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| Russia's klezmer revival Published: 04/09/2008 By: Grant Slater An annual klezmer festival in Moscow helps revive interest in Jewish music and culture in Russia and Eastern Europe.  MOSCOW (JTA) -- Holding a music box up to the microphone, Daniel Kahn asks his audience to stand at attention and spins the crank to play a tinny rendition of "The Internationale," a socialist workers' hymn laden with meaning in this post-Soviet capital. With a heave at the bellows of his marble-red accordion and a stomp of his boot, he then sounds the whistle for the night shift of the International Klezmer Union's chapter in Moscow. A two-hour peal of Jewish musical folklore follows, the lyrics spewing from the stage in four languages: English, German, Yiddish and Russian. "When I'm with the Russians, it's always a party," Kahn says. This was the final sprint of the fourth annual Moscow Yiddish Fest, a weeklong festival of music of the Jewish Diaspora that brought together a global cast of performers to capitalize on a resurgent interest in Jewish music here. They played to packed houses: concert halls during the day, clubs at night. The festival was founded by Anatoly Pinsky, an educational scholar and adviser to the Russian Ministry of Education. Originally called Dona-Fest, after the Yiddish band Pinsky created, the festival has grown every year. It also has gained the support of the Federation of Jewish Communities, Russia's largest Jewish umbrella organization, and the Moscow city government. When Pinsky died in December 2006, his daughters and community members kept the festival going. With its growing stature, the festival enables musicians from around the world to experience the distinctive Muscovite brand of Yiddish music. "Many of our musicians were going outside the country to play at other festivals," said one of Pinsky's daughters, Zoya Pinskaya. "We wanted to bring them here to see what we have. Now it's a tradition." The festival was comprised of three gala concerts, two in concert halls and one at a Jewish community center. Seminars and academic discussions on Yiddish music also were featured throughout the week. Kahn played two shows in posh Moscow nightclubs with a rotating lineup of festival participants. At the final concert hall performance, more than 50 musicians packed the stage for a farewell performance conducted by Frank London, a trumpet player from the New York-based Klezmatics. "When I started showing up here years ago, they would stand up there with a tape recorder and sing in broken Yiddish," London told JTA. "Now it's more ingrained into their consciousness." As with other facets of Jewish culture, klezmer music suffered under the communist era. London said it took 10 years from the fall of the Soviet Union for an organized klezmer scene to emerge in Moscow. It has been getting closer to its pre-Soviet roots ever since. Psoy Korolenko, a prolific poet and musician who was involved at the festival's beginning, said this gathering and others like it provide an opportunity for Klezmer musicians to bond. "These conventions create intentional communities," Korolenko said. "Without this the music would stop." With his wild, gray-flecked beard and mane to match, Korolenko was Kahn's right-hand man throughout the weekend, singing backup and loosely translating off-color jokes for Russian-speaking audiences. On the concert hall stage last Saturday night, Korolenko and Kahn stood out from the staid, Yiddish choral acts and classical clarinet solos as they tried to convince the audience to sing along to a tongue-in-cheek tune about a weeping Russian cosmonaut. The audience wasn't interested. But under the low lights of an upscale Moscow nightclub the next night, Kahn's brand of klezmer found a more receptive crowd. Ebullient Israeli expatriates, Russians and even a Chabad chasid hiding behind sunglasses and a baseball cap sang along with fervor. The set was at turns bawdy and contemplative, swinging from an up-tempo Russian dance tune to a plodding treatise on Zionism. Kahn's music and lyrics also reveal an interest in leftist Jewish politics, evident in the group's most recent homage to a mythical klezmer union -- klezmer bund, in German -- and the music-box rendition of the socialist anthem. "I was a bit nervous playing it in” the former Soviet Union, Kahn said, “but everyone there seems to love it.” Kahn, 29, raised in Detroit and now living in Berlin, is a central player in Germany's klezmer scene. When he was 18 years old, he bought an accordion from a pawn shop in Ann Arbor, Mich., took it home and learned to play "When the Saints Go Marching In." Since then he has led a nomadic life. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he studied theater, Kahn lived in New Orleans and New York before moving to Berlin. Along the way he has performed in Jewish theater, organized folk festivals and played in lounge acts. Kahn also found a gateway back to Jewish culture through klezmer, literature and language, he said, gradually exploring his own Jewish identity. In Berlin, he and his band recorded an album of what he calls "alienation klezmer music” -- a combination of radical Yiddish tunes, American gothic music and punk cabaret that draws on his travel experiences. Kahn said that translating lyrics from Yiddish and German to English has become a major interest and source of inspiration for his listless music. "Home is a tricky thing; home is people for me,” he said. Yiddish “has a sense of alienation. The language is loaded with prejudices and misconceptions. It's very rich." The music scenes in Berlin and Russia are strongly intertwined. Berlin has a vibrant underground music scene built on the foundations of Russian groups, Jewish and secular, who frequently make the trip between Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin. Among them is Naekhovichi, a Jewish group with a shuffling lineup that provided the rhythm section for several performances at the festival. At home with blues riffs and dance beats, the group is comprised of mostly secular players, but they chose to chase their grandfathers' Jewish roots in Odessa with their music. Fyodor Mashendzhinov, the drummer for Naekhovichi, said his 4-year-old band plays two types of gigs: synagogues in Russia and club shows in the underground klezmer scene. Lately, he said, the two worlds have started to merge as Jewish music has become a more stable part of the community. "It's very funny to me to see Chasidim and older people in the clubs listening to us," Mashendzhinov said. "Usually you can only see these people in synagogues, but we are playing this music and it is their cultural background." | |||||
'Songs'
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"Old Wicked Songs" by Jon
Marans MAX WRIGHT Those sad lyrics are best buried, those old songs of love lost and pain past endurance. Those old wicked songs. That poignantly spun phrase was coined by the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, though devotees of art song more likely associate it with Robert Schumann's setting of Heine's verses in a cycle called "Dichterliebe," or "Poet's Love." Observing Heine's words through the exquisite prism of Schumann's music, playwright Jon Marans beheld the whole of human suffering and asked: What does it mean to live with scars on the heart, the soul, the body -- not merely to survive, but truly to live once more? Marans came up with a layered but essentially optimistic answer in his 1996 play "Old Wicked Songs," which has remained vividly with me since I saw it in London's West End shortly after the premiere. Now the Jewish Ensemble Theatre has re-created this two-man show with all the wit, edge and ambiguity that made such an impression when the play was new. The premise is straightforward enough. In 1986, a brilliant young American pianist goes to study accompaniment with an elderly, rather eccentric teacher in Vienna called Josef Mashkan. Actually, the pianist, Stephen Hoffman, is there against his wishes. The master he really wants to work with has insisted he spend some time first with Mashkan. But the larger reason the kid is there at all is that he's burned out, his artistic drive, his ability to practice, the joy of music itself, all gone. Schumann's "Dichterliebe" is open on the piano, so Mashkan suggests they start with that. However, to his surprise and annoyance, the pianist isn't invited to play, but to sing. And so begins a contentious venture in which the uptight young American learns about breathing and the breath of life -- and in turn forces his teacher to face his own secret torment. As the addled but earnest teacher, Max Wright offers a performance that's richly textured, funny and wise. And Daniel Kahn answers with a well-gauged progression from presumptuous smart-aleck to understanding -- about breath and life and the profound possibilities that both imply. Evelyn Orbach, JET's founding artistic director, directs this show. Only when you stop to consider its seamless, effortless fluidity does her invisible hand reveal itself. Lawrence B. Johnson is a Detroit-based cultural writer and critic. You can reach him at lawrencebj@gmail.com. |
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Free Press 10/18/07 Old Wicked Songs |
Vienna is all a lie, says Stephen Hoffman.
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5/3/2007 JN-Jewish News Arts & Entertainment
ARTS: Out and About- May 3, 2007
Detroit-area native Daniel Kahn moved to Berlin in the summer of 2005. In the
fall of that year, he formed the Painted Bird, a band named for the infamous
book by Jerzy Kosinski. Featuring a rotating roster of some of Berlin and New
York's best young klezmer and Balkan players, the ensemble performs a
combination of political cabaret, radical Yiddish song, American punk folk and
klezmer - fronted by singer-songwriter Kahn on vocals, accordion and piano; U.S.
expat composer Michael Tuttle on upright bass and Swedish drummer Hampus Melin.
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It's OPie time! Daniel Kahn - Nominated for Best Musical Performance
....Daniel Kahn mastered the accordion for two Bertolt Brecht message plays: Planet Ant's "Lehrstucke" and Performance Network's "The Threepenny Opera." |
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Detroit Metro Times by Eve Doster |
"Dan Kahn is the hottest damn songwriter you've never heard of. Like Dr. John meets Leon Redbone, with the soul of John Sinclair, Kahn is not only an amazing multi-instrumentalist/playwright/poet, he also typifies the youthful ethos that reminds us that music without heart is just a bunch of noise." |
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DETROIT FREE PRESS BY MARTIN F. KOHN |
Planet Ant offers a lesson in BrechtNovember 4, 2003 It's a pretty good month to be a dead German playwright in Detroit. Planet Ant Theatre is doing its take on four of Bertolt Brecht's "Lehrstucke ('The Learning Plays)" while on the other side of town Zeitgeist Theatre presents its spin on a play by Brecht's disciple Heiner Mueller.
Both productions have much to recommend them. Director Eric W. Maher has selected four of Brecht's fable-like "Learning Plays" and the five cast members -- Jocelyn Fekel, Jen House, Dan Kahn, Charles Reynolds and Steve Sabaugh -- act with spirit and conviction. The plays are supplemented with original music by Kahn, who sings and accompanies the company on some dozen different instruments including piano, accordion, guitar and mandolin. It's all very "Threepenny Opera," and in the Brechtian tone of crossing boundaries between performer and audience, Kahn begins the evening by singing "Turn off your cell phones," to the tune of "Hava Nagila." The major piece of the evening is "The Exception and the Rule," the tale of a greedy merchant's journey across the desert in pursuit of business. He mistreats his guide and abuses his bearer, the poor fellow who carries all the supplies. An indictment of capitalism -- Brecht never was one for subtlety -- the play decries the exploitation of both mankind and natural resources; its talk about drilling for oil seems especially up-to-date. Humankind comes off no better in the three shorter plays. In "The Yes Sayer" and "Does Man Help Man?" an unfortunate victim meets a very sad end, just as in "The Exception" But "The No Sayer" is "The Yes Sayer" with a happy ending. It is the program's shortest play. "Lehrstucke" is rarely performed, and so vigorous and inventive a production is probably rarer still. |
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Message is smartly clear
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| By David
Cuthbert
Theater writer The New Orleans Times-Picayune |
'MAN' HUNT Brecht's anarchic spirit turns up in lark at the By David Cuthbert Theater writer/The Times-Picayune There's no happier experience for me than hauling my tired old keester off to some obscure theater space for a production that turns out to be so much more than expected. Bertolt Brecht's "Man is Man" at the A.R.K. gets it right: the German-born playwright's timeless theme of military manipulation of the common man and his famous alienation effect, which calls attention to the fact that what you're watching is only theater so that your intellect -- and not your emotion -- is engaged. The play's theatricality and playful, anarchic spirit prevail throughout. It was a warm night and the A.R.K. has no air-conditioning, just fans, but it didn't matter. It was exhilarating. This is Eric Bentley's 1962 adaptation of Brecht's 1926 piece in which he first tried his "epic theater" approach of social-political drama as episodic, ironic, populist entertainment. Ideas dominate here, and the message is put across in a coarsely comic, presentational style of sardonic song, mock jingoism and announcements telling the audience what is about to happen. Using the framing device of a recruitment play for His Majesty's Imperial Indian Army, "Man is Man" tells the story of Galy Gay, a trusting, good-hearted young simpleton who goes off to buy a fish for dinner and is bamboozled into the Army, brainwashed into believing that he is someone else and ultimately becomes a "human fighting machine." After all, "one man is no man" and all men are interchangeable peas in the great militant pod, robbed of identity and individuality, succumbing to the siren song of relinquished selfhood. Where to begin telling you of the rag-tag, squalid splendors of this strikingly strident evening? The company is mostly young and totally committed to the dark, derisive daffiness at hand. Bracingly directed with mocking wit and bawdy brio by Daniel Kahn and Sarah Clifford, it features Kahn at the piano and accordion, playing his own Kurt Weill-Frederick Hollander-influenced score, with one actual Weill melody, "The Cannon Song" from "The Threepenny Opera," matched with a Brecht poem. Kahn provides not only songs but underscoring as well, and serves as our wild-eyed recruiter-emcee. His tatty, talented cabaret band includes Jessie Smith, an impassive-aggressive drummer; Anikka Lachman, perched atop the upright piano, on violin; ukulele player Sienna O'Bannion; and Michael Tuttle on bass, all doubling in small roles in the play. Adam Haver is perfection as Galy Gay, the baby-faced boob turned blood-thirsty beast. Kevin Fricke barks, snarls and roars his way through the role of Sgt. Bloody Five, he of the gross appetites and outrageous costuming (a Union Jack eyepatch and increasingly outsized phallus). Claudia Baumgarten's pragmatic, whiskey wagoneer Widow Begbeck, who sells both booze and sex, is a precursor to some of Brecht's most famous characters: Pirate Jenny (from "The Threepenny Opera") and Mother Courage (from "Mother Courage and Her Children"). Bryan "Spitz"faden makes a merrily malevolent Baker, ringleader of the soldier-tricksters Shelly (played by lean, mean Arthur Fischer) and Mahoney (hearty Keith Massey). One would like to have seen more of Christopher Blum's antic Jeriah Jip, but then, he's the missing soldier Galy is pressed into impersonating. Brother Clit's anguished Mrs. Gay, Joel Davis' tech design with concentration camp-type follow spot, and Lexi Kiel-Wernsen's thrift shop/Army surplus costuming add further layers of chaotic harmony to this invigorating staging. _________________________ MAN IS MAN What: Bertolt
Brecht's play, produced by the A.R.K. Collective and directed by Daniel
Kahn and Sarah Clifford. Where: The A.R.K., 511 Marigny St. |
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Gambit Magazine - New Orleans |
The mood at the ragtag A.R.K. is perfect -- more perfect, I suspect, than any of Brecht's own productions in which his signature grittiness was generated in some very well-heeled, prestigious establishments. Off to one side of the stage, at an upright piano sits Daniel Kahn, in army khakis. Kahn, who wrote the music and co-directed the play (with Sarah Clifford), also acts as MC in the persona of Sgt. Solly Schmidt of His Majesty George the Second's India Corps. Sitting on and around the piano are assorted camp followers who make up the band. Kahn's music is appealing and evocative, as is the deliberately rinky-dink set with its scarlet curtain, bare light bulb and stretched sheet for projected titles. Galy Gay (Adam Haver) is the hero of the tale. He is an innocuous riverfront porter in Kilkoa -- a man whose major virtue is that he has "very few vices." One day, he sets out to buy a fish for supper, leaving his wife (Brother Clit, according the playbill) heating up a pot of water to cook it in. Meanwhile, an army machine-gun unit (Michael Tuttle, Arthur Fisher, Christopher Blum, Brian Spitzfaden and Keith Massey) set about looting a native shrine, the Pagoda of the Crimson God (what pagodas are doing in India is unclear). They are repulsed, and as they flee, one of their number -- Jeriah Jip, by name -- leaves a large swatch of his hair behind on the pagoda gate. Jip, a drunkard, is deposited in a large basket and left there unconscious. The commanding officer (an amusingly explosive Kevin Fricke) is a hell-for-leather sex maniac and sanguinary martinet given the sobriquet "Bloody Five" in honor of his most heroic exploit: the murder of five enemy prisoners. Bloody Five will wreak horrible retribution on the looters if he can find them, and he knows one of the looters must have a newly acquired bald spot. The machine gunners meet Galy Gay and, realizing he is incapable of saying "no," bully him into taking the place of the missing Jeriah Jip. During the rest of the play, Galy Gay gradually becomes convinced he is the man he's been impersonating. Meanwhile, the enterprising widow Begbick (a radiant Claudia Baumgarten) and her daughters (Sienna, Jessie and Anikka Lachman) keep the troops entertained. There is a long episode about a fraudulent elephant (Brian Spitzfaden and Keith Massey in costume) and Bloody Five, in a fit of morbid self doubt, castrates himself. What is one to make of it all? Well, one of the straw men that Brecht is obviously taking his agit-prop ax to is the idea of human nature. General concepts of this sort are anathema to a Marxist. Man is not Man -- he is what society makes him. In this case, a nice porter transmogrifies into an aggressive warrior. The trouble, for me, is that the transmogrification is so broadly portrayed as to be senseless, unless we are to take it that we are all Galy Gays, pursuing our own little goals, but so utterly lacking in inner direction that we can be molded at will into a contrary personality. Even if this is the point, the fable remains confusing. And the long, elaborate fictional transformation tells us precious little about the kinds of real transformations that endanger us. In any case, it's not the message, but the massage that makes the evening work. Brecht's attitude to the theater was new and refreshing. It retains a brash, defiant joy. You don't have to understand the point of the show to enjoy the show. The mood is strong and distinctive; the music is buoyant; and the performances winning. |
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