Yiddish Life Is a Carnival
I counted thirty-four musicians onstage at the end of Frank London's Yiddish Carnival at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park's bandshell Sunday night, though it was hard to get an exact tally. The stage looked like a wild party and sounded like one, too. London, a veteran trumpeter in Downtown New York's jazz and Jewish music scenes, had assembled just about everyone who'd played during his four-hour shindig, cooking up a big-band blowout that blurred the boundaries between Gypsy brass bands, Yiddish theater music, klezmer, Brazilian maracatu drumming, Cuban percussion, folkie socialism, Downtown jazz, lounge jazz, hot jazz, modern jazz, and other strands of great Jewish music.
No act was allowed to wear out its welcome at this carnival co-produced by the Workmen's Circle/Arbiter Ring. Art Bailey's Orkestra Popilar played updated klezmer and East European music; London added his doleful horn to Jack Mendelson's timeless Ashkenazic cantorial singing; Joanne Borts belted out cabaret chestnuts with the Klez Dispensers; singer Adrienne Cooper made gefilte fish sound like a radical new dining concept with the help of pianist Marilyn Lerner; Maracatú New York combined blistering northeastern Brazilian drumming with New Orleans second-line rhythms; Wolf Krakowski and Fraidy Katz sang a kind of gritty, rocking Yiddish art music; and London's longtime band, the Klezmatics, played music with lyrics by Woody Guthrie from their terrific 2006 album Wonder Wheel.
London was always in the fray, either as ringmaster or sideman. But the day's real star turned out to be actor-singer Fyvush Finkel, who's still got it at eighty-four. Finkel brought the Borscht Belt back to his hometown, mixing cornier-than-Kansas jokes with tunes like "That Wonderful Girl of Mine." Finkel turned on the charm and danced like an exotic old bird. No carnival should really be without one.