Financial Times Review

ARTS: COMPACT CHOICE
Financial Times; Jan 12, 2002

By DAVID HONIGMANNKlezmer music was born in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe at the end of the last century. It was a Jewish blend of gypsy rhythms with wild, wailing clarinet lines, bipolar music for manic dancing or melancholic weeping, music that swung between ecstasy and torment. In eastern Europe, the music died, along with many of its players, but it survived among the Jewish diaspora in the US, notably Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras in the 1920s.

For a while it went underground, though its ghost could be heard in cartoon soundtracks and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. But from the 1980s onwards, a wave of revival bands started to bring the music up to date. Artists such as David Krakauer (who played a late-night Prom in London last year), Brave Old World and the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band fused traditional klezmer with avant-garde jazz and infused it with rock dynamics.
One of the leading lights of this revival were the Klezmatics. Their leader, the trumpeter Frank London, is hyperactively collaborative, whether throwing off a film score, enlisting an entire brass band or setting Yiddish poetry to music with the Israeli singer Chava Alberstein. One of his side projects is Hasidic New Wave. Albums such as Kabology; Jews And The Abstract Truth (a nod to Oliver Nelson's lost classic The Blues And The Abstract Truth), and Guiliani Uber Alles stress the improvisational jazz, but are still clearly rooted in klezmer.

Hasidic New Wave's previous albums have been largely driven by London and the saxophonist Greg Wall, as bandleaders, but on From The Belly Of Abraham the drummer Aaron Alexander slides into the driving seat. He recruited the Senegalese percussionists Yakar Rhythms, led by Aliounne Faye, familiar to British audiences from his work with Peter Gabriel and the Senegalese superstars, but with dates with others from Stevie Wonder to Whitney Houston also on his CV.

The meeting of downtown New York and Senegal clearly has a political agenda (these are, we are told, "Adventures in the Afro-Semitic diaspora"), akin to the Klezmatics' invocation of Nubian rhythms. "Salaam Mohammed", intones Faye at the start of "Waaw Waaw", in a manner calculated to give elderly klezmer fans from the Catskills a heart attack. But does it work in practice? There are times when it sounds as if the New Yorkers and Yakar Rhythms have accidentally been double-booked in the same recording studio, but on the whole the collaboration works well for both: the Africans anchor the wilder flights of fancy; Hasidic New Wave build a melodic architecture that prevents the drumming from becoming merely dry.

London and Wall pass the lead easily from one to another; some tunes, such as "Waaw Waaw", consist largely of a single phrase repeated. "The Sacred Line" breaks the flow for a moment, for a ballad on which London's trumpet skitters around Wall's sultry melody. "Frydginator" stops and starts abruptly, studded with minute guitar acrobatics from David Fiuczynski. The album closes on "Spirit of Jew-Jew": African polyrhythms, an insistent tattoo on the high-hat and a sturdy bassline broken into by trumpet, saxophone and guitar all squalling as if nothing else on earth existed, let alone mattered.

David Honigmann
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