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Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars
"Carnival Conspiracy: In the Marketplace All is Subterfuge"
Don't bother trying to get anything done in Brazil this weekend. Carnival celebrations are starting to get crazy there. And they'll get even crazier as Fat Tuesday comes around next week. Same could be said for other places too, of course -- like New Orleans. What carnival sounds like differs depending on geographic location. But the festivities usually don't involve a klezmer band. The World's Marco Werman tells us about one musician who's out to change that.
Frank London has a reputation as a mad musical scientist. His experiments have always started with klezmer. The musical style is associated with Jewish culture. But London's work is about twisting klezmer to suit his own needs and ideas. His latest project is titled "Carnival Conspiracy." He performs it with his band the Klezmer Brass Allstars.
The Brazilian-Jewish connection isn't a stretch. The first Jews in North America arrived in New York on a boat from Brazil 350 years ago. They were in Brazil to begin with because they had fled the Spanish Inquisition in Europe. So, if a composer is going to attempt a fusion between klezmer and, say, samba, you'd want to hear something in the music that sounds a little Brazilian.
Kaminsky: "Well, you don't get that on this album so much."
David Kaminsky is an ethno-musicologist at Earlham College.
Kaminsky: "In fact the collaboration with a Brazilian group is actually a New York based group that plays Brazilian music called Maracatu New York, and they a sort of traditional music from Brazil that may not be familiar to listeners, and in fact doesn't leave so much a mark on the album. It's only on four or five tracks I think, and it's a sort of percussion ensemble that supports some of the music. Maybe we can listen to one or two of those tracks later.
MW: "Well let's listen to one of them right now."
Kaminsky: "All right."
David Kaminsky says, don't think of Frank London as a fusion artist. What he's really doing is challenging society's conventions. That's what London has done practically his entire career. That's what he and his bandmates did some years ago with the Les Miserables Brass Band.
Kaminsky: "They were sort of fusing German oom-pah sound with klezmer, even sort of appropriating some Nazi rhetoric to sort of challenge certain kinds of boundaries. And the album previous to this one which was called "The Brotherhood of Brass" was a collaboration between this Frank London group and a Roma brass band and an Egyptian brass band. And it's always been sort of explicitly about challenging boundaries between Jewish identity and other kinds of identities."
David Kaminsky believes that while Frank London portrays Carnival Conspiracy as a wacky fusion project, it is in lock step with what modern klezmer is all about.
Kaminsky: "Klezmer music has always been about fusion. It is in some sense not an on-the-edge kind of klezmer album. It is in fact very much part of a tradition that Frank London has been a big part of creating. I mean this is what klezmer is today. At least in terms of the commercial recorded output."
Frank London's latest recording with the Klezmer Brass Allstars is titled Carnival Conspiracy: In the Marketplace All Is Subterfuge. Yes, that is the title.
--For The World, I'm Marco Werman. 02/24/06 >> go there
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