Every once in a while, it makes sense to take a big gamble on unknown musicians. Occasionally the results can be disappointing, even annoying. But when they are good, they are well worth the risk.
On Wednesday night, I hit the jackpot with She’Koyokh. No, I had never heard of them either, and I had no idea why the Berlin Philharmonic had chosen to sponsor them as special guests in its World Music series. All I knew was that they would be playing something billed as “klezmer,” which somehow also included Roma, Kurdish, Turkish, Serbian, and other Eastern European melodies. Since klezmer, in my experience, has always been pretty exclusively Jewish, I was curious to see what this would entail.
It turns out that She’Koyokh, which apparently means something like “Well done!” in Yiddish, consists of seven musicians from London, one of whom is Serbian and another Turkish. None of the names and none of the faces looked Jewish to me (but then, we American Jews have always been told that English Jews don’t look Jewish). Yet the group has been featuring klezmer music for all twenty-five years of its peripatetic existence, and several of its members—in particular the outstanding clarinetist, Susi Evans—play klezmer with other groups as well.
I knew I was going to like these folks the minute they appeared on the stage of the Kammermusiksaal, where I have previously seen relatively sedate chamber performances. This raggle-taggle crowd was dressed entirely in their own particular costumes, which veered from pseudo-ethnic dress (on the part of the skilled violinist, Meg Hamilton) to sparkly-skinny punk (Evans) to glamorously chic (the amazing singer, Cigdem Aslan) to mildly formal (the excellent accordionist Zivolid Nikolic, who also happened to have a wonderful tenor voice) to schlump-casual (the guitarist Matt Bacon, the percussionist Christina Borgenstierna, and the double-bass-player Paul Moylan—all of whom were a joy to hear, both as backup and as soloists).
The instrumental numbers sounded a lot like klezmer I’ve heard before, though with none of the familiar, overplayed bar-mitzvah-party melodies. But they also included rhythms and sounds I heard long ago in Balkan folk-dancing sessions (and indeed, the group tried to get us on our feet to dance a Serbian kola at one point, though with mixed results, due mainly to audience inability to distinguish left from right). The vocal numbers—primarily performed by Aslan, though with backup from Evans and Nikolic, who also had his own Serbian solo—ranged from Ladino to Kurdish to Roma, with one entirely made-up song (in Turkish, I think) set by Aslan to a Greek melody she loved. I didn’t recognize any of the songs, either, though I did recognize the sensibility: broken-hearted, intense, and with the jagged tonal qualities that had affinities with many other Middle Eastern melodies.
Particularly in the speedy, catchy instrumental passages, I found it hard to keep my feet and body still. (I, who complained so bitterly about my over-active seatmate at the Steve Reich concert!) And yet I also felt tears coming to my eyes at moments: a tribute, I suppose, to the way this lively music emerged from conditions of suppression and oppression, flaunting its very existence as a separate genre, whining and wheedling its way into possibly dubious ears. The whole evening had a modestly celebratory quality, which was well-matched by the self-effacing English patter that the speakers (mainly Susi Evans) carried on between pieces. The audience clearly loved the group, stamping and whistling their approval throughout—there were actually audible cries of “No! No!” when the approaching end of the set was mentioned—but I think they mainly failed to get the understated British humor. My favorite such moment occurred when Evans announced that she would now be playing a piece by the famous klezmer clarinettist David Harris, “so famous that he was known as the Jewish Benny Goodman—who was of course Jewish,” she added in a quick aside. I and one or two others burst out laughing; no one else did, for reasons that escaped me. Because German audiences are afraid to laugh at anything about Jews? Because no one else took in the quietly ironic joke? No matter. We all adored the show, and that’s what counts.