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KlezmerShul
Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Veretski Pass
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Freight and Salvage Coffee House,
2020 Addison St.
Berkeley, CA
$18 advance / $22 door
A breath-taking combination of stellar musicianship and raw energy, this unique trio plays “village-style” instrumentals with origins in the Ottoman Empire and Carpathian, Jewish and Rumanian musical traditions.
Veretski Pass will be performing their new composition Klezmer Shul as well as their standard repertoire and some special surprises.
Klezmer Shul captures the emotional power of liturgical song, drawing on jazz, avant garde, classical and folk elements to achieve a truly transcendent sound. This recent composition showcases the profound synergy between three of the leading instrumentalists on the international klezmer scene.
The Veretski Pass trio, preeminent exponents of East European Jewish music, will present three premiere performances in February of The Klezmer Shul, a 45- minute, four-movement instrumental suite, written to capture the emotional power of traditional synagogue singing without the use of words.
The KlezmerShul, the latest work of Veretski Pass, is a four movement suite that attempts to bridge the gap between the sacred and the secular, through instrumental music without words.
In the 1000 year history of Ashkenazic culture, research has shown that there were Jewish trade guilds, which often established their own small synagogues, or shuls. There were tailors’ shuls, shoemakers’ shuls — and klezmer shuls. Inspired by these historic accounts, Stu Brotman obtained a grant from the Creative Work Fund in San Francisco for Veretski Pass to compose a klezmer-based, purely instrumental musical impression of a Jewish service.
Were these shuls, also known as kloyzn or shtiblekh, places for traditional services, or were they also meeting halls, gathering places for all-night jam sessions with visiting musicians and musical neighbors? In The KlezmerShul, Cookie, Josh, and Stu re-imagine them as centers of multi-cultural music making, where musicians could inspire each other, improvising, recombining, and mixing the melodies of the service with local folk, classical and popular music.
“For musical inspiration, our sources ranged from the traditional melodies of the synagogue to the folk music of the many peoples among whom Jews lived and worked: Rom (Gypsy), Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian, Moldavian, Czech, Polish melodies. Employing techniques of modern Classical composition, modern Jazz, and even Gospel music styles, we felt it important to leave the structure of the arrangements open in order to allow room for improvisation, which generates the core of our work. In this way each performance is spontaneous and unique.”
The KlezmerShul is intended as a spiritual experience, as well as pure concert music. Veretski Pass offers it as a gesture of reconciliation in a world divided by doctrine, and dedicate it to the memory of musicians lost to war.
For further information and audio samples of Klezmer Shul, please visit Veretski Pass’s website
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