Lorin sklamberg biography examples

Patrick O’Donnell wrote this review.

The German-Jewish poet Berthold Auerbach said “Music is a universal language, and needs not be translated. With it soul speaks to soul.” Perhaps Susan McKeown and Lorin Sklamberg had that in mind when they recorded Saints & Tzadiks, a Gaelic-Yiddish-English collaboration that dares you to find a niche under which to file it.

At first blush, the Celtic and Yiddish musical traditions might seem as far from one another as Israel and Ireland. The different twists of the tongue required for each language surely seem like a knot waiting to happen. But somehow, McKeown and Sklamberg weave their voices together, their verses twisting and swirling like dancers around a maypole, the lyrics darting and fluttering like kites in a gale. The end result is nothing short of a melting pot worthy of Ellis Island.

McKeown, who practically reinvented traditional Celtic music, and Sklamberg, lead singer of the genre-bending group The Klezmatics, meld songs with themes common to almost any culture on earth: love, desire, betrayal, pride, war, drink, life and death. And by doing so, they prove that music really does transcend language: soul speaking to soul.

This CD is essentially their second collaboration in three years. In 2006, McKeown worked with the Klezmatics on the Grammy-winning album Wonder Wheel. But don’t go looking for much common ground between the two works. While Wonder Wheel was based on lyrics by Woody Guthrie, Saints & Tzadiks is rooted in much older and rarer stock.

According to the duo’s Myspace page, “the bulk of the Jewish material is being drawn from the papers of the legendary collector and performer Ruth Rubin … drawn from her field recordings held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where Sklamberg serves as Sound Archivist.” The Celtic material was culled from popular and ancient tra

Lorin, there's always seemed to be a sort of a gap between klezmer and the rest of the world music spectrum, any idea why?
Lorin Sklamberg (vocals, accordion, guitar, piano): "Well, Yiddish music has always been something that was done within the Jewish community; it was never intended to be stage music or to be performed in concerts. In the history of klezmer, concert performances are a very recent occurrence; it really only started with the klezmer revival at the end of the nineteen seventies and the beginning of the nineteen eighties. With Klezmatics, we do play at world music festivals once in a while - here in Belgium I remember Sfinks - but I know klezmer as a genre isn't as well represented on these kind of events as other genres are. Apart from us, there still aren't that many klezmer bands around that do tours. The Jewish community is also a lot smaller than the communities producing these other types of music in the world music genre."

The last decade we've seen a huge rise in popularity of what we now call Balkan music. There are a lot of links both musically and historically between klezmer and gipsy music.
Lorin Sklamberg: "As a matter of fact, there's a project called The Other Europeans which focuses exactly on the joint heritage of both klezmer and gipsy music. Historically, Jewish musicians often invited gipsy musicians to play in their bands and vice versa. I've noticed that the two genres often get mixed up in people's minds too, so musically there's definitely a connection as well."

Historically, the klezmer tradition goes back many centuries, but what would you say are the direct origins of the music Klezmatics play?
Lorin Sklamberg: "This kind of music evolved when a lot of Jewish musicians fled the pogroms and the holocaust in Europe and settled in the United States. What most people think of as being klezmer music is in fact a Jewish-American hybrid form of the genre w

Written by Jeff Tamarkin

In the rich and colorful Yiddish language there are expressions that vividly convey virtually any emotion or action. One such phrase is farshafn a sakh freyd un fargenign, which means to give much joy and pleasure. Farshafn a sakh freyd un fargenign perfectly encapsulates the happiness that the Klezmatics have delivered to the passionate millions who have discovered their music since the band’s formation more than 30 years ago. In that time, the Klezmatics have raised the bar for Eastern European Jewish music, made aesthetically, politically and musically interesting recordings, inspired future generations, created a large body of work that is enduring, and helped to change the face of contemporary Yiddish culture. Not bad for a bunch of Americans who each came to klezmer music almost by accident!

Since their emergence, the Klezmatics, often called a “Jewish roots band,” have led a popular revival of this ages-old, nearly forgotten art form that, in its first incarnations, flourished at Jewish weddings and other joyous occasions. They have performed in more than 20 countries and released 11 albums to date—most recently the album Apikorsim (Heretics), produced by Danny Blume (who helped the band win a Grammy in 2006) and the first of the band’s albums to feature only the 6 members. They have also recently served as the subject of a feature-length documentary film, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

During their third-of-a-century existence they have collaborated with such brilliant artists as violinist Itzhak Perlman, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and Israeli vocal icon Chava Alberstein. They’ve also worked with everyone from folk singers Theodore Bikel and Arlo Guthrie to poet Allen Ginsberg, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, New York downtown scene fixtures John Zorn and Marc Ribot, and pop singer Neil Sedaka.

The Klezmatics have appeared on TV programs as diverse as Lat