Background
Rafi Zabor was born as Joel Zaborovsky on August 22, 1946, in New York City, New York, United States. He is the son of Harry and Sadie Novack Zaborovsky.
2900 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11210, United States
Brooklyn College where Rafi Zabor received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
(The hero of this sensational first novel is an alto-sax v...)
The hero of this sensational first novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.
https://www.amazon.com/Bear-Comes-Home-Novel-ebook/dp/B00GTGID1W/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Bear+Comes+Home&qid=1593429752&sr=8-1
1997
(Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrat...)
Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrative of the year 1986. That was the year he set out across two continents to buy a gravestone for his friend Mahmoud Rauf and to outrun the shadow of his own parents' recent death. But like a boat against the current, the writer was drawn back into the past: his father's escape from the Nazis, Rafi's own Brooklyn boyhood surrounded by the fractious, Zabors and Zaborovskys, and the anguished - sometimes farcical - spiritual journey that led Zabor from Brooklyn to Turkey by way of Coltrane, the thirteenth-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, the McGovern campaign, Gurdjieff, a shoe salesman named Gogol, and the cataclysmic months Zabor spent studying (and whirling) amid a band of Sufis in rural England. The result - the first volume - is one of the most original, capacious, and vivid narratives of the last few decades, a real-life Bildungsroman dealing with an expanded range of human experience, from matters of life and death to a piece of what lies beyond them.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052Z3IIY/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
2005
Rafi Zabor was born as Joel Zaborovsky on August 22, 1946, in New York City, New York, United States. He is the son of Harry and Sadie Novack Zaborovsky.
Rafi Zabor studied at Brooklyn College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977.
Rafi Zabor began his career in 1967 as a jazz drummer. After receiving his education in 1977, he began his journalistic career as a jazz critic at Musician. He later became an editor for the magazine. In 1989 he switched to writing and began writing his first book. The result was The Bear Comes Home (1997). He explored the intricacies of the creative process in jazz in his first novel which revolves around the assuredly human activities of a bear who performs jazz on the saxophone. When the Bear, who is a descendant of a family of European circus performers, decides to strive for the big time instead of performing on New York City street corners with his owner Joe, he begins a musical and personal journey that takes him on tour, finds him thrown in jail and studied for his strangely opposable thumbs and ability to talk, and includes a trans-species romance with a biologist named Iris.
Zabor's second book, the memoir I, Wabenzi, was published in 2005. The book takes the reader on a wild ride. The author takes the reader from Brooklyn to Woodstock, Turkey, England, Israel, Germany, California - and these travels do not begin to approach the travels the author has taken in his mind. The book is in essence a bildungsroman, the story of a young man's struggle to define himself. One of Zabor's struggles is with writer's block, and this rather weighty book is evidence that he has overcome it.
He is currently working on the second volume of his memoir. The author also contributed articles to periodicals, including Musician and Village Voice, and to The Jazz Musician (anthology).
(The hero of this sensational first novel is an alto-sax v...)
1997(Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrat...)
2005Quotations: "I definitely prefer writing fiction because of the sense of play. I'm free to invent. All I need is a good enough idea - which is my problem since I get one maybe every 10 years. I may have an overdeveloped critical faculty and it's only by luck that the idea forms enough to start creating something."
Quotes from others about the person
"Rafi Zabor is one of just a handful of jazz writers to emerge in the last twenty years who's earned the respect and admiration of the musical community of which he writes." - Pat Metheny