and he met a Warsaw girl, with lips as red as cherries dipped in wine…

Starting the new year with a new band to love - what joy…what fun…what bliss…lucky me (and you, too)!

Here’s how it happened…
I got home last night and was greeted by the sounds of Radio Hanukkah – Kelley and Lily had been surfing Direct TV’s XM channels and they had struck gold – fiddles, accordions, clarinets, and trumpets all swirling wildly together like the dream of some mad Dervish…and I had never heard of any of the musicians - The Klezmatics, The Cracow Klezmer Band, Beyond the Pale, Veretski Pass, and what has instantly become one of my favorite bands: Golem.

What do you get when you combine the exotic instrumentation of Gogol Bordello, the frenetic energy of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and the instincts of Django Reinhardt with the energy of ’77 era punk? You get New York’s Golem – a decidedly non-traditional Jewish Klezmer band. I don’t know a whole lot about them, but here’s the biography from their website…

“Contrary to popular belief, Golem is neither a towering Jewish Frankenstein who defended the Jews of 17th Century Prague, nor a creature from “Lord of the Rings.”

Golem is a 6 piece Eastern European folk-punk band.

Fronted by Annette Ezekiel Kogan - singer, accordionist, and 5-foot powerhouse; and vocalist, tambourine player, crazy-man Aaron Diskin; violin virtuoso Alicia Jo Rabins; trombonist extraordinaire Curtis Hasselbring; elegant upright bassist Taylor Bergren-Chrisman, and unstoppable drummer Tim Monaghan, Golem’s sound evokes wisps of old-world elegance filtered through the successes and disappointments of new-world dreams. Spending nights in Lower East Side immigrant-owned bagel shops and summers in Eastern Europe, Annette collects Jewish, Gypsy, and Slavic folk songs, and, with Golem, rewrites, adds, edits, and rearranges them along the way. These are the songs to which Eastern European grandparents danced over a century ago, and now Golem has its unwrinkled fans moshing to the same pulsing beats.

Unrequited love stories? Check. Drunken dances? Check. Warnings to future sons-in-law? Check. Dysfunctional families forcing kids to sell bagels on the street? Their songs have ‘em all. And they may be in Yiddish (or Russian or French), but when Golem wails that the rent is too high, everybody understands.”



resources
learn a little more about the Klezmer revival…
visit Golem at myspace…
listen to an interview with the girls of Golem…
download a five-song sampler
buy their incredible album, “Fresh Off Boat”…


watch their great video for Warsaw is Khem…

Happy Hanukkah (sorry, just a little bit late!)

...kisses, sweeter than milk

Sunny-sounding Oh Susanna, she of the girlish giggle and warm personality, likes her literature dark and, when possible, slightly morbid - when she takes you down to the river it's less likely to be about tea and oranges than moonshine and murder.
Oh Susanna is actually Suzie Ungerleider, an American-born, Canada-raised Concordia graduate who's upping the ante on '80s cowpunk by taking dramatic inspiration from the sombre songs of the old West, rural Appalachian ballads and the public domain tunes of Americana. And while Oh Susanna is "punk" only in D.I.Y. spirit, there's something decidedly contemporary amid her straight-up strumming and spare acoustic arrangements.

From her stark debut, a superb seven-song EP from 1997, through 2003's self-titled gem, Suzie has always made her home in the arms of emotionally searing material. Her fifth and latest album, Short Stories, is no less harrowing, though its inspiration came from a variety of sources, some of them terribly unlikely: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg, oral historian Studs Terkel and documentary maker Michael Moore.

One of my favorite songs on the album, Filled With Gold tells about the bond between teenaged lovers and their determination to build their life together – like many of the songs on Short Stories, it is concerned as much with what’s not being said. The idea of being young and broke and in love, and that somehow that partnership carrying you through - it's a very romantic idea. A lot of times that doesn't work, but sometimes it does.

Elsewhere, she relied on previously published work as a framework for her own lyrics, which are by turns both heart-breaking and heart-warming. The inspiration for Beauty Queen came from a poem by Sandburg, It's a first-person narrative of a girl who married a guy, a brute, and he came at her one too many times, so she knifed him. At the end, she's sitting in prison, defiantly unremorseful.

Her songs speak of an America that exists down the backroads and blind alleyways frequented by Tom Waits and Neko Case, but Suzie follows her own vision - she tells her stories like no one else.
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forever at your feet
A locket on a chain

a bow that's made from rain

a briar grows entwined with rose

I've come to be forever at your feet.

A blossom pages pressed

a knocking at my chest

Oh winding road please take me home

I long to be forever at your feet.

And I hope that you won't mind, my dear

when you see my eyes are lined, my dear

It's because I've waited all these years

for your kisses sweeter than milk

and your touch that's softer than silk

for your treasures I will be

forever at your feet.

resources
myspace
website
label

discography
Oh Susanna EP (1997)

Johnstown (1999)

Sleepy Little Sailor (2001)

Oh Susanna (2003)

Short Stories (2007)

similar artists
Gillian Welch

Kathleen Edwards

Neko Case

sample

download a selection of Suzie’s wonderful songs… (tracklist in comments)

listen to a couple of newly-recorded Christmas hymns…

oh susanna – christmas hymns

watch a video for the song "right by your side"

You can't own a mountain any more than you can own an ocean or a piece of the sky...

You hold it in trust. You live on it, you take life from it, and once you're dead, you rest in it.

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The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (CBS,1971)

It’s Christmas Eve ‘33 in the Virginia Mountains. The Walton’s await their father whose return is threatened by a worsening snowstorm. John-boy sets out to find his father and in the course of the journey discovers something of the nature of his dad. When his father finally returns, he brings a special gift for his son that reveals an unexpected understanding of the dreams and aspirations that one day will lead John-boy far from the mountain.

Graceful yet harder-edged than the subsequent TV series (which ran for nine years), The Homecoming reveals much about the importance of family, of faith, and the strength and closeness that comes through sharing and enduring hardship.

“Christmas is the season where we give tokens of love. In that house we received not tokens but love itself. I became the writer I promised my father I would be - and my destiny lead me far from Walton's Mountain. My mother lives there still, alone now for we lost my father in 1969. My brothers and sisters, grown with children of their own, live not far away. We are still a close family and see each other when we can. And like Miss Maime Baldwin's fourth cousins, we're apt to sample the recipe and then gather around the piano and hug each other while we sing the old songs. For no matter the time or distance, we are united in the memory of that Christmas Eve. More than 30 years and 3,000 miles away, I can still hear those sweet voices.”
Earl Hamner, Jr.

resources

Read Earl Hamner’s wonderful novel...

It’s a sad fact but it’s been YEARS since I’ve seen this on TV, and I honestly can’t figure why it’s failed to become a classic – you might check your local listings, but you probably won’t find it…however, you can order a copy here...

and you can watch the trailer for it right here…

endless drawings, countless sketches on my windowpanes...

Waterson:Carthy

Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man

Topic Records (2006)

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Waterson:Carthy – their music is unrepentantly traditional. Folks who prefer their Christmas songs to have a rustic, handmade feel to them will enjoy Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man immensely. Given how the same Christmas songs tend to get played over and over again starting earlier and earlier every year, it’s wonderfully refreshing to find that Waterson:Carthy were able to breathe some life into what can sometimes be a stagnant genre – and they do it, ironically, by resurrecting some material that’s even older than many of the seasonal songs with which we’re so familiar.

Now understand, this is not JUST a Christmas album. Yes, most of the songs have a yuletide flavour, some others are hymns sung at Christmas or New Year, but there are songs on here from all year round and it would be more accurate to describe this as a festive, celebratory album. Joining Waterson:Carthy for this festive album are folk trio The Devil's Interval and a number of tracks are further bolstered by the inclusion of some brass and cello. Overall, these additions give this disc a wonderfully full rousing sound, a little added depth and a more formal choral quality than is found on most Waterson:Carthy offerings.

The opening track “Residue” (a New Year’s carol), sets the albums tone with authority. A wonderful, rousing, cheery number with a full chorus sung with gusto and good cheer –you just know this is going to be a great album! As ever with Waterson:Carthy, Martin Carthy’s booklet notes give you fascinating insight into the songs and their sources – I wish someone would publish all of Martin’s anecdotes in a collected volume…maybe someday.

There are plenty of highlights: “Reap, Hook and Sickle” with its name check for Waterson:Carthy’s home of Robin Hood’s Bay; “On Christmas Day It Happened So” –Tim Van Eyken at his melancholy vocal best; “Gloryland” –the final track, a beautiful Baptist hymn.
However, none of these come anywhere close to eclipsing “Jack Frost” (written by Mike Waterson and sung by Eliza Carthy).

It will stop you in your tracks.

It will make the hairs on your neck stand on end.

It will, like Jack Frost himself send shivers down your spine.

Repeat. Play. Repeat. Play.

The long winter nights will just fly on by.

Try a touch of Jack Frost.

jack frost

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buy it