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(Concert Preview) GOLEM: Marrying klezmer to Eastern European music
8.23.05
by Seth Rogovoy
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) -- On a trip to Serbia a few years ago, Annette Ezekiel wound up spending a long night jamming with a group of Gypsy musicians. With her dark, Eastern European looks, she could easily pass for a fellow Gypsy -- although they knew she was from the U.S. and throughout the night they called her sister.
Then, after the last tune was swapped and it came time to say goodbye, they turned to her and asked her what she was. “When I told them I was Jewish they said, ‘We’re the same thing,’ and then they played ‘Hava Nagila’ with all the wrong chords,” said Ezekiel in a recent phone interview from her apartment in New York.
Despite the wrong chords, it was a telling experience, confirming for Ezekiel what she had already sensed and what she had been exploring with her band, Golem
-- the natural affinity between Yiddish music and Eastern European songs from Russian, Serbian, Gypsy, Romanian and other traditions.
Although often lumped in with the vital klezmer scene centered in downtown New York, Golem which performs at
Club Helsinki on Saturday, August 28, at 8:30 -- is not really a klezmer band. It shares with klezmer the sound of Yiddish and the bittersweet, laughing and crying quality, which Ezekiel says she finds to some extent in all of the Eastern European folk music she plays.
One difference, however, comes in the Yiddish theater and folk songs that Golem favors over the wedding-dance repertoire that comprises the bulk of most klezmer band’s set lists. In Golem’s hands, well-known songs like “Papirosn” and lesser known ones like “Rivkele”-- both found on the group’s great debut CD, Libeshmertzn (Love Hurts) -- are brimming with sensuality and passion and delivered with raw emotion.
”The Yiddish theater music is considered lowbrow stuff,” said Ezekiel, who began dancing with an Ukrainian folk ensemble as a child. “The sexiness is built into that, and people have let that fall by the wayside and let it get overrun by nostalgia.”
Golem also differs in its instrumentation. The group features two singers -- Ezekiel, who doubles on accordion, and Aaron Diskin -- as well as a bassist, a drummer, a trombonist and a violinist.
”The only really klezmer instrument is the violin,” said Ezekiel. “Even the accordion wasn’t in klezmer bands until much later. I wanted that because I wanted it to sound different from the clarinet-driven klezmer bands.”
Rather than present an isolated style of music, Ezekiel’s aim is to recontextualize klezmer and Yiddish music by juxtaposing them with their coterritorial sounds.
”Klezmer originated in that region and incorporated influences from whatever music was around there, be it Russian, Moldavian, Balkan, Rumanian. I think it’s interesting to hear those different kinds of music together in one sitting. Somehow they are pretty different, but they do make sense together.”
Want to hear this great band? I have just posted a streaming audio of Golem perfoming Odessa at clubhelsinkiweb.com
DLMWeb
8/25/2005
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