Michigan's own Daniel Kahn and his band, the Brother Nazaroff, are featured in the latest issue of Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. They released an album in the fall of 2015 honoring the work of Nathan "Prince" Nazaroff, based on his 1954 release from Smithsonian Folkways, Jewish Freilach Songs. As Dan puts it...
"Songs may be among the most durable, resilient, and effective reservoirs of personal and cultural memory and identity. In them, we encounter not only the stories of those individuals who sing them, but the stories of all those who sang them before. Their stories are encoded in the ways the songs change as they migrate through generations and geography. Indeed, these songs describe not only a traditional folk culture as something to be protected and preserved, but in that tradition's constant flux, adaptation, and migration. This living culture, if respected and allowed to breathe and grow, can be an invaluable gift.
... In the twang of Nazaroff's singing and octophone (a kind of tenor mandolin), one hears the sound of Coney Island boardwalks, Odessa streets, bungalows in the Catskills, Polish shtetl barnyards, Broadway buses, and steamship steerages. The Yiddish lyrics speak of cows, Wall Street, vodka, campfires, fishing boats, bicycles, fiddlers, gypsy girls, broken hearts, and dancing. They are as urbane as a tenement, and as rustic as a watermill, as European as Soviet gangster ballads and as American as kosher hot dogs."
Watch the animated video of their version of Ich a Mazeldicker Yid below:
Read the full piece from Daniel Kahn here.
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