The self-appointed rabbi

KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR

He's Vancouver-born and raised, but like many other musicians before him, Geoff Berner had to leave the country to get noticed.

"When you do well (in the United States or Europe), suddenly it's easier to get gigs and it's easier to get on CBC and it's easier to get into festivals in Canada," Berner noted. After a tour of Norway and the United Kingdom, he held two homecoming concerts at the Railway Club last weekend – and is one of several Jewish performers featured at this summer's Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

Berner's latest album, Whiskey Rabbi, is an example of what he wryly calls his "more mature" music. At the grand old age of 33, the folk-punk-klezmer artist has managed to turn his passion for song into a full-time job. The one-time frontman for punk rock band Terror of Tiny Town, Berner has been performing solo for the past five years – and, having just been signed by U.K. singer Billy Bragg's management team, he's set to get a lot more exposure.

Bragg ("A socialist punk rock superhero," said Berner) was one of the young Vancouverite's early inspirations – along with punk bands like The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, DOA and No Means No. Opening for Bragg last year was a sign that Berner's own career had taken off. "It's hard to feel cynical about the world when your dreams come true and you get to tour around with Billy Bragg," he mused.

Berner has also been heavily influenced by his Jewish background and klezmer tradition – although he favors the raw sound of performers like Romanian klezmer group Di Naye Kapelye (The New Band) and their more senior compatriots, whom Berner discovered on a recent trip to eastern Europe.
"Although many of them were 80 years old, they had punk rock musical values also," he said. "They played like punk rockers – they played with guts and roughness and they were losing control while they were playing, rather than getting it all perfect."

It's a style he tried to emulate as soon as he picked up the accordion. "A lot of my friends were punk rockers who discovered country music and Celtic music later on and found a way to put the spirit of punk rock into those styles," he said. "It just made more and more sense for me to try and do the same thing with Jewish music; the idea that it's more important what you have to say and the feeling you're trying to express than whether or not you get every note right or you play fast enough."

Berner's onstage style is highly interactive. "You play a song," he explained, "you interrupt the song to mock apologize for the lyrics, then you keep going with the song and then you tell a little story. You start another song and then you change your mind and play a different song and somebody yells something at you from the audience and you yell something back. So it's not like watching television. You have to remind people that they're alive and participating in the show, rather than just passively taking it in."

Berner feels it is his responsibility as a Jew to engage in political discourse.

"At Hebrew school in Beth Israel, we were taught a lot about the Holocaust and we were taught that that kind of injustice gave us a special place in the world," he said. "But I didn't feel that it meant we had special rights. I felt that it meant that we had special responsibilities and those responsibilities were having a political conscience and sticking up for other people who were getting kicked around."

He is unsettled by extremism of any kind. "It's made me so angry that I want to be part of the conversation about what Jews will be in future generations," he said, "and I don't want them to be blind supporters of Israel or people who vote Republican. Having a bunch of Jewish political drinking songs is my contribution to the conversation, to the cultural battle."

He comes by his desire to take part in that conversation naturally, coming from a long line of rabbis, from his great-grandfather on back. "My grandfather was a lawyer and my father was a lawyer," he said. "That was just a brief intermission. Now I'm a rabbi. Self-appointed."

The folk festival runs from July 15-17. Check out www.thefestival.bc.ca.

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