Veretski Pass with Joel Rubin. The Peacock and the Sunflower, 2024 (Borscht Beat Records)
The Peacock and the Sunflower is the third collaborative project between Veretski Pass and Joel Rubin, a deep exploration of the centuries of musical interactions between Jews and Ukrainians. The peacock and the sunflower are important symbols of ethnic and national importance to East European Jews and Ukrainians, respectively. In Yiddish songs and literary works, the mythical golden peacock (goldene pave) symbolized the wistfulness of youthful days gone by and the eternal optimism, triumphant spirit of the Jews, and perhaps most importantly, a symbol of Yiddish folk culture itself – alive wherever Yiddish is spoken. In Ukraine, the sunflower is the national flower, representing the warmth and power of the sun. Since the start of the brutal war against Ukraine, the sunflower has come to symbolize peace for Ukraine.
This album was deeply inspired by the online publication of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), consisting mostly of manuscripts from klezmer musicians, collected just before World War One in Ukraine and Belarus by the educator and musician, Zinovy (Zusman) Kiselgof (1878–1939). Also published as part of the project was a manuscript compiled by the violinist Avrom-Yeshiye Makonovetsky (1872– after 1945). These manuscriptswere long thought to be lost under Stalin but were found 30 years ago and recently digitized and made available to the public. In light of the war In light of the current war in Ukraine, we can be thankful for the portion of the collection that has been preserved online and we can only hope that the library’s collection remains intact and will at some point be made accessible in its entirety.
The focus of the klezmer revival has long been on American klezmer music of the early 20th century, which itself was heavily influenced by Moldovian and Ottoman-Greek music. Veretski Pass and Joel Rubin seek to turn some of that focus to Ukrainian and Jewish Ukrainian folk forms, through KMDMP materials, field recordings, early commercial recordings and personally collected manuscripts, all combined and reinterpreted as original compositions.
So, this is very much a reunion: continuing our musical collaboration of the past twelve years, reuniting with some of the Jewish and Ukrainian repertoire that has inspired us through the decades, and reuniting with the musical aesthetics that got all of us excited about these musical traditions in the first place.
It is our hope that this recording will not only provide listening enjoyment, but also carry on a tradition that is continually in peril – today perhaps more than ever.
released November 29, 2024
Musicians:
Cookie Segelstein: violin
Joshua Horowitz: 19th century button accordion, tsimbl (hammered dulcimer)
Stuart Brotman: string bass, baraban (drum)
Joel Rubin: C clarinet
“The music is, more than anything, simply beautiful; a luxurious, procession of rich resonant wood, hair and bones, bubbling in and out of each other, replete with history and complex personalities.”
Phil Blank’s Psychic Courtyardism, Dec. 7, 2024
“There are as many klezmer groups as there are grains of sand, but only a few are as good as Veretski Pass. … 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.”
Christoph Wagner, Dec. 4, 2024.
https://borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/album/the-peacock-and-the-sunflower