|
|
 |
Global Hit (Real Audio)
|
| Click Here to go back. |
The World (Public Radio Intl), Global Hit (Real Audio) >>
Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, is intended as a quiet day of reflection. Although the liturgy of sung prayer is rich on Yom Kippur, music is not a focus of this relatively modest occasion. Jewish weddings on the other hand, well that's a different story. And when the music is performed by the subject of today's Global Hit, it's really a different story. The World's Marco Werman introduces us to Solomon and Socalled.
Imagine a Jewish wedding. But there's a twist. A big twist. The music makers are not your average klezmer band. Up to this point, everything sort of seems pretty normal. And then an emcee starts to rap in Yiddish.
What may be most extraordinary about the music you hear is that it's not from New York, where there's been a lot of activity in the world of radical Jewish culture. This music originated in a relatively non-Jewish city.
Sophie Solomon: I don't think London will ever be a Jewish city because I just don't think the population just isn't there.
That's London resident, Sophie Solomon the violinist you were just listening to. She is the Solomon in the duo Solomon and Socalled.
Sophie Solomon: We met and started playing music together, and started exploring klezmer and beats together at a music camp in Canada in Montreal, in the hills above Montreal. And decided that the microphone and the violin should be married. But not Socalled and Solomon.
After all, why make a lifelong committment out of it when you're already making sounds like this without the marriage certificate.
It's certainly an unconventional view of the Jewish wedding. But Solomon and DJ Socalled have big supporters back in the capital of klezmer, New York City. Frank London, horn player for seminal klezmer band the Klezmatics, appears on Solomon and Socalled's CD. And virtuoso clarinetest David Krakauer provides a couple of devastating solos for the imaginary wedding party.
Clarinet, electric guitar, and drum n bass. You're not alone if you're wondering why Solomon and DJ Socalled decided to recreate a Jewish wedding with a hip-hop beat in the first place. Again, Sophie Solomon.
Sophie Solomon: I was really conscious that there's loads of people playing klezmer music saying, "We are now going to perform a traditional music wedding ceremony as if it were the 19th century. And I felt like well none of us can do that. Even people who play authentic klezmer can't do that because they're not living in the 19th century. They're living now and they're a product of the world in which they live. Like I am, and like socalled is. And so the world in which Socalled and I live is actually embued with lots of beats and hip-hop and things like that. I used to be a drum n bass deejay, Socalled's been making hip-hop for years. And so we thought we'd make our own authentic klezmer wedding suite, but one that happened to have beats with it.
Sophie Solomon: But actually it's kind of more interesting than that. Because the beats that Socalled makes are sampling from old Yiddish records, he samples old klezmer drummers, he'll go out and find Elaine Hoffman Watts who's this amazing old septugenarian drummer, and sample her beat, and use that and then he'll go and get David Krakauer playing a cool lick, or he'll take some words from an old Mickey Katz record, or some sample from a cantor singing, and you know he makes this incredible collage that represents the whole of Yiddishland.
Solomon and Socalled have taken their sonic collage many times on the road. Earlier this year, they played in Krakow, Poland for 10,000 people.
Sophie Solomon: And for me it's amazing, you're standing there on this stage, you're looking out over this ghetto that was derelict and is now being kind of revitalized, and there's restaurants and hotels and things, and you see people dancing in front of the synagogue, on the very spot where the selections used to take place for Auschwitz. And you can't help but be moved at something, the power of music really.
The one thing Sophie Solomon and DJ Socalled have yet to do is perform their virtual hip-hop klezmer wedding at a wedding. Next weekend, for the first time, that will finally happen.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman.
10/06/03 >> go there
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
