Ben Goldberg and David Buchbinder join Zebrina for all-star jazz show

Music Gallery concert promises ‘eastern melodies, western grooves’ while pushing boundaries of klezmer music

Zebrina's Bret Higgins, from left, Joel Schwartz, Jon Feldman, Colin Kingsmore, Max Senitt play the Music Gallery Thursday with David Buchbinder and Ben Goldberg.

By: Peter Goddard Visual Arts, Published on Wed May 22 2013

Major music forms and eras begin inconspicuously. Two or three little known composers ignited the atonal explosion in 20th-century music by insisting on the freedom to use all the notes available to them.

But who might have guessed all those Bar and Bat Mitzvah dances might kick start the next great jazz age?

Well, there’s Jonathan Feldman for starters. The Thursday Music Gallery concert by Zebrina , Feldman’s jazz fusion-meets-klezmer band, has the potential to provide the city one of those groundbreaking nights the Music Gallery hosted in the past for concerts by the Canadian Glass Orchestra and the Canadian Electronic Ensemble.

Launched in 2010 at the Ashkenaz Festival, Zebrina gets its name from a common houseplant called “the wandering Jew” (Tradescantia zebrina). Any wandering by the Toronto sextet will be entirely musical as it pushes klezmer’s piquant major-minor modulations as far afield as possible while never losing the music’s careening jazz band interactions. The possibilities tantalize. If jazz we have now began more than a century ago with southern American blues, why can’t tomorrow’s jazz begin with eastern European klezmer? Will the next Ornette Coleman use Jewish scales?

“‘You’re job is to surprise me!’ That’s what I’m going to tell everyone on the day of the performance,” says Feldman, the band’s keyboard player and chief composer. “The unexpected is expected. If we don’t completely lose control sometime during the performances I’m going to be disappointed.”

“Eastern melodies, western grooves” is the band motto. Adding David Buchbinder to the mix for the concert will likely increase the parameters of what’s possible. The Toronto trumpeter’s playing encompasses world music, Cuban, klezmer and free jazz.

Feldman’s real coup is bringing in Ben Goldberg for the show and for the following day’s recording of Zebrina’s second album, The Desert Speaks. (Trail of the Hunter Gatherers , was the band’s 2010 debut album.)

Based in Berkeley, Calif., Goldberg is a defining figure worldwide in contemporary jazz as a clarinetist, bandleader, head of BAG records and the composer behind two brilliantly beyond-category new BAG albums, Unfold Ordinary Mind, which includes guitarist Nels Cline of Wilco, and Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues , with tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redman.

Equally admiring of one another’s music Feldman and Goldberg are equally wary of calling their music “avant garde.”

“The interesting thing about me and Ben meeting is pushing klezmer in new directions,” says Feldman on the phone. “We’re both looking at what comes next. But avant garde? In a way I hate that word.”

Goldberg adds: “We live in a postmodern world, with a lot of resources at our fingertips. I don’t have the feeling there is an avant-garde anymore. I don’t want to think what something is going to sound like the next time I put my clarinet in my mouth. Because if I do it’s not going to be fresh.”

Another common concern for Feldman and Goldberg is exactly how Jewish is the post-klezmer music they’re creating? “I don’t want to deny the Jewish element in what I do or the Jewish connection,” says Feldman. “But, hey, I’m using the same harmonic scales Beethoven used.”

“Yeah I know how to play klezmer music,” says Goldberg during my phone call with him, “but I’ve had to do something more meaningful with it or else I would be playing Bar Mitzvahs, which I love to do.”

The guiding genius leading to the Zebrina-Goldberg connection is John Zorn, the punk era New York composer/producer/saxophonist whose Tzadik Records is behind the following day recording sessions. Zorn lives and talks about “radical Jewish culture.” Goldberg thinks the very fact of being Jewish brings with it a radical perspective. “I was told I had an ancestor who threw a bomb at the Czar,” he says. “I liked that a lot. I thought it was cool. I like the idea of being radical.”

Another Zorn venture — the Masada songbook, begun in the early ‘90s and due in part to Goldberg’s influence — came to change Feldman’s life. Zorn aimed to take “the idea of Jewish music into the 21st century” through the some 500 Masada songs he’s written to date.

It worked. Masada led Feldman straight to Zebrina. A mathematician by training — at MIT grad school he aimed to build a system to “track tempo changes” — Feldman’s head was also filled with Miles Davis and his generation of jazz players.

“But when I discovered Masada in 1995,” he says. “I heard new Jewish music that resonated with me as a Jew.”

Zebrina, with David Buchbinder and Ben Goldberg play the CCMC Music Gallery, 197 John St., on Thursday.