When a shy-looking 15-year-old Janis Ian finished performing her song, Society's Child, on Leonard Bernstein's television show, Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution, in 1967, Bernstein beamed at her with palpable pride. "You're a great creature," he gushed. "I think that's quite a remarkable job for a girl of your age, and I congratulate you on what's going to be a brilliant career."

No one could accuse Jewish music of not being diverse. There is Jewish reggae and hip hop, Jewish folk, even Jewish heavy metal. But despite Judaism's eclectic modern sound, Jewish gospel still feels like an oxymoron.

Not so, says black Jewish gospel singer Joshua Nelson. The impassioned choir music most commonly associated with church singing groups is actually one of the most inherently Jewish sounds around.

'Nowadays when people ask me how I define success I'd say it was being able to order anything on the menu," says Joshua Radin.

The New York-based singer-songwriter, who says that for years he was a "starving artist", can certainly order any dish he likes in any restaurant in the world. His first album to be released in the UK, Simple Times, went straight into the top 10, and he has just completed a sell-out UK tour, while his songs have been heard on more than 70 episodes of television shows, including Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy.

Geva Alon has been called "the Israeli Neil Young", his plaintive voice soaring above gentle acoustic guitar or the fuller sound of a band.

His newly released third album, Get Closer, was produced by Thom Monahan, who has worked with alternative folkie Devendra Banhart, Americana types such as The Jayhawks, and the grungier likes of Dinosaur Jr.

At a Seder night a few years ago, a teenager was talking about his schoolmates who had won a battle of the bands and were now being hotly tipped by the music press. To the guests' delight he suggested the band in question, the five-piece, Cajun Dance Party, all from north London, be renamed Kosher Dance Party, so Jewish was their make-up.

Since then, Cajun Dance Party have split up, and singer Daniel Blumberg and bassist Max Bloom have formed a new band called Yuck.

High in the Himalayas the Dalai Lama once met a group of rabbis. After their encounter he was asked what single aspect most impressed him about Judaism, and he immediately replied: the Passover Seder. Maybe, he mused, Tibetan Buddhists could adopt a similar home-based ceremony for re-enacting their own people's chequered history?

When the conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier re-routed his bouquet to "the sweet cellist at the back" he was paying tribute to an obvious, but rarely acknowledged, truth. Accolades are gifted to conductors and soloists, but their performances can only succeed with the individual and collective efforts of the musicians in the orchestra.

At the age of 106, the concert pianist Alice Sommer Herz is an international celebrity. But despite playing in front of audiences all over the world, perhaps what is most remarkable about her life is her continued capacity for hope in the face of unimaginable suffering.

In 1943, with her husband and their six-year-old son, she was deported from Prague to the Nazis' "model" concentration camp at Terezin; her music helped to sustain her spirit there and throughout her astonishing life.