Capsule Reviews

Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

MUSIC REVIEW

by Ron Nachmann

Barbez, Insignificance. Important Records, 2005

From Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon to jazz-klezmer saxophonist John Zorn, Jewish American musicians make technologically enabled cultural syncretism central to what they do. All such cosmopolitan expressions imply the most hungrily revolutionary aspects of the erstwhile cliched image of America as a melting pot of world culture. With the help of the ever-evolving tools around them, Jewish-American musicians no longer simply tolerate, but rather voraciously participate in, the mix. With their misleadingly titled third album, Insignificance, Brooklyn-based chamber-punk ensemble Barbez continues the tradition with a passionate blend of French chanson, Argentine tango, Eastern European folk, and underground punk, fuelled by twentieth-century technology.

Tellingly, bassist Dan Coates named his eight-year-old multicultural sextet after a similarly diverse Parisian neigh-borhood he once called home. But Coates is as keen on temporal blends as he is on ethnic ones. Songs like "Fear of Commitment" and "A Melancholy Picnic" depend as much on brazen singer Ksenia Vidyaykina's psychotherapeutic lyrics as they do on their classical-folk tonalities. And whoever wrote the solemn traditional Russian ballad "The Sea Spread Wide" most likely never had in mind a version spiked at points with vituperative thrash-punk phrasings.

Coates also synchs up Barbez's aptitude for traditional sounds with a spotlight on the modern. Pamelia Kurstin's theremin provides a haunted technological shade to radical German composer Hanns Eisler's "Song of the Moldau." Meanwhile, on the title track, Coates produces scratchy and laser-like electronic sounds with a modified Palm Pilot, creating a tense, forward-looking, anything-goes atmosphere that punctuates the mix that makes up Insignificance.

Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers. Drag City, 2005

With both his books and his music, poet David Berman has carved out a comfortable niche as both a southern Jewish writer and indie musician. Much like his fellow Dixie Jewish scribe/crooner Richard "Kinky" Friedman did with straight-ahead country in the 1970s, Berman and his band Silver Jews have subsumed his compellingly observant Jewish-American literary intellect into a gentle, country-tinged indie rock idiom. The band continues on this path with their sixth album, Tanglewood Numbers.

Raised in Virginia, Texas and Tennessee, Berman now lives in Memphis, where he and his wife, Cassie, make up two of the city's 10,000 Jews. On Tanglewood Numbers, his often opaque lyrics document his recent battle against substance abuse. The Silver Jews—an indie all-star ensemble that includes guitarist Steve Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich from legendary Nineties band Pavement—provide appropriately melancholy backup for Berman's vulnerable expressions.

Unlike Bob Dylan's controversial Nashville Skyline, Berman's version of country music is neither willfully mocking in its regionalism, nor bent on illustrating its novelty as a country record made by a band that is two-thirds Jewish and only one-third southern. Rather, Tanglewood Numbers speaks in what might be regarded as a voice of integration, where being both Jewish and southern is by no means the basis for a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia. While Berman doesn't evoke Jewish themes per se, it's hard not to see the invocation of both Dylan (in the moralizing "The Poor the Fair and the Good") and Lou Reed, (in "Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed") as expressing a distinctly indigenous, newly formed southern Jewish vernacular.

In a recent interview, Berman was asked if he had a rabbi. Answering affirmatively. Berman also sang the praises of his congregation's cantor, Lisa Silver, whom he confessed he secretly records at Friday-night services on a hidden digital recorder. In many respects, Tangelwood Numbers is its own stealthy monograph of a similarly ritualistic process—that of a gifted singer-songwriter and his friends bearing witness to a new Jewish culture, in all of its complicated, layered, and deeply personal glory.

Source Citation

Nachmann, Ron. 2005. Capsule reviews. Tikkun 20(6):80.