One of Bernstein's most appealing characteristics is that he refuses to take himself too seriously. Though the music is always carefully planned and superbly executed, there is nevertheless a feeling of fun and anarchy in Bernstein's bands, as if anything could happen. Indeed, it frequently does, as those who attended Sex Mob's riotous concert in Whelan's a few years ago will remember.

"Music should be about life . . . about feeling something, " Bernstein has said. "It's about creation. Also it's okay to f**k up. I really feel that an audience who goes to see a band that almost f**ks up and kind of gets slightly unhinged is going to have a better experience than an audience that goes to see a show that's perfectly controlled. If you want something perfectly controlled you turn on the TV, go see a movie, watch a music video, something that's been edited, and chopped up into something exact."

The Diaspora series came about as a result of a request from avant garde legend John Zorn, whose record label Tzadik has released a series of recordings under the Radical Jewish Culture imprint. Bernstein, the quintessential Downtown New York musician, has responded with three excellent and thought-provoking recordings which have taken traditional Jewish music and examined it under the jazz microscope.

On Diaspora Soul (Tzadik, 1999) Bernstein and a group that included Tom Waits' guitarist Marc Ribot and former Lounge Lizard saxophonist Michael Blake, blended traditional Jewish tunes with New Orleans R&B and Afro-Cuban music. Then on Diaspora Blues (Tzadik, 2002), Bernstein was joined by the veteran saxophonist Sam Rivers for a mixture of traditional and original compositions. The latest in the series is Diaspora Hollywood (Tzadik, 2004) which takes the legacies of the great West Coast film composers and arrangers as its starting point. Many of the composers from Hollywood's classic period, like Max Steiner, Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman, were Jewish and brought to Hollywood something of their distinctive European Jewish backgrounds.

Their legacies are ample testament to the importance of the migrant Jewish communities to the musical life of America's West Coast. But Bernstein is too subtle a musician to simply re-arrange their music.

Instead he has taken mostly traditional Jewish melodies and couched them in terms that recall film noir and the distinctly chamber sound of the orchestras (often overwhelmingly Jewish in their make-up) who played on film scores.

Regular working bands . . . as opposed to lesser bands put together expressly for tours . . . are particularly worth checking out, and Bernstein brings with him the group of talented musicians who appear on the original recording, including saxophonist Pablo Calogero, vibraphonist DJ Bonebrake, bassist David Pilch and drummer Danny Frankel.