Re: new jewish music

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

>On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 00:22:07 +0200, you wrote:
>
>>I have the BOW CD, one CD of geduldig and Thimann
>>and heard Mikveh in Amsterdam.
>>I can't judge Waletzky's and Mikveh's CD's.
>
>Mikveh plays straight-up traditional Yiddish music! Nothing nouveau about it 
>at all! Except maybe an unusual repetoir.

I think the band would take that as a compliment, and I think that's a 
wonderful expression of how well they have done their work. But I'd claim that 
the bulgarian village women stuff, the songs sung in english, the song 
memorializing a miscarriage. By me, there is more happening than "straight-up 
traditional Yiddish music" (and that's even before we ask whether we're 
referring to  "straight up" traditional Yiddish folk melodies, "traditional" 
2nd Ave. Yiddish theatre music,....)

I'd place Josh Waletzky's album very much in the same category for similar 
reasons (although there is no sung English, nor any balkan melodies). It 
=sounds= like an extension of Yiddish song traditions, but the subjects include 
both the timeless, and the very current, and the performances are exceptional.

The appearance of these albums is, I think, a new phenomenon. There were 
precursors--most notably the Yiddish poets whose songs were newly set to music 
by Chava Alberstein and performed by her with the Klezmatics ("the Well"), but 
that album, as wonderful as it is, still sounds to non-Yiddish speakers more 
like generic world folk music than like Yiddish.

By way of contrast, think of recent Yiddish albums which are more by way of 
nostalgia, or by making the old present for reconsideration--not necessarily 
reinterpretation, nor necessarily memorable repertoire, rather homage to songs 
familiar once before. 

And I agree with Lenka--her own recent album, in English, addressed a range of 
subjects that are part of modern Jewish lives, but which have not been part of 
modern Jewish song.

That fusion of past and present to create something new and exciting defines an 
edge, or what I see as an edge....

ari

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