Bring The Noise
Trombonist Dan Blacksberg talks about his über-heavy Jewish bands Deveykus and Electric Simcha, exploring traditional Jewish styles, and what playing Jewish music says about Jewish identity
Philadelphia-based trombonist, Dan Blacksberg, has been making a joyful Jewish noise for ages. His interests include traditional klezmer—he may be the expert on the role of trombone in the genre—and merging Hasidic melodies with new world, albeit alternative, styles like doom metal and hardcore with his bands Deveykus and Electric Simcha. His focus also includes not-necessarily-Jewish experimental music, extreme metal, and straight-ahead jazz.
“If you put on the Naftule Brandwein record (King of the Klezmer Clarinet), there is only one trombone player,” Blacksberg says about his studies of the role of the trombone, or middle-voice accompaniment, in klezmer. “On any of the tracks where there is a trombone player, I am pretty sure he is making everything up, just because it is really dynamic and things don’t repeat. Sometimes it is arranged. Sometimes it is improvised. Sometimes it is hard to tell. Sometimes it seems that there is an arrangement, but there is a lot of liberty.”
Taking liberties is a big part of Blackberg’s playing, too, and explains his comfort with cross-genre mashups and outsider music, although that may also come from his affinity for the music of Yosi and Avi Piamenta.
“I don’t know what that is,” he says about the Piamenta brothers influence on his music. “Is it jazz fusion? Jethro Tull? Disco? I don’t know if I can put my finger on one thing they are mixing in, but they had a huge effect on my music. My band, Electric Simcha, is like 70 percent Piamenta. Totally. I was basically listening to that—I was just trying to do that, but with our band—and then I was listening to all these other bands like Black Flag. But I have the immediate recall of the Piamenta sound in my head. I am not sure if I have the immediate recall of Black Flag in my head as strongly.”
I had a great time speaking with Blacksberg. As should be obvious from our conversation, he has a deep understanding about the disparate styles that fall under the banner of “Jewish” music. He’s funny, too, in an offbeat, philosemitic way. We talked about his experiences studying and exploring Jewish music, whether or not playing Jewish music has anything to do with Jewish identity, what qualities—if any—qualify a genre as “Jewish,” and his experiences fuzing Jewish musics with heavier, non-mainstream styles.
What’s your background and how did you get interested in music?
I am born and raised in Philadelphia. I grew up in south Philly, and now live in west Philly. The only time I haven’t lived here was when I was the four years I was at the New England Conservatory (NEC). I started playing the trombone when was about 10 or 11. You know how they offer you an instrument when you are in public school? I started on French horn, but that lasted about three months, and then someone let me try the trombone, and I was into it.
What did you study at the Conservatory?
I was a jazz major. People assume I did contemporary improvisation there, but no, I was a jazz major. I am one of those people who floated on the edge between those two things.
What was your introduction to Jewish music?
The story I usually tell is that I grew up going to synagogue in Philly. We had a good cantor who was a trained opera singer—so he had a good voice. He’s probably in his late-80s now, and he was old-ish when I was born. There was a Klezmatics CD that arrived at our house. I am pretty sure my parents went to see that Live in the Fiddler’s House tour with Itzhak Perlman. That tour was in the ‘90s, and it was like a big watershed moment for something relating to klezmer. Sometime at the end of high school I started listening to that Klezmatics record. I was starting to get more adventurous in my listening, making more choices—Jews with Horns is the name of the Klezmatics record—I got really into it, and got into playing some of those tunes off the record out of a fake book. I was just playing off of sheet music, really. I went to NEC, and within a couple of days of getting there, I met my friend Michael Winograd, who was already deep into this stuff. He was also booking his own gigs and playing, and he told me to go to KlezKamp. So in Freshman year, I went to KlezKamp. Those were the years it was not in the Catskills. It was in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which was close by. I arrived there, and started playing this stuff. I was already in love with the Klezmatics, and they were all there. You could take classes with them, and get feedback from people. That was basically it.
What was KlezKamp? Was it like a klezmer convention?
KlezKamp was held over Christmas week in the Catskills for most of its 30 years. It was performances at night, workshops during the day, lectures, and movies. Everybody went to this hotel in the Catskills, which was in the middle of nowhere, over Christmas week. Nobody else was there, except the staff. At its peak, it was over 400 people attending this thing. Every night there were dance parties, there was jamming—it’s probably similar to an old time festival or something like that—except it’s in a hotel, and it is a bunch of Jews. I commuted the first year, but then it moved back to the Catskills. I went to KlezKamp from 2002, every winter, until it stopped in 2014. Over that time, I moved more into the music. I started getting more into it on my own, doing my own research, doing my own practice, trying to develop my own thing, playing with my peers and elders, and just got more and more interested in it.
When you were first exploring this music, was it a cultural quest? Were you finding your Jewish identity?
Not explicitly. I was moving too fast for those kind of things. I wasn’t thinking about anything other than music at that point. The identity stuff came much later. I felt like a normal white Jewish guy—but I wouldn’t have used those terms to describe myself back then—it wasn’t even part of the conversation. It was more like, “I am going to play cutting edge creative music.” Even this old klezmer stuff, for some reason—I think because it was so connected to Radical Jewish Culture and John Zorn—it still felt like this cutting edge thing, where people were accepting me and giving me good feedback. Those two worlds were good. I was having more success. I felt more at home in them than I did in the straight-ahead jazz world. Although, I didn’t do terribly on that account, but it wasn’t my forte for sure.
I am asking, because at one point, there was a movement amongst Jewish musicians for an authentic form of expression. It was as if you were faking it if you were playing jazz or blues, but playing klezmer or Jewish music was more real. Did you feel that way?
No. I was at school doing a jazz major, but I do hear that. I wonder if people exploring that stuff now feel that way more because identity is just such a more salient part of the conversation—it certainly is on the east coast of America. I also know that people of Hankus Netsky’s generation [Netsky founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and is an important personality at NEC], felt that strongly because they grew up in the Black Power times. In the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a Jewish institutional cultural identity response to the Black Power movement. Now all this stuff was happening in the mainstream of Judaism didn’t have anything to do with klezmer music, but you have these counter cultural people, and even people like John Zorn. I remember listening to Zorn’s Masada, and realized that he realized that the Freygish scale—that harmonic minor scale thing [editor: that’s the Phrygian dominant scale, which is the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale, for you music nerds who need to know these things]—could be the Jewish blues scale, which is just an incredibly reductive thing, but incredibly, insanely effective [laughs]. If you read any of the stuff they were saying about Radical Jewish Culture—people like Marc Ribot, Anthony Coleman, David Krakauer, Frank London—a lot of them are talking about how it was this cultural rediscovery of our roots. Hankus even mentioned some story once about Archie Shepp, about exploring Jewish music partially because Archie Shepp told white people to stop playing jazz and find their own damn music.
And that was different from when you grew up?
Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, we were in such a different period around culture versus even up to the late-‘80s. This is all in retrospect, and nowadays it is also really salient. I hate to say it, but nowadays I kind of use this stuff to my advantage. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got this base covered or that base covered, and sometimes that happens in a positive way, and sometimes it happens in a less positive way. Most of the time it is generally positive. But I am able to use my position now as an acknowledged klezmer musician to my advantage in that kind of situation. But while I was learning it, I was just going after music I liked and communities that I felt were accepting me.
Did you check out non-Ashkenazi music, too?
I was mostly just working on what people showed me. I started playing with Frank London pretty early on in that time, and he would have stuff that had more Middle Eastern influences. NEC had a great Turkish music class. I took a class in the music of India, but it wasn’t connecting it explicitly to Jewish music. That search has been much more recent, I have been trying to open my ears to that music a lot more. Recently it has been, “What is the Jewish music of Yemen?” or, “What is the Jewish music of North Africa.” But again, I still mostly rely on other people telling me to check things out.
Your Deveykus project, would that be Hasidic music as opposed to klezmer?
Yeah. Klezmer wasn’t used as a genre word until the ‘70s. Andy Statman and Zev Feldman decided they wanted to call it something [Statman and Feldman released Jewish Klezmer Music in 1980]. I tell people that my wife’s grandmother called it Freilichs music. She’d say, “How do you know that Freilichs music?” I learned most of the Hasidic music through working at KlezKamp. Frank London would teach these nigunim classes, and he learned it from checking it out himself, but also from playing countless Hasidic weddings in New York. At KlezKamp, there was always a Hasidic dance band as an ensemble, and you’d be playing these tunes. I didn’t realize for a long time that they weren’t klezmer music, because it was all sort of happening at once. The difference is if you go to a Lubavitch place, for example, and sing some of these tunes, they’re going to know some of them, and they are not going to know the klezmer tunes. With my projects like Deveykus, and also Electric Simcha, the big deal is that klezmer music is pretty specific, and a lot of the tunes have a million notes in them. You can’t do the same kind of genre mixing, crossing, melding, DNA splicing. With Hasidic music, it is all vocal music, so it is a lot simpler, but it still has a lot of the musical things that make it feel Jewish. Also, those tunes were the tunes that I got really into, as meditative, spiritual tunes. Everyone else will call it klezmer, except for the 10 people who will say, “That’s not klezmer.” But at this point, I almost don’t care.
Those Deveykus nigunim, do you use them like a jazz head, as a melody to then play off of?
In that recording, for sure. But in a traditional context, you just sing them over and over again, with no improvisation. I arrange them on that record as jazz tunes, because that’s the only way I knew how.
Have you gone to Hasidic tisches and checked this stuff out in person?
Yeah, totally, though not a lot, certainly not every week. I haven’t played a million of those Hasidic wedding gigs, but I have played a handful, and they have all been impactful in the sense that you are stepping out of the modern world into such a fully realized version of Jewish culture. If you go to a modern, normal Jewish wedding, everybody is dressed the same way as non-Jews might dress. It is not as immersive into something that feels consciously different than everything else.
Klezmer shares a lot of similarities with other Eastern European music, what are the things that make it distinctly Jewish?
People argue about this all the time. The simplest answer is that it has elements of nusach, elements of liturgical style, and things mixed with different kinds of music around it. An example is the Romanian Hora, which is a song usually played in three. It uses the same scales and modes, a pretty similar time feel, but there are some things that you don’t hear, that could be traced to liturgical music, nusach, or other things like that. That is the answer for back in the day. But at this point, if you are comparing klezmer music as an Eastern European music to any other Eastern European music, the big difference is that those musics still happen in the place where they come from. Those musics certainly have lineages that were affect by War, but it was not the same. Those cultures on mass haven’t assimilated into another culture the way Eastern European Jews have, whether that’s in Israel or the United States. Plus, a lot of that music, Balkan Music, Romanian music, Polish music, different kinds of Roma music, all was changed behind the Iron Curtain. Klezmer music nowadays doesn’t have this straight-line history to its sound. It has this very re-imagined quality to it, which I think now makes it sound quite a bit different than other kinds of music that it was once connected to in the region.
Back in the day, what made it Jewish? Was it that Jews were playing it?
Yes and no. You could find a Jewish version of the same song that has a Romanian version—Romania and that area was the most integrated part of that whole world in terms of people getting along—you might play this song with one kind of accent for a Jewish crowd, and you might play the same song with another kind of accent for a gentile crowd. In certain places, the musicians who were doing it might be Jews, they might be non-Jews—but that also depends on where it was—but you could play the song in a Jewish style for a non-Jewish audience, and they would be like, “That sounds wrong. Why are you doing it wrong?”
Meaning there were conventions people knew?
Yeah. It’s the same thing with hip hop and heavy metal now. People in the metal scene can pick out these differences of genre based on the sound of the song on levels that I have no idea what they’re talking about, it is so specific. It used to be like that with all these other kinds of music, too, it just was regional and things like that.
I am asking because why can’t some Jewish kid who goes to synagogue and also plays reggae or hardcore, why wouldn’t that evolve into a Jewish reggae or hardcore? I don’t mean like what you did, reinterpreting Jewish music in that context, I mean creating a synthesis of the local styles, but as played by the local Jews?
That might have happened. If you go to places like Turkey now, I’ve seen these videos of these guys plays Saz—a thin-necked string instrument—but they’re playing it through massive amplifiers with a huge amount of distortion. They haven’t changed what they’re playing, they’ve just changed the entire sound around it. Klezmer music was functional music, so it depends on what the music is for. All the Yiddish bands, the stuff they play—the stuff that I really think is klezmer music, as opposed to the catchall version—is dance music, played for dancing, for functions. There is so much to that context, so it is harder to make that malleable. But in the Hasidic world, stuff has changed a lot. Nowadays, you have electronic beats. The melody is pretty similar, but there might be a techno beat under it, and these worlds seem to only have mixed in elements of mainstream musics.
In the last four or five years, there have been big shifts within the Orthodox community, especially in terms of embracing new music. Everything from Zusha to Nissim Black—and I don’t think it is the novelty of Nissim Black—I think people are embracing his music. Have you noticed that?
I have noticed that. I have played with Zusha a few times. But I don’t think I really understood the nuances of the orthodox community, certainly versus the hasidic community, in terms of where the differences are there. That has become a lot clearer. You had some people like Lipa Shmeltzer causing these rifts, and you see where some of the limits are. But I am going to point back to this feeling that I have—and I don’t know if you can confirm this—but I have this feeling. Obviously, I am not that interested in a lot of mainstream sounds. The things that I have combined Jewish music with are not those—hardcore, punk, and doom metal—I get pulled in a lot of directions. But I’ll just say that for the most part, most people everywhere have mainstream musical tastes. Things like Zusha or Nissim Black—both those artists that you mentioned—are referencing mainstream musics. I don’t know what you’d call Zusha actually, but they are kind of a jam band, or something. Whatever it is, it is not agro-loner music, like doom metal.
Have you ventured into the world of Zorn at all?
Yeah. Deveykus is on Tzadik.
Have you done any of the Masada books?
I have read through those. Zorn doesn’t seem to use trombone players a lot, and when he does he uses Dave Taylor, and I can’t argue with that. But if you look at the Masada books, there is very little trombone involved. I am close with a bunch of the groups. I have played a lot of gigs with Downtown people. I am close with bands like Cleric and anything Jon Madof has done—I know all those people that he works with. I have never performed on anything that was a Zorn thing, but I have also played at the Stone 40 times. I am deep in that scene. I also know the other sides of Zorn’s music, like the film stuff, the improvised stuff, Cobra. The fact that he’s been able to have such a varied and diverse career of different kinds of music making and different kinds of projects is a huge influence.
Plus, he’s just a great sax player.