jazz with first? Or how did you study, who or how?

SS: I had two really early teachers. You know the first for the first few years was a guy named Vince Ferrini, who had been a big band player, had done a few stints with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Stan Kenton, I think. He had a really deep love for the music. And then, very quickly, there happened to be a really legendary saxophonist in the next town over, named ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Vince Trombetta, who had very deep roots in Philadelphia and had taught a whole generation of great musicians who had come out of there. He was also the music director of the Mike Douglas Show, which was what brought him to LA. But a lot of people in the saxophone world know him for being

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Michael Brecker‘s teacher. And aside from teaching me saxophone, he really got me doubling, you know, playing flute and clarinet. He started me on that very early, and so those sort of secondary instruments were always kind of a big part of my world.

But I will say that Vince Trombetta really continues to have a huge influence on my thinking, and in the way I do things in that he really believed in teaching through his students making things and creating things. So I didn’t learn to improvise by the theoretical chord-scale way that a lot of other people learn. I just wrote. He would have me write out solos, write out choruses over chord changes of tunes. And it was through doing those every single week that that I sort of developed a vocabulary and learned how to improvise. It was really just a slowing down of that process. And, later on, before giving me any arranging or orchestration lessons, he would just say, “Write a saxophone quartet arrangement of ‘My Romance’ this week.” And then the teaching came through him coaching me through, like “OK, this worked, this didn’t work; you might’ve gone in this direction here or thought about this here, or this is how you achieve certain things…” So I continue to really work that way, instead this really deep study of something before I dare do it. I think I have a certain audacity to just kind of like jump in and do it.

AAJ: So you didn’t begin in the normal way of transcribing other people’s solos, you began just creating your own?

SS: There was a lot of transcribing as well, but I feel like that’s something that I did more just on my own. I have perfect pitch, so that was a fairly easy thing for me to do on my own and I actually did not have to do it so much for the teacher. But yes, that certainly was a big big part of me developing. I’m just like everybody—just total immersion and and listening for hours and hours and hours a day.

Defining the Duet Project

AAJ: I’m still struck by four volumes of the Solomon Diaries. Can you define what the project is for us again? I didn’t quite capture it.

SS: What the Solomon Diaries project is… Well, more than anything, it’s a collaboration with Nathan Koci.

AAJ: Ah, OK.

SS: The title comes from the Borscht Belt. A lot of it was in Sullivan County [Catskills area of New York], but in those days it began to be called “Solomon County,” just locally, as a reference to the Jewish presence there. And in these new records, Nathan and I talked about maybe calling them something different. But I think we both really liked the idea of it building on the first three records that we made. But also Solomon has…one of its meanings is the word peace, like salaam and shalom, and we really love that aspect of it, that strain, and wanted to carry it forward.

AAJ: So it kind of it seems to me—and please correct me—that Solomon Diaries is almost more of a group name, a name for the ensemble, because everything else seems so varied. But I guess the Jewish music quotient is kind of what’s holding it together. Is that sort of the deal?

SS: I think so, yeah. There’s a real folk element to this music that was not quite as present before. And yeah, I think I’ve grown a lot more comfortable writing in simpler settings. Sometimes writing in the jazz world I sort of feel like you need to reinvent the wheel with every piece and begin with something really concrete. And a certain prolificness the past few years for me has been due to not feeling that pressure, just sitting down and starting with two well-worn chords or a very well-worn texture and not being afraid to operate within it. And also having a certain confidence that something personal will emerge as I go on. And also I think that writing is just a lot more fun for me as I get older.

AAJ: In what you’ve been saying about well-worn chords and textures, I’m reminded of this joke, which I’m sure you know, old club date quip about playing Jewish music—what is D minor. Do you know this one?

SS: Go ahead.

AAJ: OK. “D minor? To you, it’s a key. To me, it’s a living.” A bit of Borscht Belt humor…

SS: Haha. Yeah.

AAJ: So now you start with D minor or whatever… And clarinet. When did clarinet enter into your instrumentarium?

SS: I started playing it I think probably in about seventh or eighth grade. But it was always kind of this secondary world for me. Then, over the years of living in New York… I was fairly strong on the instrument because I’d started it early and put in some study, but for a lot of years in New York I was called to be the guy who could play a whole huge bag of instruments. And that grew tiring for me. I felt really spread thin for many years. And then, kind of organically, the people I was playing with started to ask me to play clarinet more and more and I think I had this epiphany, eventually, that it felt like my voice, and it felt like there was more opportunity there, that the world is just flooded with amazing saxophone players. It’s such a huge tradition, it can feel very crowded. I don’t feel that with the clarinet, it’s kind of a much smaller, much more compact tradition and there are so few people who really can improvise confidently on the instrument that it felt like that world was sort of open.

AAJ: That’s intriguing. For

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Anat Cohen, when she first came up—clarinet was her first instrument—but she was playing saxophone all over the place in jazz at first, partly for the reason that that’s what you’re supposed to play in jazz, I think. That’s not coming from her, that’s my perception. But then she went back to clarinet because it felt more like her authentic voice, which resonates with what you’re saying, except that it actually was her original voice. But, for you, it was your father’s voice, so I’m guessing that might have been part of it. Was it?

SS: Yeah, for sure.

AAJ: Yeah, so you already had that in your musical DNA.

SS: Yeah, I think so. I was also playing a lot of South American music for a very long time, Colombian music and Argentinian music. That stuff had a very big influence on me and I was doing it primarily on clarinet.

Paring Down

AAJ: So the project, the Solomon Diaries… This is open-ended. Can we expect to hear a Volume VI and VII, and so on?

SS: I think so. I have this kind of nasty habit of… I’m always kind of thinking of the next thing, even before the thing in front of me is fully realized. So we’re playing a release show this weekend and if it was up to me, I’d play almost all new stuff. [laughs]

AAJ: Really! So what’s the next thing you’re thinking of for this group?

SS: So in the next one, for me, I want to sort of pare it back down. Nathan, besides accordion, plays a lot of other instruments on all the records we’ve made so far. He plays piano, he plays glockenspiel. He is actually a phenomenal brass player, so he put together this whole choir of trumpets on the song “Six Miles at Midnight.” So I was thinking that it would be fun to kind of tear down to just the clarinet and the accordion and see if we could swim in those waters.

AAJ: Well, I’m sure you can.

SS: Yeah, one of the great things about this duo for me—and this has actually been a new thing in my career—is having a group where we can play anywhere. It’s not that important to play within the known music ecosystem anymore. For a lot of years I felt I had something to prove, and there were really prominent NYC venues that it felt important to get into.

With this instrumentation we can play anywhere. We just need two armless chairs. I really love that about it. Some of the most meaningful concerts have been in artist salons and people’s homes. We played a concert a few weeks ago at Museum at Eldridge Street, which is housed in the oldest synagogue in New York, a beautiful historic room. Soundwise, it felt like it was made for our music. It’s been really thrilling to take this music to a lot of unique places.

AAJ: Indeed. Best wishes with the duo, and thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

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