You Gotta Give The Butcher His Share
June 23, 2018 2:21 AM   Subscribe

Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird are a modern klezmer band whose music I discovered about a month ago. Their dark, yiddish-infused songs feel perfect for Trump's America, offering a witty, wise take on all the worst aspects of human nature. The accompanying music is utterly joyous, however. Among their best songs are March of the Jobless Corps Freedom is a Verb and The Butcher's Sher.

Want more? Here's a No Depression review of their latest CD and here's a long video interview with Kahn himself. You'll also find the band's music on iTunes, Spotify and Soundcloud.
posted by Paul Slade (10 comments total) 45 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is great! Thanks for posting.
posted by maurice at 4:10 AM on June 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Fantastic! Thanks, this really moved me. The songs possess a sense of genuine hope for the world,with a heaping side of righteous anger. They are also beautiful.
posted by nolabasashi at 4:47 AM on June 23, 2018


This is good! I have appreciated klezmer-influenced music ever since I fell in love with Fiddler on the Roof as a tween.

There's a very minor and much more enjoyable rule in the same class as Rule 34, which is that if a musical genre exists, then there is bluegrass of it: in this case, "Jewgrass."
posted by drlith at 5:58 AM on June 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


Fabulous post!
posted by merriment at 8:21 AM on June 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


If you like Dan Kahn, you should check out his Yiddish cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's really something.
posted by the_blizz at 9:24 AM on June 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


ווונדערלעך
posted by growabrain at 12:25 PM on June 23, 2018


When I listened to recordings of old Wobbly songs they never seemed to convey the passion that they invoked, back in the day. I think this is the first time I've had an emotional understanding of the power political music had back then. And who knows? Maybe it will again.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:31 PM on June 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Dan Kahn is at the center of another project, The Brothers Nazaroff, which celebrates the music of the obscure Yiddish singer Nathan "Prince" Nazaroff - whose legacy was a spectacularly low selling 10" LP for Folkways in 1954 - and redid all the songs with translations into English and Russian tossed in for good measure. It was all documented on tour by Hungarian flmlmaker Csaba Bereczky.

Personal favorite: "Parasites" a political critique with words based on the wikipedia entry for "parasites" Nakam is the story of Abba Kovner, a Jewish resistance fighter and poet obsessed with revenge for the Holocaust. You can hear that Painted Bird doesn't just dabble in Klezmer music - they are all acknowledged masters of the style and repertoire.

(Oh, and Dan Kahn has the role of Perchik in this summer's Yiddish language revival of Fiddler on the Roof at New York's Folksbiene Yiddish theater, directed by Joel Grey (whose father was the great Klezmer musican and Yiddish parodist Micky Katz)
posted by zaelic at 4:02 AM on June 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


This is so relevant to my interests, both musical and political. Great find!
posted by MexicanYenta at 2:06 PM on June 24, 2018


This is fantastic! I'm digging in a bit further and really digging the whole catalog of his/their work. Thanks for sharing!
posted by piedmont at 6:37 PM on June 25, 2018


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