Devon-based klezmer band gets the party started

Halfway through a gig at an arts centre venue in Exeter, there’s a bit of commotion. “I thought this was supposed to be a proper klezmer band,” an indignant punter is kvetching to no-one in particular. “I came to see a proper klezmer band!” Off he flounces, muttering about no double-bass, no clarinet, and no klezmer.

Meanwhile, the fiddler pays not the slightest bit of attention. The picture of serene intensity, chin glued to the violin that’s an extension of him, Joel Segal sends the melody soaring and leaping between minor and major keys. It’s the essence of klezmer, lifting the spirit with its infectious joyousness. Below, the dance floor is alive with the swirling presence of people in a room only just large enough to contain both them and their enthusiasm.

Ruach is the fruit of a project that Joel, folk musician and gifted violinist, has been working on for years, following the success of his other klezmer band, Kevara. What he doesn’t know about the music of his Carpathian ancestry may be written on the back of a violin string. Later, backstage, Joel enthuses over the irony of the shteck: “So very telling.” Ruach is as authentic as it gets.

Joel, 69, grew up in north London but has lived in Devon for 50 years and raised his grandson and granddaughter there after the death of his daughter. Always interested in Israeli tunes and Jewish music, he put together a band called Hot Beigels and started playing for simchas. This band became Kevara, and Ruach followed. He’s founded several other bands and played in many, including The Bootleg Swing Band. Spinach for Norman, Joel’s English folk band, has been going for 37 years. Jewish tunes are an occasional part of their repertoire at weddings.

Joel lives in Exeter, home to the third oldest shul in the country after Bevis Marks and Plymouth. He was the shammas of this Grade II* listed shul, which he saved from a fire in 2001 caused by water ingress over antiquated wiring while he lived in it.

Klezmer music is one of most defining expressions of Jewish identity, its roots stretching back to eighteenth century Hasidism and beyond into in a vanished world. While some of its origins are in the music of the lehning liturgy, there are connections that run as deep in the mutual inextricability of gypsy and Jewish music, in which it’s impossible to know where one starts and the other finishes.

The revival of klezmer in the 1970s, influenced by jazz, in turn fed back into jazz, giving way to other genres of music, like gypsy jazz, with its swooping arpeggios and, more recently, electro-swing. But in the meantime, klezmer has strayed further and further from its origins into something that an Ashkenazi Jew in nineteenth century central or eastern Europe may not have recognised if they’d fallen across it in the shtetl.

What is a proper klezmer band? It’s easier to define it in terms of what it wouldn’t have been: neither the showy big-band sound of modern experience, nor the stuff of a tame ensemble –  accomplished though many are – playing to an audience rooted to their allocated seating in awed silence.

At the other extreme, the originally Hasidic melody Hava Nagila (or Zayt Lustig, originally) is now routinely banged out at Jewish weddings on that symbol of ersatz entertainment, a lone electric organ, almost as lip service to tradition – before giving way to smash-hit favourites for the rest of the evening. But at least it’s played to be danced to.

The clue to klezmer is in the name. Combining the Yiddish kle – key – and the Hebrew zemer – melody, it is the means of making music. Once upon a time, a band of klezmorim, restricted to three or four men (with a ban on any more from the relevant regime) would have travelled from settlement to settlement, over the Steppes and the far reaches of the Balkans.

Their instruments would have been necessarily portable, comprising only occasionally something much smaller than the double-bass that’s come to be associated with klezmer music. A xylophone would have been knocked up from different-sized stones for semitones jammed between bales of straw. “I don’t believe there was one shred of virtuosity going on here,” says Joel.

Not that there’s any shortage of virtuosity in Ruach, featuring the equally accomplished Iowerth Pugh, conductor and retired head of music at Exeter College, on low brass, and Io’s son Alfie, (bassoonist, percussionist, composer and conductor) who multi-tasks on xylophone, melodica, and crotales – a series of cymbalon-like discs chosen for its silvery “other-wordly” effect, as Joel puts it.

For Joel, who’s somewhere between populist and purist, this isn’t about a nostalgia trip to a literal reconstruction of an old-country klezmer band, but about finding expression for the heimische atmosphere of the celebrations of Ashkenazi Jewry that has been all but obliterated by the passive spectator experience that klezmer has become. “Jewish people have lost connection with dancing,” says Joel, for whom the dancing takes precedence over the music.

This vital connection is supplied by musician and caller Pam Hayes. With her knowledge of 35-plus dances, she teaches the steps as the tune unfolds.

As the melodies swoop between plangency and super-charged exuberance, they open up a door onto a lost world that also gives forward onto the present. The nuanced complexity of klezmer involves a contradiction, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In theory it’s practical, by definition: ` the means to the end of making music’. Yet in practice, it’s almost ethereal, full of the decompressed breath of spirit and inspiration, expanding as it reaches the surface. In a word: ruach.

Joel is available between London and the south-west for weddings, bar- and bat-mitvahs. joelsegal@hotmail.co.uk 07790 906118

Photos by Jenny Steer www.jennysteer.co.uk