|
June 1, 2012
KlezKanada goes Latin
The 17th annual Laurentian retreat looks south.
JANICE ARNOLD CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
In its 17th year, the KlezKanada Laurentian Retreat is looking southward to the wealth of klezmer music and other expressions of Yiddishkeit in Latin America today. The retreat, KlezKanada’s flagship event, takes place Aug. 20-26 at Camp B’nai Brith. This year’s slogan is “Where traditional and experimental Jewish culture inform each other and flourish.”
Headline performers at the festival’s Tuesday evening program, Buenos Aires Soirée, will include Jacinta, a native of the Argentine capital now living in Paris, who is a singer, guitarist, actress and master of Yiddish tango, and the duo of Marcelo Moguilevsky and César Lerner, who infuse klezmer with Argentine folk music, jazz and tango. Both are making their KlezKanada debut.
The “north-south” spirit will continue with a Jewish carnival dance, bringing faculty and guests together for a boisterous evening.
A special guest faculty member will be Prof. Avrohom Lichtenboym, executive director of the Jewish Research Institute in Buenos Aires and considered one of the world’s greatest Yiddish teachers.
This year’s retreat is under the artistic direction of trumpeter/composer Frank London, a leader of the Klezmatics, the only Jewish music band to win a Grammy Award. The New York-based group, a longstanding veteran of the klezmer revival, will perform during the retreat.
For many years, KlezKanada has developed relationships with musicians and cultural activists in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. That connection continues this year, as well.
Opa!, described as the première klezmer-ska-punk party band from St. Petersburg, will make its North American debut, playing the opening night show. Another highlight will be the inaugural Adrienne Cooper Memorial Guest Faculty Position, in honor of the American singer and Yiddish music activist, a KlezKanada veteran, who passed away in December. The first recipient of the special position will be Dutch singer Shura Lipovsky, a pioneer in the revival of Yiddish folk song in Europe since the 1970s. This award is co-sponsored with the Workmen’s Circle of New York.
Cooper will also be remembered in the Friday night program, when her interest in the intersection of the sacred and political will inspire a conversation on women’s role in Jewish music today.
Poetry is also receiving special attention this year. New generation poet/performers Adeena Karasick and Jack Marmer will head KlezKanada’s first concurrent poetry writing retreat on the theme Three Millennia of Poetic Subversion.
Another program, Occupy Yiddish! Di Anarchisten, will pay tribute to the Yiddish-speaking radicals who used poetry to spread their cause, while violinist Deborah Strauss will look at Kadya Molodowsky’s poetry, which grappled with women’s identity and changing roles within traditional society.
Two giants of Yiddish poetry, Abraham Sutzkever and Mordechai Gebirtig, will be commemorated with original musical interpretations of their work.
Musicians Michael Alpert of Brave Old World, Montreal’s klezmer-hip hop king Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, and American musician Daniel Kahn of Berlin, among others, as well as author Michael Wex, will present Memorial Songs and Stories for Adrienne Cooper.
Two CDs will be released by the Michael Winograd Band of New York and Susan Watts’ long-awaited Hartsklap (Heartbeats) also will come out during the week-long retreat.
Also attending will be Cantor Jacob Ben-Zion “Jackie” Mendelson, a New Yorker with a Montreal connection: his uncle Nathan Mendelson was cantor at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim for 35 years. He will explore traditional Jewish music.
The avant-garde “new” Jewish music will be explained by pianists Anthony Coleman, a colleague of John Zorn, and KlezKanada’s Marilyn Lerner. Montreal’s renowned Yiddish culture will be celebrated in a session called Going Back to the Main: Rediscovering the Sights, Sounds and Shuls of Yiddish Montreal inspired by three recent books by local authors, including Chantal Ringuet’s French-language A la Découverte du Montréal Yiddish.
Sure to be interesting will be the appearance of Shifra Lowen, a woman in her 30s who grew up in the Chassidic Tosh community in Boisbriand, Que. Before she and her family left the community, she wrote children’s songs. She has released CDs of her Yiddish songs and stories.
In addition to the annual retreat, KlezKanada also offers year-round programming and presents the Montreal Jewish Music Festival. For more information, call 1-514-316-7280 or visit klezkanada.org.
For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com
^TOP
|
