About En concert
by Damian Nisenson |mam_008-0001|
When I was child in Buenos Aires, in the family celebrations we used to
dance and sing a lot, we could hear the old men of the family «speak
politics» in Yiddish, so that we, the children, could not understand. Then I
became a teenager, the old men were too old; no more dance, no more Yiddish.
We spoke a lot of politics, but in Spanish! Some twenty years later, already
a musician, I asked myself: which is my folk music the one that transcends
me, the one that speaks about my origins, about my ancestry? And there it
was, the music of my childhood, this music of the Jews of Eastern Europe we
call today ‘Klezmer’. And I started to hear it, play it, know
it.
And one day I asked myself another question: what would the Jewish music
have become if the Shoa — the Holocaust — had not taken place?
Futile question, but nevertheless relevant for a Jewish musician. This music
was the sonic landscape of the marriages, Bar Mitzvah, funerals of the 6
million Jews that disappear in smoke. This music is their echo, the echo of
their laughter and their tears, their kisses and their quarrels. This music
would have changed, as they also would have changed. Nowadays they would
watch TV, like us, they would go in bars, like us, their music would mix with
other musics.
But that did not arrive. They died and this music remained frozen. We play
it again today, to do what? To speak only about what we were? Of what we
could have been? Me, I want to sing what we are, we are jazz, we are
rock’n’roll, we are ski and Internet, red wine and barbecue. And
Jews. And I would like to make my small contribution so that this music
arrives at the 21st century to sing 21st century stories, mine, yours,
ours.
This CD recorded in concert is basically a disc of contemporary jazz, each
song has an important amount of improvisation, the solos follow one another,
there are moments of collective impro also… and it is at the same time
a disc of Jewish music, first of all because it is music composed by a Jewish
composer, as secular as I can be, and because the melodies are inhabited by
‘dibukk’, spirits that sailed away in the empty pockets of my
grandparents from Odessa, Kishinev, Dubossar…
Damian Nisenson [iv-08]
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