the KlezmerShack

This is a few months old, from the WELL, but I just got a chance to confirm permission for posting it here. The author is David Julian Gray, once of the Klezmorim, now of Washington DC's Klezcentricity.

Topic 1675 [music]:  And even yet, another Concert I Just Attended
#1577 of 1580: David Julian Gray (djg)      Mon Oct 14 '02 (19:51)   

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I got to see an act <ari>'s been lauding for a few years: The Lerner/Moguilevsky Duo - These guys put on the most stunning display of virutosity I have seen in many year - but it was not virtuosity for virtuosities sake - it was nothing but passionate, thoughtful and rocking music. I do not have any words to describe just how incredible these guys were!

They are billed as "klezmer", but that doesn't quite explain what they do. They are light years ahead of anyone else in the world doing klezmer in every way - that is everyway but doing "traditional Eastern European dance music"... that is the core of their repertoire, but they use that as a spring board for free improvisation. It is free improv as modern as anything - yet far more accessible than 95% of free improv without sacrificing modernity and the highest levels of intellection! Their harmonic vocabulary is vast - in what is traditionally a modal music - but they either ferret out wild harmonies within the context of the mode - or use "Western" (French impressionism mostly) harmonies as either a foil or a well placed joke.

One plays keyboards - usually a sampled piano but also accordion - the other plays clarinet and recorder. The keyboardist is fine, fine, fine - but the clarinetist is astonishing - the best playing I've ever heard in my life - his recorder playing is lightening fast and accurate - no less his clarinet and on that instrument he also commands a tonal palette as wide as had yet been discovered for that instrument - all at his whim and command.

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