Mark Rubin, Jew of Oklahoma – Southern Discomfort

MARK RUBIN, JEW OF OKLAHOMA

Southern Discomfort

Rubinchik Recordings

markrubin.com

Mark Rubin is an interesting – and interestingly eclectic – musician. As you can surmise from his self-identification, he grew up in Oklahoma but I first became aware of him during his long sojourn in Austin, Texas when he and Danny Barnes formed the Bad Livers, a duo that brought a fresh, punk attitude to old-time music. The Bad Livers got a lot of airplay in the early days of the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show. Mark plays a bunch of instruments including bass, banjo, guitar, tuba, and mandolin and I’ve also enjoyed his work as sideman for many artists and as a member of several other groups covering a wide range of roots music styles and genres from country to klezmer. These days, Mark is based in New Orleans, one of the most fabled of all music meccas.

Southern Discomfort is Mark’s first solo album and it, too, covers a wide range of roots music styles and genres from country to klezmer – more than half of it original material.

For me, the most affecting part of the album are the fourth and fifth tracks, “The Murder of Leo Frank” and “Rumainyan Fancy.”

“The Murder of Leo Frank” is Mark’s powerful ballad – very effectively set to the same traditional tune as Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” – telling the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager in Atlanta who was framed for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker in the factory, in 1913.

After his false conviction, Frank was sentenced to death but an overwhelming campaign across the United States led the Georgia governor to commute his sentence to life in prison. But, then, Frank was kidnapped from the jail and lynched by a Ku Klux Klan mob calling itself “The Knights of Mary Phagan.” As Mark references in “The Murder of Leo Frank,” the early country musician, Fiddlin’ John Carson, wrote and performed an anti-Semitic song about the case that helped fuel the mob mentality.

The story of this case is one that I’ve been aware of since 1967 when I received the book, A Little Girl is Dead by Harry Golden, as a bar mitzvah present. Golden’s full length account of the case and its aftermath was unforgettable. Mark’s song very effectively captures the zeitgeist of the case. 

The final lines of the song – nominally addressed to fellow Jews – are “Next time you're at services/Say a Kaddish for Leo Frank." The words are a powerful lead-in to “Rumainyan Fancy,” an intense, traditional  klezmer tune played by fiddler Adam Moss with Mark on guitar. The arrangement, which builds in speed and intensity as it progresses, allows for four needed minutes of contemplation.

There’s also fun to be had on the album. The neo-jug band arrangement to “Key Chain Blues,” for example, makes it fun to listen to the narrator embrace his recent unemployment, while “Seriously (aka Too Much Weed)” is doper’s anthem with an absolutely delightful Dixieland arrangement.

The album cover art coveys the discomfort of the album title, and particularly “The Murder of Leo Frank,” with images that include the Confederate flag (which, thankfully, came down in South Carolina this week), a trio of idiotic looking Klansmen, a noose, Leo Frank, a menorah, and an African-American man with whip marks on his back.

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The Other Europeans - Splendor

THE OTHER EUROPEANS

Splendor

Kikiyon

other-europeans-band.eu

(This review is from the April 23, 2012 issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

The Other Europeans are 14 musicians from eight different countries in Europe and North America – eight of whom form a klezmer ensemble and six of whom comprise a lautar ensemble. Lautar is the music of Eastern European Roma (Gypsies). Some of the selections on Splendor, a splendid two-CD set recorded live at the Yiddish Summer Weimar in Germany in 2009, feature one or the other of the two ensembles, or parts thereof, while much of the album has all 14 of the musicians playing together.

The Other Europeans project has been spearheaded by pianist and accordionist Alan Bern, perhaps best known for his work as a member of Brave Old World, a band at the forefront of the creation of new Jewish music over the past couple of decades. Other members of the Klezmer Ensemble include clarinet and saxophone player Christian Dawid; Matt Darriau of the Klezmatics on kaval, piccolo, clarinet and saxophone; and Mark Rubin, who started his career as a member of the alt-country duo Bad Livers, on tuba and bass.

Among the members of the Lautar Ensemble are cimbalom player Kalman Balogh; accordionist Petar Ralchev; and trumpeter Adam Stinga.

Historically, as Walter Zev Feldman, mentions in his liner notes, Jewish and Roma musicians had little, if any, interaction in most areas of Eastern Europe except in Greater Hungary, primarily in the 18th century, and in Moldova, particularly in the province of Bessarabia, from the 18th century until the Holocaust. The music also crossed over to North America with Jewish immigrants in the late-19th and early-20th centuries but declined in both America and Moldova by the 1950s – in America due to assimilationist tendencies, and in Moldova due to the Soviet policy of creating a Moldovan ethnic music that was, as Feldman notes, “free from Jewish influence.”

The repertoire which the Other Europeans explore on Splendor – and which they perform brilliantly – is the klezmer and lautar music played in Bessarabia before the Second World War. Whether in the smaller klezmer and lautar groupings, or in the combined forces of the full ensemble, the music is compelling, exciting and beautiful.

Among my favourite selections from the klezmer repertoire are “Khaiterma,” a delightful classic which features Darriau on clarinet bouncing his notes off Rubin’s slap-bass playing; and the two-part “Klezmer Suite #1,” particularly the wild second part.

My favourite lautar selection is the two-part “Lautar Clarinet Suite #1,” which begins with a in a slow, contemplative mode before picking up steam. The piece almost seems classical.

And, of course, the tracks featuring all of the Other Europeans are a constant delight. Among the most beautiful and exciting pieces is the album-ending concert encore of “Sârba de la nord.”

The similarities and contrasts of the Jewish and Roma influences in this music are fascinating. Alan Bern has done a sensational job of tying it all together in the Other Europeans.

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