Song out of time

HOME OF THE BRAVE Alan Bern, right, and Brave Old World have struggled to find presenters for their project.

A frail voice sings a punning song. “Jews are blessed with Khayim [life],” the muffled recording goes—“life” from “the house of life,” a Yiddish idiom for cemetery. Khayim was also the Yiddish middle name of Mordechai Rumkowski, the Nazi-appointed administrator of Poland’s Lodz Ghetto. By one estimate, only 877 out of some 300,000 people escaped from that hell between 1940 and 1945. Rumkowski, eventually gassed at Auschwitz like many of his charges, inspires fierce debate to this day. Was he a depraved collaborator or a well-intentioned fool, duped into believing he could save lives?

The spiral of irony twists your gut, and those are just the opening moments of Song of the Lodz Ghetto, which klezmer and new Jewish music group Brave Old World performs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Sunday 3. The 70-minute suite—a Winter & Winter recording of which won best-of-year honors from Billboard and Newsday in 2005—is a set of musical glosses on Lodz Ghetto street and cabaret songs that scholar Gila Flam gathered from survivors two decades ago.

“In 1991, she approached BOW with the material and asked if we would like to create a performance piece,” recalls pianist and accordionist Alan Bern, the group’s director. “The early versions were lecture-concerts in which we presented the Lodz songs rather ‘ethnomusicologically.’ But we felt the need to make a more personal statement, and that led us to create a large cycle that interweaves the Lodz material with our own music and other Yiddish music, as well.”

Bern calls Song of the Lodz Ghetto in its current form “a fever dream,” an apt description for the haunting web of sound spun by him and the group’s other virtuoso musicians: fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, clarinetist Kurt Bjorling and bassist Stuart Brotman. Its musical textures range from the gossamer introspection of Bern’s piano to shrieking, thumping klezmer delirium that can abruptly dissolve into desolate whimpers. Alpert’s vocals, fluid and seductive, are uncannily at one with the rueful verbal and emotional acrobatics of songs that dance on the edge of the abyss.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage concert may be one of the last times that BOW performs Song of the Lodz Ghetto, which—despite rapturous acclaim—has struggled to find a musical home. “For pop and world-music presenters, it’s too heavy,” Bern says, “while classical presenters tend to look down their nose at anything coming from klezmer or new Jewish music. Presenters want neat labels, and Song of the Lodz Ghetto just doesn’t fit.”

Both classically trained and an expert improviser, Bern shrugs off issues of musical categorization. “The classical label is useful if it helps people to listen to the large-scale concept of our music, which is like a classical song cycle, but pop and jazz have explored large-scale form,” he says, citing albums by the Beatles, the Who and Charles Mingus. “And we didn’t want to overformalize Yiddish music, since one of its strengths is direct expression. So although we construct large forms, the music from moment to moment is improvised so it stays immediate. In that way our music is more like jazz.”

The need to escape pigeonholes also explains the “new Jewish music” designation. “At the beginning of the klezmer revival, we used the term loosely to mean pretty much any Yiddish music, instrumental or vocal,” Bern explains. “It became clear that that was historically wrong: Klezmorim were professional Yiddish instrumentalists. In BOW, we bit the bullet and started calling our work ‘new Jewish music,’ which can include klezmer, vocal repertoire and just about anything else we want to throw into the mix.” In Song of the Lodz Ghetto, that mix includes a shattering reference to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—the ode to brotherhood of the “enlightened” European culture that so brutally betrayed the Jews.

Upcoming BOW projects include a performance with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra of a new work by Michael Rose. “Improvisation and symphonic music—they’re not obviously compatible,” Bern chuckles. The title of the piece is Arguing with G-d—a nod perhaps, to BOW’s genre-busting and ever-combative muse.

Brave Old World presents Song of the Lodz Ghetto at the Museum of Jewish Heritage Sun 3.