To call Frank London the king of klezmer music would be too easy.

Because even though the title is totally true for the 50-year-old trumpet player, who has more klezmer records out than years living on the planet, it still tells only half of London's musical story.

"Let's see," London says, talking by phone from his home in New York, while washing dishes. "Through the years, I've played in salsa bands (clink), Haitian bands (clink), Calypso bands (clink), Balkan bands (clink), jazz bands (clink), improv bands (clink), bebop bands."

London stops listing bands apparently only because he has run out of dishes to wash. That London is best known as bandleader of the Klezmatics and will be a key performer in the 23rd Jewish Music Festival, beginning Saturday in Berkeley, is a destiny the awkward kid from Long Island never expected.

"All I knew about Jewish music while growing up certainly wasn't klezmer, and it certainly wasn't funky, and it certainly wasn't hip and interesting," London says, accidentally summing up the best ways to describe his musical career. "The Jewish music I knew was very, very cliche, corny, horrible, anti-aesthetic sounds of commercial schlock Israeli middle-class suburban Jewish stuff. It was definitely nothing I wanted to be involved with."

That all changed between the time London studied music at Brown University and then the New England Conservatory of Music, where he first heard the sounds of klezmer - strictly defined as the instrumental music of Eastern European Jews who spoke Yiddish. Nowadays, klezmer music is a familiar and established genre. The Klezmatics made an entire career out of interpreting it. Brooklyn indie duo They Might Be Giants has hints of klezmer in its hit pop songs. Cities across the world have festivals dedicated to it.

But to a college-age London on a musical mission to explore everything ethnic, the most exotic sounds he found happened to be the most closely rooted to his own family's background.

"When you hear or play klezmer music, it evokes that old shtetl world that doesn't exist anymore," says London, who joined the klezmer Conservatory Band in Boston around 1980. "It's that wonderful miracle of music that can transport you to an otherwise forgotten time and place."

The klezmer revival began in Berkeley around 1976, believes Ellie Shapiro, director of the Bay Area's Jewish Music Festival. A group called the Klezmorim began playing the traditional style after it and others started exploring and collecting old scratchy 78 records engraved with instrumental and otherworldly use of violins, trombones, cimbaloms and clarinets.

London heard these original klezmer source recordings, made from about 1905 to 1930, and was blown away. The klezmer records also led him to discover nigunim music, the vocal tunes of Hasidism.

"Part of the idea of nigunim is to attain oneness with God," says London, who's own spirituality grew with music. "Singing and dancing was seen as a holy act. Through nigunim, which involves a state of trance and medium of repetition, one can attain spiritual ecstasy through singing and dancing."

Combine nigunim with klezmer, and add a touch of London's first love of rock 'n' roll, and you've got the Klezmatics.

"Frank really is a force of energy," says Shapiro, who first saw him perform at a Klezmatics gig at the Great American Music Hall about 10 years ago. "He has this ability to galvanize a group of musicians and extract all of their talents and skills. I saw him perform recently in Krakow, and it was like the stage was another world and he transported everybody with him. When Frank got off the stage and I went up to him, he didn't even recognize me. It was like he was still in that other world."

London's leadership and the fact that he is "ambitious without the ego" is also why he plays a key role in this year's festival and will be honored with the Shofar Award.

London opens the festival Saturday with an ensemble performance of his latest CD, "A Night in the Old Marketplace," based on a 1907 Yiddish play by I.L. Peretz. London describes the project as ...

"Well, to tell you the truth, I don't really know what to call it," he says.

Peretz's original play, a ghost story, is virtually impossible to stage, calling on upward of 150 characters who come back from the dead, sometimes to utter only one line. To take it on, London tried combining several formats, including workshops, readings, fully staged musicals with costumes. The best edited form seemed to be the album, which includes a full band, singers who play characters without acting and a narrator who ties it all together.

London was drawn to "A Night in the Old Marketplace" in part because he loves ghost stories and because he felt a parallel connection with what Peretz was doing 100 years ago.

"Peretz and his peers were folklorists who were very aware that the onset of modernity was going to wipe out the entire shtetl life they grew up in," London says. "They set out to use the new tools - photography and recordings - to document their world before it was gone."

On March 29, London will present an even more unusual performance. Called "The Ark," the commissioned work involves London leading a collective of nine musicians from around the world who will go on a six-day retreat the week before to produce an entire new work of music from the ground up. There will be no rules, no sound checks, no cell phones, no interviews, no worrying about checking the parking meter. With the gift of time, the nine musicians are asked only to create a new piece of Jewish music and play it in here and again later at the Jewish music festival in Krakow.

"As far as I know," London says, returning to his dishwashing, "nothing like that has ever been done before for Jewish music."

It's no wonder that London will be the first.

The 23rd Jewish Music Festival opens at 8 p.m. Saturday with Frank London's "A Night in the Old Marketplace." $24-$28. Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Other events include Osvaldo Golijov's "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind" with the Bridge Players (March 23); Hasidic cantor Benzion Miller with Daniel Gildar (March 23); "Ladder of Gold" with Teslim (March 25); Golem with Lord Loves a Working Man (March 26); and "Israel @ 60," with marimba virtuoso Chen Zimbalista (March 27). For complete schedule (through March 30), go to www.jewishmusicfestival.org.

-- by Delfín Vigil