“We’ve reached a certain period of assimilation and Jewish comfort in America, where forms of ghettoization have gone out the window, except for in religious communities,” says Aaron Bisman, the energetic young founder of the nonprofit JDub Records, awaiting the start of the New York debut of his label’s newest artists, Balkan Beat Box (BBB). “People have no identity remaining.”
BBB is the product of ten years of musical tinkering by New York-based Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan and their ever-changing cadre of fellow musicians. Their sound draws from a wide array of geographic and stylistic influences: traditional Mediterranean, Balkan, Yemenite sounds, interwoven with dancehall, hip-hop, and rock sounds. Such a mishmash is hardly the first place one might expect young Jews to turn for a new way to connect with their Jewish identity. And yet, this is just the place Bisman has in mind.
On the forefront of a wave of self-consciously hip organizations that include Heeb Magazine, Storahtelling, and the blog Jewschool.com, Bisman and JDub are part a widespread effort to change young Jews’ relationships with their Jewishness—and they plan to do it with music. “I don’t care if people become religious, or join a synagogue, or donate, or whatever. I care that they think that Judaism matters, in whatever way,” Bisman says. “I think about it as an open door,” he says. “Young people aren’t looking for the same old same old. I think we have different things in mind. And if our institutions and our leaders give people what they want, the numbers will all go back up.”
Bisman’s first exercise in giving people what they want came when his fledgling label signed Matisyahu, the hit Hasidic reggae superstar. Matisyahu struck many as a nontraditional choice for JDub’s first artist. Dressed in a black hat and tzitzit, the Jewish content of his act was, if anything, too apparent. In the BBB, JDub might encounter the opposite problem.
Muskat, the duo’s percussionist, sees the group as an attempt to reconcile the traditional music of his childhood and the modern music he has played ever since. “In Israel you hear so much authentic Mediterranean, Eastern European music, all over, everywhere you’re going, in the market, on the radio,” he says. “It’s kind of in our blood, these melodies and these grooves.”
Indeed, BBB’s music is eminently danceable. At their New York debut at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, the group convinced the audience to abandon their seats in under five minutes. Their diverse lineup gave the experience a kind of circus feel. Besides Muskat and Kaplan, who was playing the saxophone the group that night consisted of Tomer Yosef, an Israeli MC; two mysterious vocalists known as the Bulgarian Chicks who dressed in traditional Eastern European costumes and sang in their native tongue; Hasan ben Jaffar, who chanted and played the Moroccan gnawa; a belly dancer named Suri; a guitarist; a bassist; and a second saxophonist.
Muskat says he did not always appreciate the more traditional styles he currently tinkers with. “When [Ori and I] got to our teenage years, we resisted everything that was authentic and went hardcore to punk rock,” he said. Yet, while he and Ori were working with such well known alternative groups as Gogol Bordello, Firewater, and Big Lazy, he found that his “tastes were always Middle Eastern and Oriental.”
With BBB, Muskat says, he has worked to return to the authenticity of the music he had heard as a kid. “For us, the fun is to approach this music in a modern way. We didn’t grow up in any village in Romania, so we got to give it our own twist, which is growing up in the 80s.”
In this way, BBB and JDub are a perfect fit: both seek to bring new relevance to older traditions. And yet, while Bisman and JDub are concerned with the renewal of Jewish culture, the whole notion is fairly tangential for the men of BBB.
While Bisman insists that many of the BBB’s lyrics are in Hebrew, and included a very clearly Hebrew track by the group in a recent compilation CD, it is hard to pinpoint what about them is Jewish. With Matisyahu, it was clear: he looked Jewish, he dressed like a Lubavitcher, and he sang (in English) about God. The Balkan Beat Box offers no such signs. The artists are less identifiably Jewish, they dress in ethnic and Western outfits, and their lyrics are generally not in English, so any references to God or, say, matzah, would go right over the head of most American listeners.
When asked if BBB’s music was Jewish, Yosef, the group’s sometime-MC, responded as if it was the first time he had been asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah! Also Jewish. It’s being made by a couple of Jewish guys…It’s not like traditional Jewish.” The band’s MySpace.com profile, however, seems to feel the need for a bit more justification: “The Balkan Beat Box views Jewish music with fresh eyes: as a continuing cultural dialogue,” it proclaims. “The dialogue can take the form of a clash of cultures, and sometimes it is the natural progression of many young artists’ Diaspora experience. At other times it is Israeli with all the music that lives there – Arabic, Sephardic, Hassidic – a true melting pot with never-ending sources of inspiration.”
And in fact, this preoccupation with the potential ‘Jewishness’ of the music may be a bit misplaced. Case in point: the concert at Joe’s Pub. While the crowd, as a whole, skewed young, there were plenty of older folks, possibly drawn by the article about the concert that appeared in the Forward a few days before. As the band got going, and Yosef took his cordless mic out into the audience, more than a few middle aged men in the room began throwing themselves completely to the mercy of the beat. With no thought for how they looked or the growing sweat stains in the armpits of their dress shirts, they danced like it was 1967 and, well, connected.
What, then, does it matter whether Tomer Yosef thinks the music is Jewish or not? The audience had a positive experience in a space that had declared itself to be Jewish. Bisman’s protocols had been met.
Balkan Beat Box’s self-titled debut album was released in the U.S. and Canada by JDub on September 20th. They are really very good. And it’s no wonder. In the words of Tamir Muskat, “We are so fucking serious about what we’re doing.”
