About Jeremy
Singer/songwriter/composer/lyricist Jeremy Schonfeld has won numerous awards and performed in front of huge crowds, but his latest project, Iron & Coal, is his biggest yet. Produced by Werner Stranka & Martin Gellner for Beat 4 feet Productions in Vienna, the album—scheduled for a late November release—is simultaneously accessible and unpredictable. Listeners are invited on a musical ride that ranges from hard-hitting rock to full orchestral compositions.
Jeremy had ruminated over the material that makes up Iron & Coal for years, but it wasn’t until his father fell ill that he began to write the music. The result is a raw take on the things he saw, felt and experienced from adolescence to adulthood as a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors. As fate would have it, Jeremy’s father passed away at the age of 77 on the exact date that Iron & Coal was mastered.
“I created this album as a tribute to my father, my grandparents, and to all of those who survived the Holocaust and their children who grew up living beneath the shadows of those horrific experiences,” says Jeremy.
The concept album is not a new undertaking for Jeremy. His album Drift was turned into a production for a benefit concert at BB Kings in New York City starring Adam Pascal, Julia Murney, Terrence Mann, Jarrod Emick and Adam Kantor, among others. It garnered several “Best of …” honors including “Best Show of 2009” from Triangle Arts & Entertainment, and “Best Original Music” from Indy Week. Critics praised “Schonfeld's courageous rock and soulful song-cycle sensitively articulated a series of moments in a divorce, largely from the husband's point of view … a prismatic set of rocking, thoughtful, raging, aching – but ultimately joyous – confessions. Four Stars.” (Indy Week). It was also part of North Carolina’s “Hot Summer Nights" at the Kennedy and the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF).
Other recent projects include the album 37 Notebooks, which featured the vocal talents of Shoshana Bean, Tracie Thoms, Amy Spanger, Lauren Kennedy, Luther Creek, and Kate Shindle, among others; the feature film Clear Blue Tuesday, in which he was featured and for which he wrote two songs; and the innumerable ATrainPlays.
When he’s not composing or performing, Jeremy is active in helping young people achieve their goals in theatre through The Broadway Dreams Foundation—a premier performing arts training program. He proudly serves on the advisory board, is the musical director, a featured performer and teacher for the BDF. If that weren’t enough, he also wrote the foundation’s theme song.
Schonfeld has contributed original music for numerous benefit concerts including Defying Inequality, Broadway in South Africa, The Pink Campaign on Broadway, and Broadway for a New America, among others. He has been the featured composer for Monday Night, New Voices and Cutting Edge Composers II. Jeremy’s “Song for New Orleans,” performed by Adam Pascal, is currently being used as part of a recruitment video for the American Red Cross.
Jeremy’s show performances are also very impressive. Recent performances include Madison Square Garden, Birdland, Joe’s Pub, BB Kings, The Public Theatre, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center, the Upright Cabaret in Los Angeles, 14th Street Playhouse in Atlanta and Boston University’s “BU on Broadway” series. He’s also a regularly featured performer on the Rock and Roll concert series “Rockers on Broadway.”
Jeremy lives in Brooklyn with his Kiwi wife Sarah-Jane, super-cool teenage daughter Alexandra, and hyper dog Byron.
Site design and illustrations ©2011 Tom Seltzer for Seltzer Studio Graphics. Photography by Leonard Prochazka, except for photo on this page, by Tanner Photography. Video of Jeremy and Gus by Rod Milam of MilamNYC productions.