Celebrating a Passionate Underground Brooklyn Jewish Tradition

A hundred years ago, some of the biggest rockstars in the world sang in synagogues.

They were competitive. Many of them went on concert tour. A global audience bought their 78 RPM records. Yet those cantors weren’t just raising their voices in stock renditions of centuries-old repertoire, otherworldly and inspiring as many of those songs are. Pre-WWII artists like Gershon Sirota, Zawel Kwartin and Yossele Rosenblatt energized their fan bases with their unique interpretations of ancient traditions.

While cantorial performance has tragically fallen into a steep decline in recent decades, a new generation centered around a mostly underground performance scene in Brooklyn is bringing it back. The new vinyl record Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today – streaming at Bandcamp – focuses on six cantors leading the way.

As you would expect, vocals are front and center in this collection: the musical backdrop is typically limited to spare, resonant organ, played by David Reich and Jeremiah Lockwood (better known as the firebrand guitarist in the Sway Machinery). First on the mic is Yanky Lemmer of Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side, who takes his time through a soaring, impassioned, dynamically shifting version of the imploring Yom Kippur nigun Shomea Kol Bichiyos.

Shimmi Miller, of Temple Beth El in Borough Park, contributes his own mystical, melismatic anthem for the blessing of the new moon, Yehi Rotzon, anchored by Reich’s low-key but emphatic piano and a rousing choir of his fellow cantors.

Yossi Pomerantz sings a calmly determined version of V’aly y’dey Avodecha, a declaration of faith by legendary cantor Sholom Katz, who sang his way out of being murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Yoel Kohn takes over for a soulful performance of the Shabbat theme Kulam Ahuvim over Reich’s spacious piano. Lemmer returns to the mic for an insistent, breathtaking performance Moron D’vishmayo, a global hit for Kwartin. Then Kohn takes over again, rising to a gripping falsetto for the album’s most vast, spacious number, L’olam Yehey Odom, from the catalog of the great Hungarian cantor and Holocaust survivor Yehoshua Wieder.

Yoel Pollack delivers an expressive, thoughtful, operatically-tinged recording of Yossele Rosenblatt’s somber 1920 hit Shomer Yisroel, a requiem for the victims of World War I with Reich on harmony vocals. Then the pianist moves to the mic for Eso Eynay, a triumphant setting of Psalm 121.

Miller’s second song is a pensive version of the Rosh Hashanah song Habeyn Yakir Li. Lemmer closes the record with a fervent, viscerally angry a-cappella take of Tiher Rabi Yishmael, a Yom Kippur tribute to martyrs.

It’s also worth remembering that today we are on the brink of this year’s Hanukah celebration. But the annual Festival of Lights is not just about piety: it’s a celebration of transgression, a single night’s worth of lamp oil divinely multiplied to last for eight days of defiance in the face of tyranny. As that story goes, there is divinity in noncompliance. On this particular evening, Jews and non-Jews alike would do well to give that some thought.

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Legendary/Obscure Klezmer Art-Rock Band From North of the Border Plays a Rare Two-Night Stand in Williamsburg

Back in the zeros, Black Ox Orkestar emerged as the klezmer spinoff of Godspeed You Black Emperor. They put out a couple of records and then by the middle of the decade they were finished. Fast forward to 2022: they’re back, with an absolutely haunting, otherworldly new album, Everything Returns – streaming at Bandcamp – and a two-night stand at Union Pool on Dec 16 and 17 for slightly more than $24 (guessing that cash customers may have round up a few cents to $25 at the door). Avant garde trumpet titan Matana Roberts opens the first night at 8; as of today, it looks like Black Ox Orkestar have the second night to themselves.

They open the new record with a gorgeously somber old liturgical theme, Tish Nign, pianist Scott Gilmore punching in hard as violinist Jessica Moss and clarinetist Gabriel Levine float and shiver eerily and Godspeed bassist Thierry Amar maintains a distant, hypnotic, saturnine pulse.

That pulse picks up with a cinematic tension in Perpetual Peace, perfectly encapsulizing this band’s appeal: epic sweep, haunting minor melodies. The sound is much larger than you would expect from a four-piece augmented by Pierre-Guy Blanchard’s terse drumming; Levine’s multitracked bass clarinet along with his standard issue-model are an especially tasty touch.

Likewise, Gilmore blends pitchblende piano and cimbalom textures on Oysgeforn, the plaintively drifting introduction to Bessarabian Hora. As the pace picks up, Craig Pedersen’s trumpet takes centerstage in a regal, Middle Eastern-flavored melody over the twin-tuba drive of Julie Houle and Julie Richard. From there the band follow a ghostly segue into Mizrakh Mi Ma’arav, another absolutely gorgeous, haunting theme awash in low resonances and fleeting riffs from throughout the band as Moss and her bandmates exchange Yiddish lyrics.

There’s a similar sepulchral quality to Skotschne, Gilmore’s stately cimbalom over Levine’s gentle acoustic guitar and the soaring web of strings overhead. It wouldn’t be out of place as an instrumental on Neko Case’s Blacklisted album.

Gilmore shifts back to piano over buzzy, drony clarinet for Viderkol (Echo), a spare art-rock waltz that wouldn’t be out of place in the Botanica catalog. Epigenetik, a spare, angst-fueled, wintry guitar-and-strings ballad, is much the same.

The skies brighten for Moldovan Zhok, a puffing, rustically orchestrated, somewhat vaudevillian-flavored diptych. The band wind up this improbable and often spellbindingly beautiful record with a hushed, guardedly hopeful nocturne, Lamed-Vovnik.

Singles to Start Your Week With a Smile…and a Mystery Song

OK, maybe with a snarky smile. If you know this blog, you know the drill. Memes to make you laugh, then a self-guided playlist, then maybe something serious to keep us grounded. Click on artist names for their webpages, click on titles for audio and/or visuals. About 25 minutes worth of tunes. Make sure you use a browser like Brave to block the ads at the youtube videos.

Who says the future is so scary? Fran Leader, one of the leaders of the UK anti-fracking movement, shares a vision of “the good reset” – in case you’re wondering, the punchline is at the bottom.

“Is it Halloween already?” via El Gato Malo.

Artist Anne Gibbons has a good reason why all pregnant women should join the “rat race” to the DNA-altering Covid injection!

One of the few New York bands who date back to the late zeros and are still going strong, Changing Modes have a new video for Days, a characteristically acerbic, shapeshifting anthem: “These are the days I never spent with you.”

Does anybody recognize this song? If you know the answer, hit the comment button at the bottom of the page. Thanks! It’s a gorgeous orchestral arrangement of an old Hasidic nigun. Via Brooklyn’s #1 freedom fighter Brucha Weisberger, chronicling the ongoing holocaust in Israel.

“If the evidence points back, then why would they screen it?” Lula Wiles‘ frontwoman Mali Obomsawin asks in Television, the Boston band’s swaying psych-folk takedown of corporate media duplicity and false dichotomies.

Crone’s Abyss Road starts out like a peak-era 90s Versus-style downstroke anthem and goes back ten years to a heavier sound. Killer guitar solo!

Denial, by Onyria makes a good segue, a catchy, dystopic stadium rock stomp.

The devil is in the details in Mary Bragg‘s new single, Panorama, an allusive Crowded House-like haunter: “A real life diorama, to a starry-eyed pollyanna.”

Who would expect an oldschool 6/8 honkytonk ballad with a weird shoegaze interlude? But it works. Here’s Suzannah’s Losing Side of Town.

Finally, let’s get the word “philanthropath” into general circulation. Margaret Anna Alice, one of the great freedom fighters who sprang up in the wake of the 2020 totalitarian takeover, came up with that description for Gates, Soros, Bloomberg and the rest of the reptile oligarchs. She also shares the creepy depopulation scene from the late great Rik Mayall’s last film, One by One (scroll down)

Elegantly Exhilarating Klezmer Band Mames Babegenush Make a Welcome Return to Manhattan

Danish klezmer band Mames Babegenush made New York music history a couple of years ago for being part of what appears to have been the final installment of Golden Fest, the annual mega-concert of Balkan and Balkan-adjacent music that ran uninterrupted for more than three decades and was arguably the most exhilarating annual New York music event. The previous weekend, the band had played a marathon series of shows, from the Lower East Side to Curry Hill, chronicled in part here after a wild night at the Carlton Arms Hotel.

For those who can’t get enough of bracing minor keys and sizzling solos, Mames Babegenush are on the road for their “COVID Can’t Keep Klezmer Down” tour, with a gig at Drom on July 20 at 8 PM; you can get in for $20 in advance. And an advance listen to two new tunes the band have recently recorded proves this irrepressible bunch of party animal virtuosos are no worse for the layoff during the global totalitarian takeover. The first song, Elvermose Cocek reminds how much fun they can have with tunes from outside the klezmer demimonce, in this case a pouncing Balkan dance with a gorgeous, soaring solo from clarinetist Emil Goldschmidt.

The second is Night Flight, a gorgeous nocturne which their drummer Morten Aero opens with a mysterious cimbalom solo before bassist Andreas Mollerhoj introduces a tiptoeing pulse, setting the stage for a deep-sky solo from flugelhorn player Bo Rande. That’s the loud and soft of what you can expect from a band whose nine-album output of originals and imaginative takes on klezmer classics includes one titled Klezmer Killed the Radio Star.

A High-Voltage Klezmer Twinbill in the East Village on the 15th.

For those outside of New York, Midwood is a comfortable tree-lined Brooklyn neighborhood full of single-family woodframe homes (and unfortunately now, McMansions where some of those homes once stood). It has a robust Jewish population. This blog’s owner used to live there.

There was also a band called Midwood, led by a prime mover in the New York klezmer scene, violinist Jake Shulman-Ment. He’s playing on a killer twinbill on June 15 at 7 PM at Drom, leading his Fidl Kapelye with a global cast of klezmer singers: Zhenya Lopatnik, Sarah Gordon, Margot Leverett and Lorin Sklamberg, Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London‘s Klezmer Brass Allstars, who have become epically symphonic in recent years, headline; you can get in for $20 in advance.

Midwood’s mostly-instrumental album of electrified klezmer art-rock , Out of the Narrows came out in 2018 and is still streaming at Bandcamp. Guitarist Yoshie Fruchter machete-chops acidic, clanging chords as Shulman-Ment blasts through a thornily ornamented chromatic dance melody over drummer Richie Barshay’s scampering forward drive in the first tune, Isaac. Then it’s Fruchter’s turn to wail, scream and peel the paint off the walls

Anxiously allusive violin dances over a spiky, loopy guitar phrase and creepy glockenspiel as the group make their way into the second track, Ansky, Fruchter alternating between jangle and crunch as Barshay supplies a lithely boomy groove. It has a very late zeros/early teens Tzadik feel.

The group follow a slow, broodingly resonant trajectory in Ahava Raba: it sounds like Big Lazy with a violin, no great surprise considering that Fruchter would eventually work with that group’s mastermind, Steve Ulrich. They takes it out with a growling, bluesy Fruchter solo and a splash on Barshay’s gong.

Eléonore Weill sings the bittersweet love ballad Dortn over Fruchter’s starry, wide-angle tremolo guitar. The group reinvent Bughici Nign, a famous Romanian Jewish theme, with a lingering spaciousness but also an expectant unease. From there they segue into the similarly stately Bughici Khusidl: it’s cool to hear a distorted guitar behind Shulman-Ment’s meticulous melismas.

The next track, simply titled Waltz has a familiar minor-key feel, in the same vein as another hyphenated guy, Avi Fox-Rosen‘s work, reaching a scorching klezmer-metal peak. It’s the high point of the album.

Weill reaches for a stern intensity as the band sway precariously behind her in Az in Droysn. The closing cut, Gute Nakht is a gorgeously slow waltz and a good closer to this underrated gem of a record.

A Prescient, Indomitable Final Album From Jewlia Eisenberg’s Charming Hostess

“There was a doctor, there was a teacher, but the doctor didn’t care about illness, and the teacher didn’t care about teaching,” Charming Hostess frontwoman Jewlia Eisenberg sang, to open her radical circus rock band’s final album, The Ginzburg Geographies. In the context of 2022, the irony could not be more crushing.

Eisenberg died on 3/11 last year, four months after the Covid shot rollout. She’d been in precarious health for quite some time before. Nonetheless, the indomitable singer and musical polymath had continued to perform and work on a vast series of projects right up until the 2020 lockdown. It’s something of a miracle that she got as far as she did with the album, which her bandmates finished without her last year.

It’s collection of wildly original arrangements of Italian protest songs, an exploration of the territory that nurtured and eventually destroyed the marriage between World War II-era Italian antifascist activists and writers Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Hounded and pursued by axis forces, the two managed to evade and outlive Mussolini, but Leone was murdered by the Nazis. His widow would go on to serve in the Italian parliament in the decades after the war.

If you count their college days, Charming Hostess enjoyed a career that lasted almost thirty years, on and off. They went through many incarnations, from proto Gogol Bordello punk to feminist klezmer. Here, they do a strikingly faithful evocation of an anarchic Italian street band from seventy years ago, while also putting their own spin on retro 70s Italian film music in a Tredici Bacci vein . Eisenberg took several of the couple’s texts and used them to create a playlist of brooding, accordion-fueled psychedelia, oom-pah blue-collar protest songs and skittishly subversive bedroom pop. A girl protests against household drudgery, over a swaying, accordion-fueled backdrop. “Authority has no value,” Eisenberg reminds. Guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood jangles through some heartbreakingly beautiful interludes behind Eisenberg’s delicate multitracks. Much of this is on the phantasmagorical side, which makes plenty of sense considering the context. There’s also a ramshackle, bluegrass-flavored cover of a classic Woody Guthrie antifascist song.

The best number on the album is La Situazione, a slinky, shuffling, distantly creepy psychedelic rock shuffle fueled by Dan Cantrell’s roller-rink organ. The gist of Leone’s text is that it is Italians’ duty not to give in to alarmism and instead to dig in and fight while the Nazis roll into Rome. You want prophetic?

Eisenberg was outrageously funny, earthy and sometimes combative. Yet that feisty persona was a manifestation of her deeply liberational Jewish spirituality. She wrote film and theatre music, took a plunge into Babylonian mysticism and late in her career revisited her inner soul and blues sirens: she was a lot of those. Eisenberg didn’t just think outside the box: that box existed only as a target for her surrealist wit…or to be destroyed. How cruel that we’ll never know what else she might have had up her sleeve.

Ridiculous, Virtuosic, Outside-the-Box Fun From Joyride

It takes a lot of nerve to make music as amusing as Joyride‘s. Their irreverent reinventions of famous classical and jazz themes are as funny as they are outside-the-box. Whoever heard of an accordion-and-oboe arrangement of Bach’s Air on a G String, with a jazzy bridge? Throughout their debut album – streaming at Spotify – the duo of oboist Colin Maier and multi-keyboardist Charles Cozens have unrelenting, sometimes snarky fun and show off an impressive fluency throughout a wide variety of styles.

Maier cuts loose with his sizzling chops in what could be the most ridiculously over-the-top version of Tiger Rag ever recorded. Their Piazzolla-inspired piano-and-oboe version of Flight of the Bumblebee is pretty ridiculous, too – the punchline is way too good to give away.

Cozens goes back to accordion for Rhapsody in Light Blue, where the duo reinvent the Gershwin theme as a quasi-fugue before stretching it out. The most cynically spot-on track here is Isolation Blues, a ragtime-flavored reflection on endlessly exasperating plandemic restrictions.

Klezmer Fun is aptly titled, beginning with a brisk take of a famous hora, Maier adding subtle multitracks and shivery trills through an unexpectedly low-key interlude. Czardahora is a more harmonically adventurous take on the same formula. Tango de la Noche has Cozens on both piano and accordion, along with a similar mashup of popular nuevo tango riffs.

They close with La Fiesta, where Cozens and then Maier spin through supersonic riffage in what sounds like a loving spoof of flamenco jazz. One caveat: when you make a playlist out of this, ixnay on the little jokey skits in between some of the songs.

Jeremiah Lockwood’s Gorgeous New All-Instrumental Album Takes Hanukah Music to the Next Level

Guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood‘s new solo acoustic instrumental album The Great Miracle – streaming at Bandcamp – is one of the most fascinatingly individualistic Hanukah records ever made. The leader of Malian and cantorially-inspired psychedelic rockers the Sway Machinery draws equally on his immersion in country blues as well as traditional Jewish music, for an often breathtakingly beautiful series of new versions of themes associated with the Festival of Lights.

He opens with the introspective Ritual, rising from a spacious intro to steady, spiky, rustic chords. It’s part cantorial melody, part Piedmont blues, part stately baroque theme.

Al Hanisim is an absolutely gorgeous, chromatically-spiced theme with shadowy echoes of Greek rembetiko music. Lockwood reinvents Mi Yamalel as a similarly celestial tableau with a cheery, strolling blues undercurrent. There’s more than a hint of flamenco, and Morricone, in the striking changes and tumbling Middle Eastern-tinged runs in Izhar Cohen’s Al Hanisim: it would make a great surf song.

Lockwood also follows a plaintive Spanish-tinged trajectory in Maoz Tzur, with some of the album’s most incisive fingerpicking. Little Dreydl is a change of pace, a ragtime attempt to rescue one of the season’s most cloying melodies from its usual home in the dairy fridge.

Drey Dreydl is the most bucolic, blues-infused track here, but it’s also a showcase for Lockwood’s skills as a picker. He closes the record with Chanuka Oy Chanuka – since it’s Hebrew, you can transliterate it any number of ways in English. It’s the most enigmatic, jazz-oriented number here, many times removed from its humble origins.

Could a Hanukah record ever make it to the best albums of the year list here? Stay tuned for when that page goes live next month!

Fire Up the Menorah, It’s Party Time With Sarah Aroeste

When it comes to year-end holiday music, there are no Chosen People. Everybody suffers. A cynic could say that at this time of year, we’re all Jews.

There isn’t quite the glut of cheesy Hanukah music that there is for Christmas, but beyond the joke songs and the reggae records, it’s usually pretty awful. That’s why it’s cool that singer Sarah Aroeste, one of the world’s great advocates for Ladino music, has released what she calls the first-ever all-Ladino Hanukah record, streaming at Bandcamp.

This is refreshingly edgy music, with flamenco, and Andalucian, and Middle Eastern influences, as you would expect from the Sephardic tradition. Aroeste has really gone deep into the repertoire and unearthed a playlist of material from past decades as well as past centuries. Aroeste’s vocals are also remarkably easy to sing along to: if you know Spanish, Ladino is a lot less challenging than, say, Yiddish or Hebrew.

And the band are killer. Who would have expected a biting, brass-fueled shamstep Hanukah song? Or for a Hanukah album to open with a sizzling oud taqsim? That’s Yaniv Taichman spiraling around before Aroeste raises her voice in celebration, with a melody that seems to owe more to the Holy Land than to anywhere in Europe.

Israeli crooner Shuky Shveiky sings and plays fierce flamenco guitar on a Gipsy Kings-style take of Ocho Kandelikas, one of the best-known Ladino Hanukah songs. The first of two Aroeste originals is the acoustic guitar-driven minor-key singalong Fiesta de Hanuka. The second, Vayehi Mikets is a bouncy number based on an ancient parody: in this version, Joseph is contemplating pastries rather than the raw materials that Pharaoh put him in charge of.

Aroeste duets with songwriter Gloria Joyce Ascher on a sly reggae version of her joyous Ya Viene Hanuká! The family-friendly take of Flory Jagoda’s Hanuka, Hanuka is closer to dhaanto than reggae – but, hey, Ethiopia and Eritrea are the original Jewish stomping ground.

There’s also a cheery classical guitar-and-vocal tune by contemporary Israeli Ladino poet Medi Koen-Malki; a soaring Ladino version of Ma’oz Tzur set to a stately melody by eighteenth century Venetian composer Benedetto Giacomo Marcello; and a version of Dak il Tas with some spiky santoor from Eitan Refua. You get some history and culture with this album too.

Haunting Klezmer Sounds and Protest Songs Outdoors in Park Slope This Week

One of the most powerful protest songs that’s been resurrected in recent years is Mir Veln Zey Iberlebn (We Will Outlive Them).

This old Jewish melody, reinvented by Brooklyn klezmer band Tsibele, is as indomitable an anthem as any freedom fighter could want. In this seven-minute live clip, the group lead a singalong in the deliciously Middle Eastern-flavored freygische mode. Midway through, they provide the grim backstory.

When the Nazis marched into Lublin, Poland in 1941 and rounded up the Jews there, they were as sadistic as usual. Driving the population out into the fields, they commanded the captives to dance. The response was this song. As we all know, those Jews did not outlive their tormentors, but they raised the bar for defiance in the face of evil about as high as it can go.

As sadistic as the lockdowner regime has been, there’s special resonance in that song for us. Inevitability theories of history are full of holes, there’s no doubt that if the world is going to survive, we will outlive them. You can buy an embroidered patch for your coat which says exactly that, in Yiddish and English, from the band.

Half of the group – violinist Zoe Aqua and accordionist Ira Temple – are teaming up for an outdoor show with trumpeter Dan Blacksberg on July 29 at 4:30 PM at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, 58 7th Ave at Lincoln Pl in Park Slope. It’s about equidistant from the Grand Army Plaza and 7th Ave. B/Q stations.

Starting in the mid-teens, Tsibele became a fixture across several scenes here, and made some waves with their album It’s Dark Outside – Indroysn iz Finster, streaming at Bandcamp. Bassist Zoë Guigueno, flutist Eléonore Weill and trumpeter Eva Boodman focus intensely on Aqua’s dark arrangements of some well-known, politically resonant old songs.

Aqua’s slashing, low-register lines pierce the brooding ambience underneath in the first tune, Dem Nayntn Yanuar/Ninth of January, a dirge commemorating the 1905 massacre of freedom fighters in St. Petersburg, The band maintain a somber atmosphere in the blue-collar lament Di Svet Shop, based on a poem by Morris Rosenfeld.

They pick up the pace with a dead-serious take of Nifty’s Eigene, violin and trumpet taking turns with the original lead written by legendary klezmer clarinetist Naftule Brandwein. The album’s big, ominously atmospheric epic is a murder ballad, Tsvelef A Zeyger/Twelve O’clock, with a looming trumpet solo at the center.

Likewise, Boodman’s moody, soulful lines intertwine with the trills of the flute in the slow, darkly methodical Rosemont Terkisher. They close the record with the lilting, wistful title track, a love song.

Fun fact: tsibele is Yiddish for “onion.” Lots of layers to peel back here.