Solilians
SPB: What is your favorite music related film or documentary?
Solilians: German filmmaker Claudia Heuermann’s Sabbath In Paradise (on Tzadik) explores the question of what it means to be a modern experimental Jewish musician from all angles, capturing Radical Jewish Culture and downtown NYC’s East Village golden age of the early ‘90s in all it’s breath, depth and glory. So often (and perhaps justifiably) this is associated with John Zorn, his masterpiece Masada Books and his concept of Radical Jewish Culture. Sabbath In Paradise was actually born out of Heuermann’s attempt to make a film about Zorn (which later came out as A Bookshelf On Top of the Sky), however, due to Zorn’s busy schedule at the time (and thank G-d!), she was unable to complete that movie for some time and turned her attention to the burgeoning rest of the East Village scene and it’s so many lesser-known geniuses. Heuermann was there, she captured it, and what a gift she has given the world as a result.
Subsequently, so many often overlooked brilliant minds shine in this movie, all of whom offer just as much as Zorn, and approach what taking the tradition of Klezmer and Jewish Music and shifting it through their own particular experimental lens, to lesser and greater extents religious or secular, posing questions such as Frank London’s (trumpeter and band leader of The Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, and much more) what does Jewish music mean when it’s divorced from its religious context, a cultural side of Judaism separate from religious Judaism. Andy Statman (genius mandolin player and incredible clarinetist) ponders will it continue to exist, have any staying power absent the religious side, waxing poetic on the multiplicity of experimental Jewish music and asking what is Jewish music. Michael Alpert (of Brave Old World) points out how at that time, how interesting it was that all these musicians were choosing to identify as Jewish, downtown, and hip. The great clarinetist David Krakauer (later a great solo artist but the clarinetist on The Klezmatics best releases [Rhythm + Jews and Jews With Horns] as well) proclaims we’re making a new tradition, and Anthony Coleman, explains luminously and hysterically his attempt in the Selfhaters to “reduce a whole ethnic group into a single cry,” building a musical language which couldn’t exist without the Jewish music language and culture.
The greatest thing about the movie is how many major players it captures footage of in their prime: the original Masada Quartet (with Zorn, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron and Greg Cohen) at the original Knitting Factory, Masada String Trio (with Erik Friedlander, Mark Feldman and Greg Cohen), Anthony Coleman’s Selfhaters, Andy Statman’s Quartet during the recording of Between Heaven & Earth (one of his greatest albums, and definitely his greatest album on clarinet [a spiritual Jewish jazz masterpiece], though really it his mandolin which cries such beauty), Zorn’s Cobra, Erik Friedlander solo, and Marc Ribot.
The film is interspersed with tons of religious scenes of Chasidic Jews superimposed throughout, with none other than the brilliant Harvey Pekar (who’s masterpiece comic American Splendor remains one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the 20th century, and who himself was a jazz critic) narrating an eastern European folk tale over it. The movie could be a bit shorter, but it is such a treasure trove of material it doesn’t matter, raising fascinating questions, pointing to how in Europe (where much of the music featured here was born), Jews were the ‘other’, how on another continent tradition morphs into the future, and ultimately, as Krakauer proclaims, what does it mean to be Jewish.
