Beyond the Pale

By John Payne

"We have our roots in a lot of folk traditions, but we try not to fetishize authenticity," says Beyond the Pale's founder and mandolin master Eric Stein. Even in a musical world where the boundaries between traditional ethnic styles are being poked at, rethunk and smeared beyond recognition, the probing invention of Toronto's Beyond the Pale really is shocking. Out of spontaneous group compositions and the band's repertoire of refreshingly odd-mixed American jazz/rock/bluegrass/funk, the band forges something unusual by stirring in Jewish and Romanian folk tunes, new Yiddish poetry set to Roma melodies, spiky-funky Serbian rhythms and an often darkly melancholic sentimentality. Much of this derives from the band's scholarly research into obscure musical manuscripts collected a century ago by Eastern European ethnographers, and a whole bunch of scratchy 78s of ancient, obscure klezmer bands. Beyond the Pale's new Postcards (Borealis Records) is a bracingly modern, mind-blowing flight into a very new Jewish-Balkan sonic atmosphere.