Nice review by Christoph Wagner of the Veretski Pass and Joel Rubin CD collaboration, The Peacock and the Sunflower. First published on Dec. 4, 2024.
Klezmer mit Akkuratesse
English translation:
There are as many klezmer groups as there are grains of sand, but only a few are as good as Veretski Pass. The trio from California, consisting of Cookie Segelstein (violin), Joshua Horowitz (accordion and dulcimer) and Stuart Brotman (three-string basset), plays a Klezmer music that strives for historical accuracy and authenticity in order to come close to the sound we know from old shellac records, the frozen examples of Klezmer music as it sounded more than a hundred years ago. For the third time, the three have teamed up for an album with Joel Rubin, perhaps the best clarinetist on the current Klezmer scene.
The four musicians are highly virtuoso instrumentalists who are immersed and versed in all aspects of Klezmer playing. They know the tricks of intonation, the small melodic shifts and harmonic dissonances, the bending of the notes, the ornamentation and the trills, all of which together produce a group sound that is dense and compact, rough and yet full of life. Most of the pieces are traditional melodies from the Ukraine, others are new compositions, mostly by Cookie Segelstein, which nevertheless move strictly in the sound world of old Jewish Eastern Europe. Sometimes they are fast dances, then again slow, solemn melodies, in which a subtle, quiet sadness almost always resonates.
In the booklet text, Joel Rubin speaks of Klezmer as a fusion music because it has taken on trace elements of regional folk music styles, but also absorbed popular melodies and hits. The “Novosilky March”, one of the album’s 29 tracks and barely a minute long, is the best example of this kind of musical borscht, a march that is confounding because in every other bar you seem to recognize the connection to another popular style. That’s how foreign Klezmer can sound.