If you’re a fan of the Be Good Tanyas, chances are you know something about the work of Geoff Berner. The Vancouver trio covered his “Light Enough To Travel” on their debut album Blue Horse, turning what was originally a vocals-and-accordion oddity into a winsome, throwback-country rambler.
Tanyas fans looking for something different would do well to check out Whiskey Rabbi, on which Berner tackles a genre that, being centuries old, truly deserves the description old-timey: klezmer. Rather than watering things down for North American ears, the singer-songwriter-accordionist makes a valiant attempt to deliver the music in its purest form.
Backed by Po’ Girl violinist Diona Davies and percussionist Wayne Adams, Berner is on a self-proclaimed mission to drag klezmer music kicking and screaming back into the bars. Fittingly, a good half of the ten tracks sound like they were recorded between vodka shots in rural Romania, with Berner making more references to alcohol than a Pogues boxed set.
Old-country scorchers such as “Lucky God Damn Jew” and “Drunk All Day” make for the album’s most feverishly appealing moments, but it’s not all an endless party. Clearly an artist with a conscience, Berner asks some tough questions in the skeletal “The Traveller’s Curse”, condemning the artificial borders that separate the world’s haves from the have-nots. Even more provocatively, the haunting “The Violins — Al Kamanjaat” makes a bold political statement by setting a work by Palestinian resistance poet Mahmoud Darwich to the most Jewish of Jewish music forms.
So forget that it’s a klezmer record by a young Canuck, Whiskey Rabbi is laudable for a more impressive reason: In addition to making you want to dance, it will also make you think.