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Geoff Berner doesn't deal in fossils. Sure, the Vancouverite's Whiskey Rabbi trilogy (launched in 2005 with an album titled exactly that, followed by 2007's Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride and 2009's Klezmer Mongrels) was an odyssey through his Eastern European Jewish cultural roots funneled through feral scholarly investigations and a punk ethos, but he focuses on klezmer's continued relevance rather than embalming it in shallow sentimentalism. Berner's new release, Victory Party, crystallizes his Janus-faced approach, demonstrating that to find our bearings, we need a map of the past in our pockets—and he's swaddled the lesson in a spectacular freak-out of clarinet, strings, accordion and the thrillingly unexpected, led through a wide swath of emotional wilderness by his expressive voice. Victory Party is sometimes a celebration, but also a protest and warning.
"The theme came with the Obama victory in 2008, the sense of Pyrrhic victory—we win but everything is destroyed," Berner explains. "The other thing that inspired that song was this weird story this 94-year-old German klezmer violinist told me. He said this Jewish guy came back from the camps in '45, set up his old Berlin bar again and paid Germans to play klezmer music while he drank himself to death. The fiddler said he picked up klezmer because that was the best gig in town! A very compelling story of victory."
Victory Party's contemporary resonance is grounded in the kind of jarring contradictions that are the hallmark of chronic power imbalances. Comfortingly, there's been a through-line of dissidence pointing the finger from the underbelly, often using art and wit.
"That kind of dark humour is there in klezmer music and old Yiddish songs. It's not something you have to impose on the culture. You just have to dig it up—that radical tradition is there. It's that whole thing Utah Phillips says about how remembering is a subversive act."
Hailing art forms as having been "revived" obscures their history, and they've rarely actually been dead.
"Because mainstream culture doesn't have a memory, it doesn't recognize old ideas as old—they think they're new, every time," laughs Berner. "Revivals and reinventions are often about selling records and concert tickets by giving the impression there's something new, because that's what people and the press respond to."
Yet contradiction sits there, too. "In the end, it's true, though: if you write about what's going on in the world, what you see around you, you're bound to come up with some stuff that's new, accidentally."
Berner concludes, "In the end, it comes down to good stuff and bad stuff. The bad stuff cuts out aspects of human experience; cuts politics out, or the dark side of romantic relationships, or the drug and alcohol aspect of human existence. Art like that becomes kitsch. There's always been kitschy, crappy klezmer and there's always been the real deal. The kitschy stuff allows people to ignore things they'd rather not think about and is easier to play in the town square in front of children, but there's always the undercurrent of the real stuff—and that's what I'm shooting for. 03/01/11
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