When Piranha first got things rolling in 1987, our idea was to celebrate music styles that became “entartete Musik” when the Nazi gangs ruled in Germany – that is to say, Jewish, Gypsy and black music.

Our 1989 release of the Klezmatics debut album “Shvaygn = Toyt”, which is Yiddish for Silence = Death, highlighted very early on our affection for klezmer – the foot-stomping frenzied wedding music of East European Jews.

The Klezmatics were formed in New York just 3 years earlier, and would be dubbed “The Rolling Stones of Klezmer” over the years. They led a wave of bands that picked up on the revived interest in Jewish music which might have been heard in the East European Jewish shtetl (village) - the sort of place painted by Marc Chagall, with rickety wooden houses, raucous wedding processions and fiddlers on the roof – a world far removed from the asphalt of the New York streets of the eighties.

Band members may have grown up with a vague flavor of klezmer culture, though few knew Yiddish or traditional klezmer bulgars and freylekhs. In the course of 35 years the band has moved from the polyglot folk revival explorations of the 70s and 80s, firmly placing the klezmer genre in contemporary contexts, mixing Yiddish life with a rocking party mood.

Frank London, the trumpeter of the Klezmatics, has also distinguished himself in various other solo projects with Piranha. One of London’s seminal albums, recorded in the bar of The Knitting Factory in New York is Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, [/i]Di Shikere Kalelye – Jewish-Oriental Village Brass from NYC’s Lower East Side.[/i]

Frank London and his band take as their models the Shikere Kapelye, which translates as the “inebriated orchestra” or “band of drunks”, who caroused shambolically through East Europe a century ago. The delightfully irreverent titles are evocative of drunken debauchery: Fun Der Kretshme (Coming from the Bar), Lign In Der Gasn Nign (Lying in the Street Tune) and Oy, Mayn Kepele (Oh, My Aching Head).

London also cut with Piranha the dazzling Astro-Hungarian Jewish Music, with the Glass House Orchestra, a tribute to Jewish Hungarian heritage, featuring top musicians from Budapest and New York, turning traditional and popular tunes into dream-like, spacey and frenetic extravaganzas.

Solomon & Socalled’s brilliant album HipHopKhasene presents the next klezmer generation, mixing traditional wedding music with hip-hop, and highlighting riffs by perhaps the greatest klezmer clarinetist around, David Krakauer, a member of the Klezmatics in their early years.

Mazeltov!