Re: go hear Wolf Krakowski this Thursday 6/19 in NYC!

[George Robinson <grcomm...>]

My own piece on Wolf appeared in Jewish Week this weekend but isn't on the
website, so I take the liberty of appending it here.

George (notorious taker of liberties . . . and naps) Robinson

Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
  -Henry Ward Beecher


By George Robinson


            Wolf Krakowski's third CD "Goyrl:Destiny" was released a year
ago, but it is only this week that the gifted Yiddish rocker from Toronto
finally makes his New York debut. He shrugged it off in an e-mail last week
with typically dark humor, "In our little world of  'alternative' and 'world
' and 'Jewish' music, things move slower because we do not have the benefit
of ubiquitous bludgeon-style advertising and hype."

Anyone who has heard his first album, "Transmigrations," will recall
instantly the thrill and shock of recognition from the first notes Jim
Armenti's brooding guitar line on the opening track; after drummer Bob Grant
and bassist Ray Mason move into a country shuffle rhythm, Krakowski's
doom-laden vocal kicks in with "Tzen Brider/Ten Brothers."

Yiddish rock and roll? Of course.

When you hear it, and hear it played this well, it seems an obvious concept,
but Krakowski was breaking new ground, a place he explored to even greater
effect with his second Yiddish-language set last year.

"I just sing and play songs that I can relate to the ones that seem genuine
and well-crafted," he wrote last week. "I certainly admire and respect the
songwriters whose work I perform, but I am not on any conscious mission to
preserve anything."

Sometime in the early '80s, he began to connect the music he had grown up
listening to on the radio and records - blues, country, bluegrass, rock -
with the Yiddish music his mother had exposed him to

"After a lifetime of being involved with [those] genres, some of what I had
internalized over the years began to percolate, a creative process kicked in
and I found a way to express some of the deeper parts of myself, in my own
voice," he explained. "At the risk of sounding pompous, I found a vehicle
for my story, my family's and that of the Jewish people."

His family's story is harrowing. His parents fled Poland after the Nazi
invasion, only to land in the Gulag. Their first child died as a result of
the deprivation they experienced after being deported from the camps to
Kazakhstan. When they tried to emigrate to Palestine after the war, they
were arrested and placed in a DP camp in Austria, where Krakowski was born
in 1947. Eventually, they re-located to Sweden and subsequently in 1954, to
Canada.

Krakowski is almost casual about his family's terrible experiences in World
War II, noting "There are a lot of similar stories among survivor families."

That statement is undoubtedly true, but Krakowski has taken the pain and
anger of his family's story and made it into memorable music.



Wolf Krakowski and the Lonesome Brothers (with Tom Shea replacing Grant on
drums) will be performing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Battery Park
City) on Thursday, June 19 at 7 p.m. "Transmigrations" and "Goyrl:Destiny"
are available on the Tzadik label; Krakowski's English-language CD,
"Unbounded" is available from Kame'a Media, www.Kamea.com.




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