The Klezmatics -- photo by Alan Roche
by Tucker Petertil
New York’s The Klezmatics will celebrate 25 years together playing their genre-defying mixture of jazz and traditional Jewish music when they appear at the Washington Center December 21st.
I had a chance to ask Lorin Sklamberg – the group’s founder, lead singer, accordionist, guitarist and pianist – some questions, and drafted in Daniel Landin guitarist of local Klezmer band Erev Rav to ask a few more.
Opal: How do feel about your influence on other bands? For instance we have a great Klezmer band here in Olympia called Erev Rav.
Lorin: I haven’t had the privilege of hearing them, yet! It’s really fantastic that a couple of generations have come of age during our time together as a band that have grown up with our music in their ears, and with klezmer music in general. That definitely wasn’t so when we first started out. It makes me very proud to hear the freedom younger musicians have within the music now and yet how grounded they are in style and nuance. I like to think that we and some of our colleagues had a lot to do with that.
Opal: What is your personal story about becoming a musician? Supportive parents or uncontrollable urge?
Lorin: I know it’s a big cliché but family legend goes that I was singing before I could talk. My mom was a folksinging single mother with three kids – I taught myself to play guitar by watching her and, later, accordion. I always knew I would be a professional musician, though I wasn’t sure where I would end up musically. But it was definitely both – supportive and uncontrollable!
Opal: What music other than your own are you currently liking?
Lorin: I have young kids, so I’m exposed to a lot of current pop music. Of that, Maroon 5 is a guilty pleasure! If I look on my iPhone, I see a lot of opera (Jonas Kaufmann, Joyce DiDonato), Broadway musicals (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Book of Mormon) world music (Salsa Celtica, Mikel Laboa). I’ve also been catching up on Donovan’s classic albums of the late 1960s, which I seem to have missed the first time around.
Questions from Daniel Landin of Erev Rav.
Daniel: What were the ideas behind your recent collaboration project with Gospel Musicians?
Lorin: Actually, we’re in Milan performing our Brother Moses Smote the Water show with the “Prince of Kosher Gospel” Joshua Nelson right now! The show came out of an idea by the then-program director of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage to create a concert combing ‘freedom songs’, mostly around music for Passover and African-American spirituals. The original performance included the Klezmatics, black-Jewish American gospel singer Joshua Nelson, singer-songwriter Raúl Midón and jazz keyboardist/singer Amina Claudine Myers. For the past few years, we’ve been touring a streamlined version of the show with Josh. It’s always a treat to raise the roof with this show
Daniel: How do you relate traditional music with contemporary – I am curious if you just sniff your way to the music you find most interesting, or if you’re consciously combining your klezmer roots with particular genres.
Lorin: I can only speak for myself, but I would say that for me it’s more like sniffing, but without really thinking about combining this or that. We all have backgrounds in other styles of music – jazz, Irish, Balkan, Americana and Latin come immediately to mind. So it’s more like whatever works for a particular song or tune. As we’ve found over the years, it’s not an easy thing to combine styles in a convincing way.
Daniel: What has been the journey of musicians into the band replacing original musicians?
Lorin: The players who’ve come into the band over the years have by and large been musicians who we’ve known from our work outside of the Klezmatics. I played with Paul (our bassist) in New York’s Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band. Matt Darriad had been in Les Miserables Brass Band with Frank, while Lisa fiddled with Matt in the contemporary Celtic band Whirligig. A very New York kind of story, I guess.
Daniel: Is there intentional integration of particular instrumentation in the current band?
Lorin: Over the years, the band has added new instruments that have become part of our sound. One is Paul’s tsimbl, a traditional Jewish hammered dulcimer, which provides an eerie, older-world timbre. Matt has added the kaval, a Bulgarian end-blown flute, to his arsenal. Again, old-world, but a little more mysterious and hard-to-define for a general audience. And several years ago I started using a Tacoma Papoose, a small six-string guitar tuned up a fourth from a standard steel-stringed instrument. This came about mostly from the practical considerations of touring, but it also has a lovely, silvery ping in a register that complements our instruments and voices nicely. Oh, and everyone sings. Group vocals are a big part of things, too.
Daniel: What is exciting in the Klezmatics’ world or happening in the world of klezmer music right now?
Lorin: There are an innumerable number of new klezmer recordings and such in development, on the road or on the web. The advent of Kickstarter fundraising, for example, has enabled many of us to fund projects that, in the current financial and business climate, would otherwise never see the light of day. One that comes to mind is the production of a commercial recording by a remarkable octogenarian native Yiddish singer named Arkady Gendler. Our violinist has just put out an instructional klezmer fiddle DVD. Oh, and did I mention that the Klezmatics have a new double-CD, Live at Town Hall, plus Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, has just been commercially released on DVD. Exciting, yes indeed!
The Klezmatics play the WashingtonCenter on Wednesday December 21st