On 6 January 2001 Suzanne Smith and I were married in New York City. Before the service there was a choral music recital; at the party afterwards music was provided by Albert Narkolayev and his Mazel Tov Band.¹ I had heard Albert playing with his band (then called Shalom Aleichem) at a Muslim wedding in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 1991 (HKFAA trip). I had been skeptical when he told me of his plans to come to New York, but he made it within the year. The 2001 version of his band, which had three members from his Dushanbe group, played traditional and modern Central Asian music as well as popular Western standards.

In May 2001 we moved to Weehawken, New Jersey. From our home there it is a 15 minute walk along and down the New Jersey Palisades to the Port Imperial Pier, from which one can take a New York Waterways ferry across the Hudson River, 7 minutes to the 38th Street Pier in mid-town, or 17 minutes to Pier 11 by Wall Street. (Unlike in Cheung Chau, one can also go by bus, which takes 10 minutes to Port Authority Bus Terminal).

 
Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a separate page)

1. Albert Narkolayev and his Mazel Tov Band
Many video clips of Albert and his band can be found online, including ones from a tour back to Dushanbe. The music they normally play is generally called "Bukharian". Many of the leading musicians in this style were Jewish, and Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) had the oldest Jewish community in Central Asia (some claim the world, dating it to the Babylonian Captivity [Wiki]). There is some discussion of this music online, though as of 2010 the entry "Music" under the Wikipedia article Bukharan Jews confused this popular genre with one of its sources, the traditional form called Shashmaqam (Wiki). See also Ted Levin (Wiki), 100,000 Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (Indiana University Press, 1999). In 2010 Ted wrote me that it had become "common...for Bukharan Jewish musicians from the communities in New York and Tel Aviv to return to Central Asia to perform at big weddings (very prestigious for the families) and state-sponsored festivals (demonstrates the continuing grip of the Motherland on the diaspora)...."
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