Irish? Yiddish? Whateverish? Lorin Sklamberg Puts It Together on Two Projects

If you ran into Lorin Sklamberg in January 2009 and he seemed a little, well, distracted, he begs your forgiveness. See, for a stretch of two and half weeks, the Klezmatics singer and co-founder was recording two new side-project albums in the same studio, each taking off on a different tangent from his Yiddish music core. On one day he'd be working with Irish-born singer Susan McKeon on what would become the Irish-Yiddish hybrid 'Saints & Tzadiks'; the next he'd find himself with fellow Klezmatics founder Frank London making 'Tsuker-zis,' a set of largely Hasidic songs tied to Jewish holidays from throughout the calendar -- but with some twists in the form of Ara Dinkjian (of the group Night Ark) on oud, Deep Singh on tabla and art-punk innovator Knox Chandler (who's played with, well, everyone from the Vibrators to Natalie Merchant) on electric guitar and electronic effects.

It was at times a bit disorienting.

"I was a bit of a nut case," he admits now.

And yet he insists that he never got confused about which was which on any given day.

"Definitely not," he says, laughing. "The Klezmatics have never had the luxury of spending huge amounts of time in the studio."

And the Klezmatics have rarely had the luxury of doing just one thing at a time. Or have not had the interest in such limitations. A typical concert, such as the one at UCLA's Royce Hall last year, saw the group swinging between lively traditional klezmer, Yiddish singalongs, free-jazz explorations of Eastern European modes, music composed for experimental theater productions and a set of Hanukah songs the group did with lyrics found in the Woody Guthrie archives.

Singing in Gaelic? Working with an oud and tabla? Routine business.

"The Klezmatics always has kind of been whatever musical languages we each speak in the band," Sklamberg says. "And these projects are sort of an extension of that. For me it's just one other thing going off in one direction or another direction. It's just nice to have the opportunity to put down my thoughts on music for these different repertoires at the time I do them. Then it's a snapshot of what I was thinking at the time."

So what was he thinking back in January, musically speaking? Well, he was thinking about the passing along of traditions, the disconnect between generations and the inevitable continuity that comes in the process of discovery.

"There's a song on 'Saints & Tzadiks' called 'Father and Son' that's sort of this dialogue between a father and his son," he says. "The father accuses the son of not being holy enough and the son calls the father out on something he had done that no one would consider being done by a holy man -- it's not the old days when you can fool someone with false piety. You have to love your friends as yourself and strive to make the world a better place."

Lorin Sklamberg and Susan McKeown, 'Father and Son'


"I suppose that's sort of like on 'Tsuker-zis' where we're approaching these songs as contemporary New York musicians," he says. "And the first song is about the father who's sitting in a sukkat and it's kind of windy outside and his child comes in and says, 'Aren't you worried that the sukkat's going to blow over?' He says. 'Don't be foolish. We've been building them for more than 2000 years."

Lorin Sklamberg and Susan McKeown, 'A Sukkat Made of Branches'


"So they're related in that it's a dialogue between a father and a child," he says. "In one case the father is educating the child, while in the other the child is actually telling the father how it is."

Now, neither of those songs are completely typical of their respective albums. 'Father and Son' is an a cappella solo performance in Yiddish, where most of the set is both singers with accompaniment, and much of it in Gaelic -- a language with which Sklamberg had no prior experience.

"It doesn't relate to any language I've sung in," he says. "Well, it doesn't relate to any other language, period. Very tricky to sound somewhat passable."

But it was a challenge he'd long desired.

"This is something we've been talking about for a while," Sklamberg says. "Both of us are crazy busy inhabitants of New York. Between playing and creating and raising kids it's like somewhere in there we thought, "You know, we really should get together and do something with Yiddish and Irish."

But other than a wish to work together, why?

"There was the linguistic challenge," he says. "But also that there's certainly some sort of commonality of moods and ways of fitting things together. There's certainly a precedent for Jews playing Irish music. Maybe this will start a trend."

Once he and McKeon started planning, it came together quickly in a series of meetings at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, where Sklamberg has a day job as a sound archivist.

"I work very close to where she lives, so we'd have these meetings in my office, and by and large the Yiddish material comes from a book of transcriptions from Ruth Rubin's field recordings, which are housed here. This book had just come out and no one knows most of these songs, so it's a good source for some different material. We went through the book, looked at the words and decided on a bunch. The Irish material were things that either Susan was familiar with before. In some cases the songs stand alone, and sometimes the songs are the same in Yiddish and Irish, things about the same themes that we put together."

'Tsuker-zis,' the third in a series of Hasidic-oriented projects he and London have done for avant-sax player John Zorn's Tzadik Records label, was also something that had been discussed for some time but came together quickly.

"Frank came up with the idea of going in this slightly different musical direction using an oud player -- in this case Ara," he says. "The fact that it's him makes it work for me. I was actually a little skeptical about it. I heard people use so-called Middle Eastern instrumentation to play Ashkenazi music and I think it's hard to make it work. I find sometimes it's at odds with each other, sounds a little like kind of playing lip service to something.

"In contemporary Yiddish music, people sometimes thought that Jewish music that was given Middle Eastern or 'Oriental' sounds was somehow sexier. I kind of didn't want to go in that direction, but it ended up working out, and Ara is such a soulful, beautiful player with wonderful ideas. He came to my house for rehearsal and was drooling over my record collection, records of Greek and Armenian music from the '50s. We have that in common, so it was really nice to work with him."

And Singh's tablas? Sklamberg was skeptical about that as well.

"It's very easy to slap two things together," he says. "Much more difficult to actually make them work."

And ditto for the involvement of Chandler, a versatile musician with distinctively outside approaches.

"Frank knew him through some musical circle in New York or another, and again I was sort of, 'Hmmmm,' " Sklamberg says. "But again it worked out OK. He was a kind of quirky guy. But everyone I work with is quirky. People's quirks are what makes what we do interesting."

Especially when one is not sure which quirks one's going to encounter from one day to the next.