The Klezmatics’ most recent release, the lengthy unashamed celebration of everything they are about, Live At Town Hall, was a vigorous and beautiful set recorded in their New York home. That album caught the electrifying and uncompromising heft of their polemics, their poetics and their playing. And it revealed how The Klezmatics nod to the past – respectfully and disrespectfully – before grasping all the genre’s potentials, with commitment, virtuosity, understanding, humour and righteousness. And opener in their new set, Der Geler Fink, has all the effervescent playing that we have come to expect, a resonant rough groove against which futuristic klezmer is played with conviction and style.
Apikorsim sees deceptively approachable and familiar melodies envelope trills light as air and seriously played intent, through carefully and artfully disjointed arrangements. Admiration accompanies the discomforting unease that something is not quite right. And this is good, because, as trumpeter Frank London has explained, klezmer can perfectly evoke otherworldly nostalgia “for a time and place that we never knew”.
The Klezmatics are modernity, but teetering through hints of tango drama, haltering waltz, millennial concerns and the biggest music. The band have openly supported all manner of socially progressive goodness, a stance that has provoked academic tracts in addition to a vital and exciting popularity. They show that there is no contradiction in presenting both jaggedly hot songs of radical contemporary politics, and smoothly tearjerking laments steeped in ancient spirituality. In recognising that barriers and preciousness never make much sense in any form of traditional music, The Klezmatics have changed traditional Jewish music – and have become, in the process, the only Jewish music group to have won a Grammy (for their stunning multicultural setting of previously unsung Woody Guthrie lyrics). There is praise here, but for a God who is also emphatically questioned.
This is a heady existential statement, reaching out beyond any safe constituency, challenging every icon and tenet encountered, and answering most questions with confusion and wild celebration: The controlled raucousness of Tayer Yankele, an incongruent spiritual beseeching earthed into the secular by the rawness of the playing. And also the carefully delineated faint of Ver Firt Di Ale Shifn? (Who Guides The Ships?), which is sedate and dignified, strings swaying above delicate percussion and despair. A yearning slow dance of the mind’s eye.
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