Bustan and Klezcamp

[Benla Den <benla...>]

I finally got around to listening to Bustan's album "Abraham". The liner
notes say that Bustan is trying to meld Eastern and Western Jewish music.
They claim that other attempts at this end up leaning towards one or the
other using the lesser influence to ornament the greater. They are trying to
truly meld both. Instrumentally they sound much more Sepahrdic than
Ashkenazik to my Eastern European ears. The songs also seem to have more of
the spehardic flavor to them in general but there are exceptions. One of the
players is influenced by spanish guitar and this comes out on several cuts
where the rhythm moves into a Santana like latin groove and you can hear the
flamenco influenced guitar. There are also some passages that are
reminiscent of Mahvaishnu orchestra, a jazzy fusion sound that is still
somewhat spacey.
The album is all instrumental and the players are good. The arrangements are
also good with some real good "show us your chops" endings. I guess if I
have a criticism it is that some of the music is so steeped ina middle
eastern sound that the oud music reminded me of some of the music I hear
locally in Greek restaurants. Not that it is bad but it is kind of generic
middle eastern sounds and didn't distiguish itself. This is only with regard
to the oud jamming on a couple of cuts.

My inlaws jsut returned from KlezCamp. They videotaped about 10 hours worht
of stuff for me. They said the music was outstanding and , for them, it was
a wonderfully revitalizing thing to see the culture of their youth being
celebrated by young and old with zeal and vigor. The Klezmatic were there
and my mother in law spoke at length with one of them who had visited
Auschwitz. Apparentlaly when the band was in Poland he was the only one who
made the trip. It is hard to have a gathering that celebrates Yiddish
culture without feeling the dark shadow of Nazi Germany in the corners.
Hitler was essentially successful in wiping out Yiddishkeit since most of
the Yiddishkeit who survived did so by oving to other palces and eventually,
especially a generation or two down the line, adopting the culture of the
new home.

One more idea I got after listening to Bustan. the World Music rage has many
Ashekenaz Jews checking out the very different sound of Sephardic music. It
is more "hip" sounding than the music of Europe which has a connection with
classical and traditional western harmonized music. The whole Sephardic
thing of using intertwining scales, of creating "trance music" is appealing
to the young white musician, myself included. I guess what Bustan made me
think about was that it is kind of like white guys playing the blues. You
better be pretty amazing at it to win over an audience. The allusion to the
music at Greek resaurants is about seeing native players of middle eastern
music pull it off with the ease that comes from having a sound be "your
sound". Sometimes it sounds like the learned white folks try to hard,
approach the music more academically, and therefore don't have the
smoothness in their music.

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