Beatroute Magazine,
Interview
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How does one introduce Geoff Berner? He is a Jewish guy from Vancouver who plays accordion and prefers whiskey to beer because then you don't have to go to the bathroom as often.
True story.
He is passionate, political, and at all times thoughtful about the world we live in and the path on which we are headed.
He is also making his way to Calgary this month as he celebrates the March 8th release of Victory Party on Mint Records.
“We need cultural diversity as well as bio-diversity. And to find the answers ... we are going to need a diverse range of points of view,” explains Berner.
Since his trip to Romania in 2004, which he calls a “baptism of fire,” Berner has been pursuing the “not-so-glamourous scholarship of Klezmer”: listening to records, reading books, going to Jewish culture festivals, and just reaching out to the Klezmer community. For the uninitiated, Klezmer is a Jewish folk music tradition, historically influenced by traditional Romanian music, well known as expressive dance music (complete with laughing and weeping) and situated around such instruments as the accordion, violin, trombone, trumpet and piano.
Berner’s 2005 album, Whiskey Rabbi, was he calls a bit of a “message in a bottle,” Wondering if there was anyone interested in “edgy, dirty, political Klezmer,” put Berner comfortably in the mushrooming movement of Klezmer, which singer-songwriter and accordionist Daniel Kahn, calls “Klezmer Bund.”
Berner found the answer to his question and has since collaborated with a number of musicians who are also involved in this movement of marrying traditional Klezmer with a very punk attitude.
When asked about the accordion, he responds: “When I started playing the accordion in the '90s it was really considered not okay. Unless you were into Tom Waits or The Pogues, there wasn't a way in, in people's minds, and even then they barely noticed that the accordion was a major aspect to the romance of [that] sound."
Since then, there has been an resurgence of singer-songwriter accordionists, such as Jason Webley from Seattle, the aforementioned Kahn and Amanda Palmer. In San Francisco alone, according to Berner, there is an events calendar for accordion-playing burlesque girls.
Bringing up the book Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx, Berner explains, “It illustrates the accordion was a major cultural component for every immigrant group that came to America in the 20th century: Germans, Mexicans, Jews, Spanish, Italian, Caribbean. They all had the accordion in their music because it was portable and it could create so much sound... It really becomes a symbol of the cultural treasures that people brought with them to America, that they cast aside in order to assimilate into a melting pot of America”.
Berner makes every attempt to challenge this type of assimilation by choosing to remember, which is, in itself, subversive. He does this by adapting the old with the new. The track "Dalloy Polizei," for example, is a “really old song that says, ‘Fuck the Police.’”
When asked what is different about his seventh release, Victory Party, his short answer is: “Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled.” Dolgin brings a wealth of Klezmer knowledge and musicality of the studio to the project as producer.
The result is a bigger, fuller sound with more texture. The opening title track sweeps you into the bellows of the accordion and takes you on a journey. "Wealthy Poet" makes you groove to the deep resonating rhythm. And the album is littered with upbeat, vaudevillian, carnival-esque sounds, like "Laughing Jackie the Pimp" and "Jail," which juxtapose very real and heartbreaking lyrics with the marginalization of sex trade workers and the culture of prison.
According to Berner himself, his shows have “become a meeting point where lots of crazy, interesting people get together and dance and do silly things."
He points out that Calgary's own Kris Demeanor, “who is a bloody genius,” will be on the bill, emphatically stating, “there is no songwriter better than Kris Demeanor working today.”
03/09/11
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