Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride

...a CD review

The Wedding Dance

of the Widow Bride

words & music
by Geoff Berner

The Wedding Dance is not pretty - it’s beautiful… beautiful, angry, sweaty, sexy and all the way up in your face. Mr. Berner aka “the lucky goddamn jew”set out several years ago with Diona Davies and Wayne Adams for the hills and villages of Hungary and beyond, searching for klezmer artists who survived The Holocaust .

What they found during these encounters was more than tough old men and melodies – and you can hear it on The Wedding Song.

Klezmer, like blues, rembetika and other great traditional styles, came from hard lives in tough times. Out of those years of love, lust, liquor, knives… and the occasional pogrom… came a music burning with passion, pain and a yearning that can strip paint. The Wedding Dance honours that tradition by taking klezmer out of the Volvo and back to the street.

Mr. Berner sings his ass off, whispers to screams and everywhere between . Diona’s fiddle wails with mad joy, scratches like a boney finger at the window and leaps into the darkness with Wayne’s tribal primal percussion.

From zen subtle and tasty to manic thunder, this is the work of a committed ensemble playing for their lives. It kicks ass - a sharp reminder that kicking ass was an acoustic tradition. On a good day, it still does no matter how many Folk moderns might get the vapors just thinking about the very questionable lifestyle choices that forged these sounds.

Fair enough - decaf lattes do go better with the gelded incarnations of traditional music so often heard these days.

Geoff Berner doesn’t just play klezmer, he is klezmer incarnate - what John Zorn was to jazz or Billy Bragg to punk in the 80s – making great music that’s true to its’ roots.

'nuff said,
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