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Cd Review
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Alarm, Cd Review >>
David Krakauer & Socalled with Klezmer Madness
Bubbemeises:Lies My Gramma Told Me
When David Krakauer's debut album Klezmer Madness appeared in 1995, it was a signal that the traditionally Jewish style of music was not long er to be confined to synagogues and bar mitzvah banquet halls. An accomplished clarinetist and fixture on the Manhattan downtown scene, Krakauer (along with spiritual allies John Zorn and Frank London) has been fusing and modernizing klezmer with accents of rock, jazz, and funk, in unique and eye-opening ways. Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me is just as idiosyncratic and rewarding as his previous endeavors. People may doubt that a middle-aged clarinetist of Jewish-Polish descent could successfully blend his 15th century Yiddish stule with hip-hop beats and samples, stabs of funk but somehow Krakauer and collaborator Socalled manage to guide this precarious pastiche in the right direction. The danceable rhythms of klezmer are enhanced and highlighted by Socalled's clever production, which provides Krakauer ample rhythmic fodder with which to play. He squalls and screeches throughout "Moscovitz and Loops of It" and "B Flat a la Socalled," with stunning intensity. "Turntable Pounding" employs found-sound and samples of antique Yiddish records to set a distinctly tense mood, before erupting into a thrashing hard-rock climax, while "Bus Number 9999" is an amusing beat-poet ramble of a sufficiently addled rider, the irrational leaps of thought matched by skittish clarinet bleats and an ambient miasma of city sounds. Bubbmeises:Lies My Gramma Told Me is an astoundingly original piece of work, one that revels in its own absudity and improbability with unabashed joy. 12/01/06
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