The Crescent City has no shortage of exotic hybrid bands, from the long-running Astral Project to the more recent Los Hombres Calientes.
But one of the city’s most unusual outfits has to be the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, an ensemble that merges several distinct musical traditions to often hilarious effect.
Though they’re more New Orleans than klezmer, these unorthodox musicians ultimately laugh at boundaries separating musical genres. Why segregate musical languages, the All-Stars seem to be asking, when it’s so entertaining to hear them collide?
Even musical purists would have found the band’s first set Tuesday night at Schubas difficult to resist. For if the All-Stars clearly exaggerated traditional klezmer phrasings and consistently italicized stylistic devices that deserved more subtlety, the exuberance and technical command of their work very nearly obliterated one’s reservations.
Judging by appearances, the members of the sextet are in their 20s and 30s, which may help explain the hard-driving, rock-tinged nature of their work. In general, their volume levels are high, their tempos aggressive, their approach iconoclastic.
But this is not your typical bar band, in part because each player brings considerable technical achievement and musical sophistication to the proceedings.
Consider the front line, with clarinetist Robert Wagner and saxophonist Ben Ellman taking the most intricate passages at outrageously fast tempos–and with nary a glitch. Yet no matter how quickly they tossed off their runs and scales, it was the spirit of the music and the shape of the phrase that mattered most to these artists.
Because the band reveled in heavy amplification (with both Wagner and Ellman repeatedly asking the sound engineer for more juice), it was difficult to get the complete measure of their music. Was there nuance to Wagner’s clarinet lines? Was there a fundamental difference in the way Ellman approached the soprano and tenor saxophones? Their high-decibel solos rendered these questions impossible to answer.
Yet there was no denying the force and fervor of their performance. To hear the two reedists blasting freely throughout duet passages was to behold klezmer music for a new generation.
Wagner and Ellman, however, didn’t produce the band’s relentless energy alone–their four-man rhythm unit perpetually egged them on. Specifically, it was Glen Hartman’s staccato chords on accordion, Jonathan Freilich’s crisp fills on guitar, Arthur Kastler’s cleanly articulated notes on bass and Kevin O’Day’s New Orleans street rhythms on drums that persuaded listeners to dance.
For all the drive and high volume of this music-making, the players took pains to balance the sound of one instrument against another. So even at full tilt, each player’s contribution rang out clearly.
If the reedists overstated the lamenting quality one associates with some klezmer music, if the rhythm section was too glib in its use of tempo and meter changes, these flaws often could be overlooked. When you’re reinventing a musical genre, you can’t always worry about the niceties.
