Last week I wrote that what the country needed in these times of woe was an album by a Scottish singer formerly in a landfill indie band, but now I realise it’s actually a bunch of Dutch fellas in the form of the Amsterdam Klezmer Band playing a Jewish gig set from 100 years ago — klezmer being, as you all know, a traditional instrumental musical genre of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, characterised by dance-oriented tunes that blend joyous melodies with sobbing, clarinet-driven sounds. It says here.
Imagine a Tarantino movie where he wants Jewish/Gypsy folk dancing with gay abandon just before John Travolta arrives with an AR-15 and bump stock and kills them all.
Klezmer is not so mad for a Dutch band as you might think. As a direct result of Congleton twinning and when young and foolish, I ended up very drunk in a nightclub in Breda, a dingy cellar-bar-type place, where an oompah band was playing Madness covers. It was glorious. My Dutch chum fell into someone and spilled his beer and the Dutch bloke just wandered over and said “English?” as if this explained all bad behaviour. Not a sign of “You spilled my drink, pal,” and a long way from a night out north of the Biesbosch days later — but that’s another story, of being drunk in Haarlem.
This sort of stuff is gloriously Dutch, even though Amsterdam is more stag dos than Gypsy weddings.
The Amsterdam Klezmer Band has apparently been going since 1996. It’s marvellous, a kind of betwixt-world-war jazz mixed with Jewish lachrymosity.
Their Bandcamp biog says: “The band loves tradition and innovation, blows down festival tents, the roof off concert halls and draws tears in theatres. The music of the Amsterdam Klezmer Band is a vibrant mix of klezmer, Balkan, ska, jazz, gipsy, oriental and hip hop, guaranteed to lead to a big party in any live situation.”
See amsterdamklezmerband.bandcamp.com – you won’t be disappointed.
JMC
