We Don’t Play The Sad Stuff

Annette Ezekiel Kogan explains her take on Jewish identity, and how her band, Golem, embodies those ideals

Annette Ezekiel Kogan started her band, Golem, in the early 2000s, as a way to explore the Eastern European folk musics she loved, but in a manner that was authentic, and Jewish. “I just wanted to do something that was my own,” she says in our interview below. “I felt that there were already real Russian, and Ukrainian, and Balkan people who played that stuff, so what’s my music? Then I started getting into klezmer music, because it is essentially the same kind of music, pretty much, except that it’s got this Jewish feel to it.”

But that focus doesn’t make Golem an oldies act, bound to traditional conventions, or a part of the klezmer revival. It has edge, and, despite its mostly acoustic—and guitar-less—instrumentation, owes a lot more to punk than old world sensibilities. And that, given the abundance of Yiddish-speaking, philo-semitic programing for 20-something, hip, urban, Jewish singles in New York at the time—where Golem was based—put them at the epicenter of a vibrant, if short-lived, Jewish cultural explosion. 

For most of the aughts, Golem was a fixture on the New York Jewish-Eastern-European-Balkan scene, performing at venues and events that catered to Manhattan’s hoards of searching and interested Jews. In 2005, they signed with JDub Records—the label behind artists like Matisyahu and Balkan Beat Box—toured Europe and North America, honed their live chops, and, consistent with their klezmer aesthetic, became an established wedding act as well. These days, nearing their twentieth anniversary, the band still tours and performs, and their discography includes an assortment of recordings, including five full-length releases, the most recent being, Tanz, which came out in 2014. 

“It has always been difficult to record us, and to capture that live energy we have onstage,” Ezekiel Kogan says. “That is the conundrum, and I feel like the person who really understood us was Tony Maimone, from Pere Ubu, who produced our last album, Tanz. He recorded us live together, as much as possible, while still adding a lot of producing and mixing magic. That album also has our most original material, with my take on Jewish identity, if you will—strength, fighting back, alive—rather than whiny and dead.” 

Those positive, empowered, and forward-looking ethos define Ezekiel Kogan’s outlook, which we discussed at length from her corona hideout in the Catskills. We also spoke about her early experiences with Eastern European music, learning Yiddish, Golem’s unique approach to klezmer, how music is a gateway to Jewish identity, and her awkward encounters with Jewish music enthusiasts in Poland. 

Are you originally from Massachusetts?

I grew up in Lexington. My father was a professor at MIT, and my mother was from New York. I always felt like I was in exile from New York growing up. I went to high school with the other singer in Golem, Aaron Diskin. We were high school classmates.

Wasn’t Amanda Palmer at your high school as well? I didn’t realize Lexington was so cool. 

She was with us in high school. It didn't feel that cool, but there were a lot of interesting people there I guess [laughs]. After high school, I went to college at Columbia, and I stayed in New York ever since.

Did you play in bands when you were in high school?

No. I played classical piano, and I was a ballet dancer. I also did Ukrainian folk dancing.

How did you get into that?

We spent every summer in the Catskills. I got very serious about ballet around age 11, and I told my mother that I couldn’t just sit at the lake and not dance. There are all these weird resorts in the Catskills—a lot of Jewish resorts, all kinds of things—and there was also a Ukrainian resort about 15 minutes away. It was right next to the orthodox Jewish stuff. They had a dance festival every year, and a dance workshop. My mom put me and my sister into there, and they had very amazing Ukrainian ballet teachers. We ended up being in their group, and we toured Ukraine with them. I think a lot of my love of Eastern European folk music is from that, and not necessarily from the Jewish side. Also, we had accordion accompaniment, and I fell in love with the instrument.

Is that when you started playing, and was it easy to go from piano to accordion? 

I didn’t start until later, but that’s how I started to love it. Another reason I started playing was because I already knew half of it, which is the keyboard side. I just had to learn the button side. I wouldn’t call myself a virtuoso, but I can play. 

Did you start speaking Yiddish during those summers in the Catskills, too? 

My grandfather was a Yiddish speaker, but it was the usual story, and he didn’t speak it, not to me and not to my mother. It was like his secret language with his brothers. I got into it—I am a language person—and I got interested, and started learning it later, but unfortunately, after he died. 

Did you explore the culture that is associated with speaking Yiddish as well?

I started a long time ago. I went for one or two years to the KlezKamp, where there was Yiddish and klezmer music. But I learned Yiddish mainly at the Workmen’s Circle. There was an amazing teacher named Pesach Fiszman, and he was this Jew from Argentina. He was an amazing Yiddish speaker, originally from the Ukraine where my grandfather was from. He was very inspiring, told crazy stories, and explained Shalom Aleichem [the great Yiddish writer, Shalom Rabinowitz]. He’d say stuff like, “This is what you’ll never understand about it!” He dropped dead a few years ago without ever being sick. But everyone who studied with him remembers him, and then the rest I did by myself. Yiddish is a great, fascinating language. Everything you say—it’s so sarcastic that everything you say is the opposite of what you mean.

When you went on those trips to the Ukraine with the dance group, did you travel all over the country?

We only went once, and it was in 1992 when Ukraine just became independent, and things were pretty crazy there at the time. I didn’t fully realize it then. We went around the country in buses, and basically, my sister and I were the two Jews with this group of Ukrainian Americans who were also going back to their parent’s homeland for the first time. It was a very interesting experience for everyone.

Did you make it to where your family is from? 

No, that was further east than where we went. The thing is, my husband is a refugee, and he came to America in 1992 from Ukraine. He was still there at the time, but of course, we didn’t meet. Although I was in his city, which is Kharkiv. It all came full circle, too. We went back in 2015 with Golem. We were invited to play at a Jewish festival in Lviv. My husband came, and we went back to his city after that. We checked it out. It was his first time back since 1994. 

What’s the genesis of Golem? Were you starting to get interested in those Balkan-type musics?

I got into that, and also Ukrainian folk music, and Russian folk music, and I just wanted to do something that was my own. I felt that there were already real Russian, and Ukrainian, and Balkan people who played that stuff, so what’s my music? Then I started getting into klezmer music, because it is essentially the same kind of music, pretty much, except that it’s got this Jewish feel to it. I fell in love with it, and felt that it was my thing. And that’s even though my father is Iraqi Jewish. A lot of times, we play in these places with a lot of old Ashkenazi Yiddish speakers, and they’ll ask, “Why are you doing this?”—because I look like my father [laughs]. I’ll always be an interloper, I guess.

Since those types of music have so many similarities, what gives klezmer its Jewish feel? 

They say that the melodies have an influence from hazanus [Jewish cantorial, liturgical singing], and that kind of thing. I think it has more of a tinge of sadness than the similar Ukrainian and Polish melodies, and more of that Middle Eastern feel, and different scales. But it’s such a mix, It’s not really anything, it’s a mix of whatever was around them: Hungarian music, Polish music, Ukrainian music, all that stuff. And then also the Gypsy music—Romany stuff—and they would put in little Jewish melodies, and things like that. Those things would Jew-a-size it, because it’s really not its own thing—although I probably shouldn't say that [laughs]. It’s just like Jewish food. Jewish food is the food from wherever they were living, with a little Jewish twist to it.

What about rhythmically? Is it basically a straight four feel?

Not always. There’s the hora beat, which is bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. They also do all kinds of waltzes, everything, czardas, mazurka—those were the genres that were popular in Eastern Europe at the time.

But with Golem, those rhythms translate well into the punk, or hardcore feels.

That’s pretty much a straight four, like all the Ukrainian folk music. It works perfectly. But we don’t consider ourselves rhythmically authentic at all. We definitely put our own spin on it rhythmically. There’s a whole school of klezmer drumming, but our drummer doesn’t do that.

He does straight rock drumming?

Rock, but he also has a lot of jazz influences. When I started out, there were a bunch of people already doing the authentic thing, like the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which I love, from the New England Conservatory. The Klezmer Conservatory Band was a main influence. My mother took me to their concerts in Boston when I was little. I saw people like Don Byron and Hankus Netsky. I always mention to Hankus when I see him [that at those shows] there were all these old people, and then there was my sister and I dancing around the front. But, as I was saying, I didn’t want to try to be authentic and recreate how it was. I felt that it had such a life to it, and I didn’t want our music to seem like a museum thing for old people, from an old world, but to give it a modern, contemporary life and strength to it.

Did you start the band, and has the lineup stayed similar throughout?

I did. Our newest guy is Jeremy Brown, the violinist, and he’s already been there for eight years, but we still call him the new guy. I started it. I asked Aaron to do it. He was this rocker who played with Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and all that. I invited him over, and asked him, “Do you want to do some Yiddish songs?” He said, “Sure.” Actually, he came over and asked if I would play his songs that he was writing, and I said, “How about doing some Jewish music with me instead?” This was in 2000, and he actually hooked me up with this klezmer band in Williamsburg that was very wild, and more punk than we are. There was nothing really organized about it. It was about 15 people, it was called, the Murrays, and we did a few shows. I couldn’t take it after that. The whole thing fell apart on stage, and after that I went back to Aaron, and said, “Ok, can you do it with me now for real?” He said, “Yes.” The bass player, Taylor Bergren-Chrismam, is original. Our trombonist, Curtis Hasselbring, came onboard shortly after that. He wasn’t at the beginning. He is amazing, and he and I do a lot of the writing together. He’s my main writing partner.

Does Curtis play guitar with you, too?

Sometimes at weddings he plays guitar, until we found Brandon Seabrook. Brandon is incredible. He plays at all the weddings with us, and he is featured on the last album Tanz. And there’s also our drummer, Tim Monaghan, who’s great.

Did you teach Aaron to speak Yiddish?

He does everything by ear. I teach him. 

Does he know what he's saying?

I explain it to him [laughs]. But he’s just got it. He’s got this incredible ear, and an incredible rubbery face. He was meant to be in the Yiddish theater, if he had been born in the 1920s. I have him singing in Russian, and in Yiddish. 

Do you write the lyrics in those different languages? 

When we started out, I had no interest in doing original material. We were taking old songs, and transforming them, and making them sound punk rock and contemporary. I thought, “Who cares what I have to say?” I didn’t like the whole idea. But then, little-by-little, it grew and we started doing our own songs. I started writing lyrics, and Curtis and I mainly write the songs. Some of them I wrote by myself. But everyone is involved. I bring them my idea for an arrangement and writing, and then everyone fills in their own part. It is very collaborative.

Is it loose, too, is there a lot of improvisation? 

The solos are improvised, but it’s not that loose. It’s not jammy or anything. It’s pretty structured, but there is also a lot of improvisation.

The band has a punk energy, but no distorted guitars or anything like that. 

That’s the thing about our band, which is that it’s so hard to define, and we’ve had that problem the whole time. When we were on the JDub record label, they were always trying to find the “genre.” They were calling us “gypsy punk,” yuck, there’s nothing gypsy and there’s nothing punk [laughs]. The punk is the attitude—being irreverential and we did a lot of screaming and yelling—but the music is pretty authentic. I like to say that we revere the tradition while playing with it. We don’t want to destroy it. The gypsy thing is because there was—and still is—this whole Balkan music movement. We went to Mexico, and did our last album, Tanz, with the Discos Corasón record label, because they had this huge Balkan gypsy punk scene there. We played amazing concerts in Mexico City with thousands of people—there were not many Jews at all, but they just really loved it—and that was one of the most incredible experiences.

JDub also had Balkan Beat Box, which is very different from Golem, although they have a similar energy. 

Right, it is a similar energy, but they had a lot more electronica. We are really into live music, which is out-of-date—or people are moving away from it—but we’ve always kept to that. Even playing weddings, which gives us that authentic live music feel that you don’t get even in concerts. It’s organic, and creates a situation, an atmosphere, instead of an artificial concert setting.

Are weddings a big part of what the band does?

Yeah, and we don’t only play the Jewish music, we also do tons of covers, like fun ‘70s stuff, especially with Brandon, it can be amazing.

It seems that between John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture scene, JDub Records, Makor (the Jewish cultural center on the Upper West Side), and the Knitting Factory, that there was a thriving Jewish culture scene in New York City in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. What was going on, was it something in the air? 

We started right at that time, maybe a little before that. Makor was our main venue at the beginning, and also the Knitting Factory. We were never part of the John Zorn scene, that was more avant-garde than what we were doing. Gogol Bordello started at the same time as well.

Were they a part of that scene, too? 

They weren’t at Makor, but at other clubs, like Mehanata, with a weekly Balkan music party that we played a lot, too. There was this whole Eastern-European-for-Americans scene going on, and also this Jewish interest in Yiddish and Jewish culture. There was an identity thing happening at that time.

Was Makor more than just a club, what else did they do there? 

It was designed as a Jewish singles place for people who weren’t religious and didn’t fit in. People who couldn’t go to the synagogue and meet a Jewish person, but still wanted to. That was really the idea behind it. But it was also cool. It had music, and a restaurant, and classes. It was started by the Bronfmans (philanthropist Charles Bronfman). It was for his son—not specifically for his son—but they were looking, and there was nothing for them.

What happened to it? Did everyone get married? 

I guess. People grew out of it. I think people have become more religious in different ways. There was a big secular scene there, and now those people have turned to either Modern Orthodoxy, or progressive Judaism, or something like that. But with JDub, Matisyahu was their huge thing. They did that themselves—they had the idea for it—it was a very collaborative thing, and it was hugely successful. They were trying to do that again. They were trying to mold us in a way, but we were anti-molding, so it didn’t work. 

Was getting interested in Jewish music also a way to embrace your Jewish identity? 

Oh yeah, for sure. When it started out, it was this new thing of people embracing their grandparents’ culture. Now, I feel it is much more common to think about your roots, but then, it seemed like people were almost still trying to assimilate more than going back to where they had come from. A lot of people would come up to us after every show, and say, “You made me remember this and that and my grandparents.” It was definitely an identity thing. We had this whole scene that got older, and got married. It’s not the same anymore.

Did older people come to your shows as well? 

It was always a very mixed audience. We always had very crazy mixed crowds, from young punk rockers, to non-Jews, to old Jews. I loved that.

People came with their walkers? 

Totally, [although it may have been too loud for them]. But sometimes I felt like the old people understood it more than the young ones, because they could actually understand the words.

Do you also play those Jewish festivals in Europe?

Yes. There’s one we played, it’s a Jewish festival in Warsaw, Poland, and we were supposed to play two shows. But it’s a very weird scene—a lot of non-Jews—and it kind of feels like Jewish Disney World. Gross. It is very nostalgic for something that isn’t there anymore. The non-Jews are very nostalgic for it for some reason. I don’t know why—guilt, or interest, or something. There are a lot of very traditional singing groups, and instrumentalists, and then we came and did our explosive thing. After that, the organizer canceled our second show, and said, “Where’s your Jewish sound, your sad stuff?” 

Your sad stuff?

I said, “We’re not sad. We’re strong and we’re alive. We’re not going to be remembering the ghetto up here.” We actually went to a rock club in Warsaw. They had us do a show in a club, and the crowd spilled out into the street. We didn’t even have our own instruments—the drummer played on buckets—and we had people dancing out in the street. It ended up being an amazing experience, but it was very interesting.

I once spoke with a rabbi in Poland, and he told me that amongst Polish youth, being Jewish is hip. 

Yes it is. All these people came up to us, and said, “You know, I am like one-eighth Jewish.” [Laughs]. I don’t know, it was kind of a weird feeling.

Photo by Jesse Vega

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