David Krakauer & Socalled With Klezmer Madness!
Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me Label Bleu LBLC6677
The collision of hip hop and klezmer was not necessarily inevitable but there's a strange familiarity to this compelling opus. Imagine a wedding band, drunk in a corner of a community hall, trying to remember their repertoire while the kids have taken over the sound system and are fighting to play their favourite hip hop sides. No one minds: the clarinetist in fact seems to be responding to the beats until the accordion wells up to rein him back in. The precedent I would venture is Don Byron, who has combined hip hop and klezmer into his own melange of jazz funk and R&B. Krakauer takes a different tack: he samples Herschel Bernardi (!) doing his "Chocolate-covered matzohs" routine in the title cut. There's a lot of ambient stuff which I really dug, like the tapes are rolling and you never know what's going to happen next. A nut gets on a bus and we overhear his stream of consciousness while Krakauer noodles. Poetry & jazz. Sort of. It's been edited carefully though, so it is not mere slackness masquerading as an experiment in oblique discovery. As neither klezmer nor hip hop has the upper hand it makes a curious mix, the bedfellows roiling and tossing with some inspired clarinet soaring over the samples and rhythms. It seems Krakauer, the ringleader, wanted to shake up his own band and steer them towards trance funk. Having mixmaster Socalled create rhythms was just what was needed to goose their creative juices. There are traditional Jewish and gypsy melodies, meaningless fragments of chanting, deranged raps and a lot of veiled political commentary. --Alastair Johnston