live review of Golem

[Seth Rogovoy <rogovoy...>]

We had the great fortune to have Golem right here in our hometown last
night, before a sold-out crowd at Club Helsinki (www.clubhelsinkiweb.com).
Here's an approximate version of the review I wrote that will run in the
Berkshire Eagle, probably tomorrow. It will also be posted soon at
www.rogovoy.com and at www.berkshireeagle.com.

Golem reinvigorates the Great Eastern European Songbook

by Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., November 15, 2002) – You didn’t have to understand
Yiddish – or Serbian, Rom, Ukrainian, Russian, or any of the other languages
that vocalists Annette Ezekiel and Aaron Diskin sang in – to get the message
of Golem’s performance at Club Helsinki on Thursday night.

Nor did Ezekiel or Diskin – nor the terrific quartet of musicians that
comprise the instrumental portion of the group – have to toy much with the
material to deliver an earthy, sensual performance of Yiddish, Balkan and
Eastern European folk songs that recaptured a lost world while drawing
strong, clear connections between that world and the one in which we live.

“Libershmertzn,” or “Love Hurts,” is the title of Golem’s brand-new CD on
which most of the songs the group played are found, and the ambivalent pain
of love – with a huge wink of an eye -- served as the unifying theme of the
evening. And it was apparently a universally recognizable one too, as the
packed crowd at Helsinki enthusiastically received Golem’s ministrations,
refusing to let the New York-based band leave until it had played every last
song in its repertoire.

Golem has stumbled upon a rich vein of traditional music in these passionate
songs of the Old World. And with only a slight modicum of non-traditional
elements added to the arrangements – a little jazz here, a pop quotation
there, some rock ‘n’ roll bounce in the drums here, a surprisingly
sympathetic bit of Latin or swing there – Golem has unearthed a treasure
trove. Think of it as another world of standards – the eastern, darker, but
no less sophisticated inverse face of the so-called Great American Songbook.

It’s a wonder that more groups haven’t availed themselves of these songs
with so much built-in drama -- songs like “Mekhaye,” about a daughter gone
off to Palestine where she slept in a hay wagon with two pioneers, or
“Papirosn,” the sad tale of an orphan reduced to selling cigarettes in the
pouring rain, or “The Dead Cossack,” literally about love and death.

But it’s equally wonderful that this group of singers and musicians have
stumbled upon this repertoire. Ezekiel and Diskin were dramatic, attractive
entertainers --  the former with her subtle, pelvic gyrations and busy,
relentlessly shaking left leg a veritable Elvis Presley of Eastern European
folk, the latter with his creepy, demented persona a veritable Screamin’ Jay
Hawkins to her Elvis.

In their witty musical punctuations and commentaries, trombonist Curtis
Hasselbring and violist Karen Waltuch were the instrumental alter egos of
the singers. And contrabassist Taylor Bergren-Chrisman and drummer Laura
Cromwell were a versatile rhythm section, jumping from Gypsy mariachi to
tango to the irregular, jerky meters of Balkan dance tunes.

When they are performed these days, songs like “Rumenye, Rumenye” and
“Rivkele” are often rendered with schmaltz and nostalgia or treated as
breakable artifacts to be handled with delicacy and care.

In the hands of the young musicians of Golem, these songs are reinvigorated
as living, breathing channels of emotion, to be approached no differently
than hits from the rock era. That they are able to do so without wholesale
reinvention of the melodies and arrangements suggests as much about their
origins – that these songs were rocking the shtetl long before Elvis got the
blues – as it does about the genius of this ensemble – that they astutely
recognize the riches in this overlooked body of work, and are transforming
themselves and their audiences in the process of reviving it.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on November 16,
2002. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2002. All rights reserved.]

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+