Published: 6 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Australian Klezmer big band has an eclectic new album, ZETS! - born from the resurgence of Yiddish in Melbourne and the pressures of lockdown.
What do you get when you mix Klezmer with free jazz, a funky rhythm section and electronic dance music? You get YID!
Led by Melbourne jazz musician Simon Starr, YID! is more than just another big band. It brings the laughter, tears and vision of the age-old Jewish experience to a modern audience yearning for inspiration - and connection.
YID! was formed when Starr returned from Israel at the end of 2015, wondering what to do next. When guitarist Willy Zygier (who plays in a duo with Debra Conway) suggested a Yiddish big band, the two friends laughed. However, the idea resonated with Starr, and the more friends he tested it with, the more it generated enthusiasm.
With his deep love of all types of music and hyper-intense focus, Starr’s grooves and idiosyncratic melodic invention have featured in every type of Australian and international music, both here and overseas.
In December 2016, there were 27 people at the first rehearsal for YID! The band made its debut in 2017 with 22 players at the Jewish concert In One Night., “It was absolute chaos, but it clicked,” Starr says.
The band has evolved from a rag-tag bunch of recruits trying to recontextualise Yiddish into a more focused, highly experimental ensemble. YID! flows between eras, genres and moods, from the frenzied euphoria of dance music you might hear at a wedding, to aching songs of love and affliction, free jazz, modern hip-hop and funk.
“I wanted to achieve the deep yearning for something better than the persecution our ancestors faced, both melodically and narratively, as well as the many ideologies they devised to solve their problems,” Starr says.
“YID! incorporates the mystical and mysterious characters that inhabit Shtetl literature, and the edgy Yiddish poetry of late 19th-early 20th century Yiddish poets, whose content and mode of expression was far more radical than anything happening today. I wanted to carry that spirit, that restless and relentless search for true expression.”
Along with arrangements by Starr and his brother Adam, Willy Zygier, Gideon Preiss and Husky Gawenda, YID! has also maintained its passionate free jazz roots, with Tomi Kalinski reciting spoken word commenting on both the songs and life in the 21st century.
YID! has since enjoyed considerable success, with performances at WOMADelaide and a headline appearance at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto, Canada, the biggest Jewish music festival in the world. Its first album, Space Klezmer, was launched in 2018.
“2020 was to be the year that we would play in USA and Israel, and record album #2, but the pandemic had other plans for us,” Starr tells.
Instead, YIDS!’s second and latest album, ZETS!, was recorded in between lockdowns in 2021 and completed just in time for the main stage of WOMADelaide in March.
ZETS!, which roughly translates much like Batman’s Kapow!, is a metaphorical whack to everything that has come before for YID!. The album combines its lifeblood of traditional Yiddish songs with original music and lyrics and includes its first recorded rap piece, Shabbes.
Drawing inspiration from Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of The Moon and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, the album incorporates approximately 180 samples that Starr, Preiss, Gawenda, Marty Lubran and fellow producer Josh Abrahams collected from old Yiddish records, comedy routines, radio ads and lectures, and layered on top, underneath and in between the songs.
“This was the crucial special sauce, to create the multi-media collage aspect to the recording that we so admired on Paul’s Boutique,” Starr explains. “It’s that tension between acknowledging history and having one leg in it, while toe-tapping purposefully into the future with the other.”
Examples of their improvisational spirit include Fun Tehilim, a humanist reading of Psalm No. 1, originally commissioned by Kadimah; The Overture, a sort of welcome to Shtetl describing the eternal challenges faced by a society riddled with dybbuks [evil spirits]; a haunting version of Oyfn Pripetshik inspired by Herbie Hancock’s arrangements of Joni Mitchell songs; and Tsurik In Shvartz, the heart of the album, which traverses a survey of 1930s Yiddish radio and an electric meditation calling us to remember our ancestors.
A script and treatment are also in development for a feature film showcasing the musicians on ZETS! as troubadours narrating its storyline, much like a Greek chorus.
“When we conceived of the album, we thought it would be a good idea to make it an imaginary soundtrack to a lokshen [farce] western film,” Starr explains. “However, on Tomi’s recommendation, I read Isaac Babel’s Tales of Odessa, whose central character Benia Krik, the Jewish Robin Hood, was based on the real-life Russian gangster of the 1920s, Mishka Yapochnik.
“Krik stands up to antisemites and bullies, redistributes booty scored from the ruling classes in pre-Revolution Odessa and is largely loyal to his despairing family and community. The parallels with Ukraine and Russia are fairly obvious,” Starr says.
While a director and producer have signed on for the project, Starr says getting it to the next stages will take “a lot of hard work, creativity and persistence”.
“It’s hard enough doing a concert with this band, let alone getting a feature film in Yiddish off the ground.”
But for Starr, YID! is a calling. Like many Australian Jews, his grandparents had Ashkenazi roots, and he was obsessed with the Shoah as a child. “Contributing to Jewish culture, however, seems like the right response for me, right now, to the eternal and insurmountable challenges posed by an event of such magnitude,” he says.
Beyond getting the film made, Starr dreams of having YID! continue to make great music. “I’d love to perform around Australia, sing Paul Simon’s der Boxer in New York and in the Old City of Jerusalem (or on top of Masada),” he says. “But above everything else, one concert at a time, we’re content to get the show right and have enough people there to give us the communion and connection necessary to transcend the notes and bring it to life.”
What can you expect if you come along?
“It’s strangely moving for people hearing heartfelt lyrics without understanding a single thing,” Starr says. “I project a similar set of extreme emotions on to Brazilian music. You will dance, probably laugh, sing, perhaps cry. You will also be amused and transfixed by the visual and aural feast on display. But really, you should just come along and see for yourselves.”
ZETS! launch and concert is on December 10 at Memo Music Hall, Melbourne. CLICK HERE to book
Photo: YID! performing at Shir Madness
