FRANK LONDON'S KLEZMER BRASS ALLSTARS
CARNIVAL CONSPIRACY (Piranha CD PIR1902)

You've heard of "the wandering Jew," well, the first Jews in North America came by boat from Brazil 350 years ago. Frank London's latest release is a compilation of carnivalesque songs from around the world, commemorating this anniversary. I have listened to this several times, trying to get a handle on it. Sometimes I think it's circus music, othertimes the soundtrack for a very sad black & white film about Lodz. It's Klezmer which means I keep ad libbing "If I were a rich man" or "You've gotta pick a pocket or two" to certain familiar musical motifs that pop up. Mostly it's traditional stuff (which doesn't really engage me), but the eighth track "A Time of desire," makes this a keeper (until they do ELECTRIC GYPSYLAND II where it belongs). It's a wild dubby experimental remix of a traditional tune with Kol Isha on the knobs. After that the last four tracks seem coherent and diverse enough to be interesting, so it's one of those albums that doesn't really start at the beginning. The tunes are all traditional but London's arrangements are excellent. I always regret studying German in secondary school instead of Spanish, but I have picked up Spanish by osmosis, and the German comes in handy when trying to decipher Yiddish. "Pantagruel, shikker hindert prozent," is a song title referring to the shit-faced comic character in Rabelais' novel. Drunkenness is evoked in the rollicking tuba bass and slurred trumpet lines. The liner notes, by London, clearly derive from a reading of Mikhail Bakhtin's brilliant opus on the language of the marketplace in Rabelais. KLEZMER CONSPIRACY is enjoyable if you put it on random sequence and have a drink or two and fart and belch periodically to punctuate the music.

To get political for just a moment, I have to agree with Mr McDinnerjazz, president of Iran, that Israel should be moved to the USA. No one cares about New Jersey, it's a dump. So let's rename it New Jerusalem and give it to the Israelis. We can clean it up with the millions we spend on military aid and disarm them at the same time. Plus they'll all be near their bubbes in the Bronx and can shop at Zabar's. The dispossessed Palestinians can have their land back & Bushco can concentrate on more important problems, like destabilizing Latin America. (End of rant in the spirit of Rabelais.)