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Clarinetist David Krakauer finds in hip-hop klezmer a funk that fits
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San Francisco Chronicle, Clarinetist David Krakauer finds in hip-hop klezmer a funk that fits >>
Klezmer music has always been a blend of every cultural strain to come within its orbit, from a cantorial chant to pop songs to jazz. So why not hip-hop as well?
With his band Klezmer Madness, clarinetist and composer David Krakauer has been pushing the boundaries of Jewish music ever further. And on his most recent CD, "Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me" (Label Bleu), he joins forces with a young Canadian beat-meister named Socalled to produce a churning musical melange that he calls "the true Jew funk, the amazing Bulgar beat."
This weekend the band will deliver that sound live in two San Francisco performances. Saturday's Herbst Theatre concert, presented by San Francisco Performances, is a joint appearance with jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine, whose cross-genre projects have sought out the klezmer strains in Mahler's music and reinterpreted Bach's "Goldberg Variations" from a gospel and bebop perspective. That will be followed by a free concert Sunday afternoon as part of the Morrison Artists Series at San Francisco State University.
For Krakauer, 49, the fusion of klezmer and hip-hop is only the latest chapter in a fecund career encompassing classical, jazz, avant-garde improvisation and more traditional klezmer revivalism. It was a chance meeting with 28-year-old Socalled, a.k.a Josh Dolgin, that put him onto that track.
"I was teaching at a festival called KlezCanada," Krakauer recalled, "and at the end this guy hands me this thing he made in his basement called 'Hip-Hop Seder.' There are so many kitschy things like this out there that I was skeptical.
"But I put it on and I was blown away. Here's a guy who'd been making his own quirky brand of hip-hop since he was 15, starting with this crappy sampler."
What gives the tracks on "Bubbemeises" their distinctive edge is the sources that Socalled draws on -- everything from old cantorial recordings to a corny 1960s comedy LP by Herschel Bernardi. Krakauer's clarinet playing, inflected with all the sobs and emotional ornamentation of the klezmer tradition, soars above the beat.
"This comes out of the hip-hop aesthetic that says you have to represent, to be who you are," Krakauer says. "It's funny -- people have said this is the most Jewish record I've made."
Krakauer is the original voluble New Yorker -- ask him a question and he can run with it for 10 or 15 minutes. He grew up in Manhattan, the child of a psychiatrist father and a mother who was a classical violinist.
"When I was 10 I had the opportunity to study music in school. My mother said it was too late for the violin -- she had started at 3 -- and that I should play a wind instrument like clarinet or flute. She said them in that order, so I chose the clarinet."
Krakauer dates his true love of music to a year later, when he discovered the jazz master Sidney Bechet. At the High School of Music and Art, he studied both classical and jazz, but in college he had a "crisis of confidence" about jazz and decided to concentrate on the classical side.
That went well for a while -- he played at the Marlboro Music Festival, was a member of the Aspen Woodwind Quintet and even dabbled a little in the world of experimental music. But he felt the improvisatory side of his artistry beginning to languish.
"Then, in 1987, I was living across from Zabar's, and there was this little klezmer band that used to play on the street outside my apartment. I was on the 10th floor, but it floated up, as though they were serenading me.
"And one day I ran into the accordion player on the bus and she said that their clarinetist was leaving town and they were looking for someone. She knew I was an established player, and I'm sure she thought I might recommend a student or something.
"But as I opened my mouth, the words just came out, 'I'd like to try.' It was one of those moments were you just -- spontaneously, at that moment, I felt I'd like to play klezmer music.
"For me, after all the crises and questioning and breast-beating, this made sense. It sounded like the voice of my grandmother, with her Yiddish-soaked English. I found a musical home."
Krakauer came onto the scene near the end of the first phase of the klezmer revival, a period during which musicians were intent on reviving and replicating the performances caught on old recordings.
"By the time I arrived, it seemed that the revival was petering out. The attitude at that time was that this was music that folkies, cognoscenti and maybe older people in Florida are going to love, but then it was going to run its course and be finished."
But before that happened, a second wave of performers -- younger, more irreverent and steeped in rock 'n' roll -- got hold of klezmer. Krakauer joined one of the more influential bands of that period, the Klezmatics, playing with them on the records "Rhythm and Jews" and "Jews With Horns."
From there it was a short step to making his own records for Tzadik, the exploratory label run by composer and downtown guru John Zorn. Among those offerings was "Klezmer, NY," which included a musical reverie about a meeting between Bechet and klezmer clarinetist Naftule Brandwein.
At the same time, Krakauer has kept up his classical chops, playing Brahms with the Emerson String Quartet and participating in the world premiere recording of Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Tempest Fantasy." He has collaborated regularly with the Kronos Quartet, especially in performances of Osvaldo Golijov's klezmer-tinged "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind."
For Krakauer, this sort of omnivorous activity feels only natural. "This is all part of living in the 21st century. You make your own casserole from the ingredients you have at hand."
-Joshua Kosman 12/09/05 >> go there
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