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!)
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