World Music Wire:

Jailbait princesses and phonograph pornographers. Anarchists, atheists, and amputees. Humble farmhands who dig their own graves, and holy womanizers out to save the unlovable. Welcome to the wild world of Georges Brassens, as translated on the new album Bad Reputation and channeled by Pierre de Gaillande.

The Paris-born, California-raised singer, musician, composer, and translator found a kindred spirit in the pioneering pop star, ubiquitous in France but sadly neglected in America. Keenly in tune with Brassens’ timeless eloquence and timely grit, de Gaillande embarked on an epic two-year mission to translate Brassens’ work and evoke the legendary singer-songwriter for Anglophone audiences. The hard part: to keep Brassens’ melodies intact, de Gaillande had to keep the same syllable count, rhyme scheme, and other poetic parts in English.

De Gaillande spent his teenage years in California immersed in rock, laying out wacky punk anthems on his four-track and using guitar licks to woo girls at Sunday school. He later took these skills to New York, where he rocked with indie and folk-rock bands like the Morning Glories.

But he had a dark secret: He was French. His father, a teacher, made sure he never forgot it. “He likes to impart his wisdom,” de Gaillande muses. “My dad would make my sister and me sit down with a George Brassens song, asking us if we understood what it was about. He would bore us to death. We couldn’t enjoy the music because it was like school.”

The obsession that became Bad Reputation started when the senior de Gaillande sent his son the lyrics to “Le Mecreant,” a Brassens song calling for morality without the crutch of religious authority, a graceful statement of atheist philosophy. It struck de Gaillande and sparked a conversation with his dad that turned into a serious translating habit. “Over the years I had tried to translate the poetry of writers like Baudelaire, so I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at this song, which I loved,” recalls de Gaillande with a smile. “Then I went back to all these other cool ones with great melodies, and boom, it totally avalanched from there.”

Yet this nonchalance belies the task de Gaillande had set for himself: to adapt one of the biggest figures in French music and poetry without completely and utterly betraying Brassens in all his complexity: the iconic iconoclast. A dreamer who dominated the pop scene for decades. A highly individualistic man of powerful convictions—yet no patience with politics or intellectual fads. A proto-punk who worshiped 17th-century poetry, whose banned songs became national treasures, and whose moustache sparked a fashion craze.

It’s nearly impossible to explain Brassens’ significance in French culture—and nearly impossible to underplay it. He’s a teller of tales like Bob Dylan, if Dylan had come from a centuries-long line of satirical tunesmiths and bards. He sounds like Django Reinhardt swinging with an apolitical Woodie Guthrie. A voice like Leonard Cohen’s dominates sparse arrangements that managed to blast French pop apart the way the Beatles did Anglophone rock.

Yet de Gaillande has succeeded in invoking Brassens’ essence by painstakingly, playfully rendering his exquisite, unusual lyrics into English. Lyrics borrowing from the golden age of French poetry, the 17th century, chock full of colorful profanity and medieval references.

Brassens, in his meditation on the vagaries of celebrity “Trumpets of Fortune and Fame,” asks wryly, “I wonder, holy cow, who do I have to f*ck / To make the goddess of a hundred mouths speak up?” Yet he’s just as likely to reference the Old Testament (“Bad Reputation” speaks of the prophet Jeremiah) or 16th-century religious violence (the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Hugenots comes up in “Don Juan”) as to drop an “F” bomb.

De Gaillande relished the challenge. “I found that I was really well suited to it; I’ve been a songwriter preoccupied with lyrics, poetry, and melody for a long time,” de Gaillande reflects. “It was amazing to have this music that’s been in my head for so long come to life.”

A self-taught songwriter, the poetry-mad Brassens made music to fit the words. “He would write lyrics with rhyme and rhythm, and then cobbled the music together to fit,” de Gaillande explains. ”The music feels unpremeditated, fluid, and personal. Sometimes it makes no sense rhythmically, because it’s in service to the lyrics.” To do justice to the music, de Gaillande kept all the rhythms intact, finding the right number of English syllables, and maintaining the original rhyme schemes.

He also found, as he began working with New York-based musicians unfamiliar with Brassens’ songs, that these rhythmic subtleties had eluded most people who played songs like “Bad Reputation.” That is, until bassist Christian Bongers noticed something: Everyone was getting it wrong.

“That was the first Brassens song I ever learned, and I used to play it on guitar. Christian realized that I was playing it wrong, that there is this wild rhythm that’s hard to pin down,” de Gaillande notes. “It has a 5/4 moment that’s bizarre. It took someone with fresh ears to really get it.”

This peculiar sense of rhythm entwines with a quiet interplay between melodies, with little licks and flourishes in the originals provided by a second guitar. De Gaillande, while wanting to respect Brassens’ sonic sensibilities, used a broader, richer musical palette to bring out the many melodies: vibes, clarinet, dobro, another voice thanks to singer Keren Ann (“To Die for Your Ideas”).

But one thing was off the table: drums. “I’ve made a conscious decision to not have a lot of drums, even though I come from a folk rock or punk background,” de Gaillande says. “I didn’t want too many drums or any other instrument with rock connotations because Brassens ignored rock altogether.” Even though hints of rock sometimes shine through on songs like “Penelope,” Brassens seemed to have had little interest in the music taking Europe’s youth by storm.

That was typical for Brassens, a man who lived in a cold-water, no-frills Paris flat even at the height of his illustrious career, a place that had harbored him after he ran away from a German work camp and that he said taught him to appreciate discomfort. Living in his run-down apartment and his own dream world, the only rules he acknowledged were those of poetry. He ignored contemporary culture, politics, and even the bans on his songs, and instead mocked the scandal surrounding his off-color language with songs like “The Pornographer.”

“He uses all this dirty imagery, and then says, ‘See what you made me do?’” de Gaillande laughs. “I went full on with the obscenity.” He turned to the last remaining bastion of obscenity, the last dirty word standing: “Don’t ask me to compose a poem/ If it would upset you to know / That I sit and watch every day / The c*nts on parade / I’m the pornographer of the phonograph, sir / The perverted son of the sing-along.”

Brassens had no interest in being fashionable or cool, and yet defined coolness in a way that resonates for de Gaillande in our day and age. For de Gaillande, it boils down to language: “Using proper grammar, good spelling, and eloquent language is subversive and even sexy in this era of Tea-Party talk,” de Gaillande smiles. “That’s part of the mission of this project: to bring back that kind of sexy.”

“This project has been a real departure for me; it’s very adult and almost square,” de Gaillande laughs. “But I think it’s the hippest thing I’ve ever done. I draw inspiration from Brassens’ attitude: He didn’t care what people thought. He just got the poetry out there.”

World Music Wire:

The descendant of warrior princes, the son of two black African parents, Afro-pop pioneer Salif Keita was born “white.” Inheriting albinism, a lack of skin pigmentation, Keita instantly stood out among other Africans and stood out as a spokesperson for tolerance in all forms.

La Différence, the legendary singer addresses this deeply personal issue–albinism in Africa—and gives it an urgent global resonance that takes his songs from Bamako to Beirut. As Keita’s famed “golden voice” cathartically croons in the title track, "I'm a black man, my skin is white and I like it, it's my difference/I'm a white man, my blood is black, I love that, it's the difference that's beautiful."

The distinction is often interpreted as an ill omen in his native Mali, and invited a life of ridicule, making Keita an outcast in his own community. Society, including public schools in Mali, perpetuates harmful beliefs about albinos, and they are often shunned, ridiculed, and even killed for superstitious purposes.

Although he and others have come to terms with albinism, Keita has struggled long and desperately with the stigma attached to his skin color. Though born into a noted caste of musicians with direct links to Sounjata Keita–the heroic 13th-century warrior-prince who edified the ancient Malian Empire–Keita was forbidden to play music growing up. He was also disowned by his father, kicked out of school, and rejected by the local aristocracy.

Filled with unrealized musical ambitions, Keita had no choice but to leave Mali as a young man. Armed with the strength of his convictions, he travelled to neighboring Ivory Coast, then Paris, London, and New York, where his skin color could not keep him from expressing his artistic vision. His perseverance paid off throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as he became an internationally recognized icon thanks to his gravely voice, innovative musical arrangements, and profoundly poetic lyrics.

In 1997, Keita’s fame helped him to overcome the stigma attached to albinism that persisted in West Africa, allowing him to make a triumphant return to Mali. Cautiously re-entering a community that once shunned him, he discovered a newfound acceptance, which allowed him to re-establish roots there, including building a studio in the capital of Bamako.

La Différence is the latest in a trilogy of acclaimed acoustic oriented recordings (Moffou 2002, M’Bemba 2006) that were primarily recorded at Keita’s Bamako studio. The intimate acoustic environment of La Différence allows Keita’s vocal timbres to shimmer and soar, highlighting their poetic nuances and the poignant themes of his lyrics. While the album is dedicated to the plight of albinos in Africa, leading with its title track that aims to increase the global awareness of this cause, the remainder of the album delves into a wide range of social and political issues.

Over a thick sanguine female vocal chorus and rhythmic guitar riffs, “Ekolo d’Amour” seeks to inform listeners about the ecological devastation that has befallen Africa. Fusing the powerful traditional tones of the 21-stringed kora with a contemporary guitar-rich, down-tempo, polyrhythmic groove, “San Ka Na” cites a specific example of ecological destruction, alerting audiences of the need to protect Africa’s Niger River, upon whose banks Keita played as a child. With a rough and urgent voice, Keita scorns local politicians for their neglect and complacency regarding such problems.

These compositions also point to the global nature of this album, which was recorded across three continents, including sessions in Los Angeles, Paris, and Bamako, among others. String arrangements written by noted producer Patrice Renson (M., Vanessa Paradis, Ben Ricour, Amadou and Mariam) and recorded in Beirut with Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf give the album a subtle orchestral depth. On several songs, the plucked strings of a Middle-Eastern oud mingle with the West African ngoni (lute), creating a swirling melodic texture of Arab-infused African tones.

La Différence also finds the singer re-imagining a few previous recordings with a new palette of sounds. Harnessing the deeply echoing, bluesy textures of guest guitarists Bill Frisell and Seb Martel, an intimate rendition of 1995’s “Folon” offers a stripped-down, horn-absent version that allows Keita’s haunting voice to pierce the mellow cosmopolitan soundscape. With producer John Henry, Keita reaches back to the 1970s, recalling his days with the Ambassadeurs du Motel band in Bamako, with a new incarnation of “Seydou.”

Departing from the original track (“Seydou Bathily”), this softer version bathes Keita’s voice in a rich sonic world of resonant vocal refrains, Arabic-tinged string arrangements, interlocking guitar tones, and a multilayered percussion ensemble that merges sounds from Africa and the Middle East. Given that these songs have been refined by Keita and his band over the course of many years, some for decades, it is no wonder why his delivery comes across with a relaxed, sophisticated confidence.

Further linking La Différence with Keita’s long musical career, the melody of “Djélé” is decorated by the intricate balafon work of Keletigui Diabaté, a monumental figure in Malian music and one of Keita’s most faithful musical partners, helping him to develop as a guitarist over the course of almost four decades. Drawing on his international sojourns, “Djélé” reinforces Keita’s cosmopolitan approach to this album as the breathy tones of an accordion dance with a concert piano over top a bed of deep electric bass, legato orchestral strings, plucked African lutes, and a global array of polyrhythmic percussive timbres.

While listeners may lose themselves in the sophisticated blend of sounds found on La Différence, Keita has not lost site of the ultimate inspiration for this project–the men and women who still suffer with the stigma and health risks of albinism in Africa. As Keita remarked in a recent Mondomix interview, “It’s very, very important for me to help albino people, because they need help, and it is my duty, because I am albino, too.”

To combat the prejudices that regularly threaten albino Africans, the singer has pledged that all the proceeds from this work will be funnelled into his foundation, Salif Keita pour les Albinos.

Since 2001, this charity has tirelessly worked to erase the stigma attached to albinos in Africa, and provide care and assistance to albinos in need of refuge and medical attention, including protection from the sun. Keita knows its dangers first hand, losing his sister to skin cancer in the 1990s. Over the past four years, Keita has donated proceeds from record sales and tours to purchase sunscreen for Africans in need, and build a school and health clinic in Bamako.

La Différence is an intimate journey into Keita’s personal struggles. Singing a hymn of universal tolerance Keita poetically claims, "some of us are black, some are white/all that difference has a purpose…for us to complete each other/let everyone receive love and dignity/the world will be a more beautiful place.”

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Take one part diverse players with intense focus and killer chops, and one part neglected mid-century multi-ethnic hybrid music with origins on America’s harmonious island paradise. Add a dash of Technicolor tropical dreamscape, a twist of wild birdcalls, and stir soulfully.

WAITIKI 7 serves up this polychrome cocktail, taking a new serious spin on exotica, the musical genre that leaped from Hawai‛i’s fashionable bars and clubs to mainstream living rooms in post-War America. Keeping true to exotica’s deep roots and intense demands on musicians with New Sounds of Exotica, the group brings heady passion, acoustic musicianship, and a love of old-school mixology to an art form just begging to be revisited and savored.

The luscious mix that is exotica—the blend of tropical soundscapes, Latin percussion, and popular jazz perfected by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and their ensembles—has been profoundly misunderstood. Far from the kitsch of its waning days, the best exotica flows from two very positive and progressive places: the multi-cultural openness of Hawai‛i’s music scene in the first half of the 20th century, and the mid-century impulses that fueled a craze for transcontinental travel and curiosity about Asian-Pacific cultures.

“It was a huge thing at that time to fly from the West Coast to Hawai‛i,” explains Randy Wong, the Hawai‛i-born, classically trained founder of WAITIKI 7. “It became the stepping stone to the East. People became genuinely fascinated by these cultures. The war was over, and there was a spirit of real optimism and excitement.”

These new travelers came to Hawai‛i and discovered what had been brewing in the relatively open climate of cross-cultural exploration for several decades: a vibrant music scene with everything from mixed Hawaiian and English folk ballads, to second-generation Japanese club bands made of traditional Asian instruments, to Puerto Rican percussionists who had recently come to work in the sugar industry. “The musicians who played exotica came from this scene,” Wong notes. “It was really one of the first popular world-music hybrids in America.”

Enterprising bandleaders brought all these sounds together, creating groups that Wong describes as “one huge rhythm section,” so huge that Martin Denny, the king of classic exotica, needed three trailers to take all the percussion instruments—from gamelan parts to octave after octave of tuned gongs to huge bamboo xylophones—along on tour. WAITIKI 7 lets the full percussive force of exotica shine on tracks like Denny’s Chinese-inflected rumbler “Firecracker.”

Exotica musicians were highly skilled, fastidious arrangers, often drawing on Hollywood experience to craft the perfectly evocative sound of the fantastic tropics. Wong, who has had a chance to study Denny’s scores, was blown away by the level of detail. These were serious musicians “with serious chops,” Wong smiles, and a serious approach to even the campiest moments in the music.

WAITIKI 7 embraces the pulse and ambiance of exotica, while adding their own stamp thanks to the diverse jazz, classical, and folk backgrounds the seven members bring to the group, including the jazz drums of multi-instrumentalist Abe Lagrimas, Jr; the thoughtful and vigorous Latin and jazz piano of Zaccai Curtis; the ever cool vibes of classically trained Jim Benoit.Improvisation and more expansive, expressive solos, something rarely heard in carefully scored classic exotica, play a major role in shaping the band’s sound, as do unexpected instruments from violin (classical virtuoso Helen Liu) to woodwinds of all shapes and sizes (Berklee instructor and Latin jazz master Tim Mayer).

Adding a new dimension to the rhythm sections of the past, lush melodies come to the fore on WAITIKI 7’s tour of exotica standards like the beautiful “Bali Ha‛i” of South Pacific fame. Or on the mysterious yet once wildly popular “Similau,” penned by one of dozens of exotica ghostwriters hired to copy Denny and Lyman’s signature sound—without the prohibitive licensing costs.

“The song does things with Latin rhythms and percussion that never happen. The güiro (notched gourd), for instance, is played backwards, something you just don’t do,” explains Wong. “But it works and makes for one mean song.”

The group comes by its love of exotica honestly. WAITIKI 7 percussionist Lopaka Colon picked up not only his beats, but his amazing bird and animal calls from his father, veteran musician Augie Colon, who played for years with Denny. The senior Colon tracked game in the valleys of Hawai‛i Island and O‛ahu, teaching himself calls to attract birds and animals. When he joined Denny’s group, Augie Colon started tossing in calls to enhance the overall atmosphere, and soon band members were responding, teasingly, in kind.

“It’s exciting, and you can’t help but get into it. When Lopaka whoops and howls, he sounds like some marvelous bird, and he’s playing intense percussion parts at the same time,” Wong enthuses. “The birdcalls are a virtuosic element, and they require an acoustic approach to work well. Samples or keyboards can sound so canned. And it really gives the original exotica musicians like Augie their due.”

Wong himself was exposed to the magic of these calls as a child. He grew up tagging along with his grandfather to hear Arthur Lyman, one of the exotica greats who also used birdcalls for dramatic effect. “We’d be sitting ten feet from the guy and he’d be playing solo vibes and doing birdcalls,” Wong recalls. “It was really otherworldly. I got the sound in my ear, even though I didn’t know it was part of a larger musical thing.”

WAITIKI 7’s originals keep true to the spirit of this larger musical movement, renewing exotica’s ties to Hawaiian culture and moving audience members deeply. Wong’s “Sweet Pīkake Serenade,” inspired by traditional Hawaiian ballads, keeps it so real, it literally makes exotica fans weep. “When we performed for the 500th show of Kansas Public Radio’s Retro Cocktail Hour,” Wong remembers, “there were serious tiki fans who had driven from Chicago, L.A., South Carolina to Lawrence and they had us play for four hours. When we played ‘Sweet Pīkake Serenade,’ the audience started crying tears of joy. We still get fan mail from that gig.”

Tiki culture and its exotica soundtrack have another serious side: the heady cocktails once served alongside the music’s sonic dreamscapes. And just like real exotica demands virtuosic musicianship, real tiki cocktails require premium ingredients artfully balanced: freshly creamed coconuts, just squeezed juices, homemade allspice liqueurs, the clove-lime-almond notes of falernum syrup.

“We’re taking this wholly authentic approach to the music,” Wong explains. “To stay in line with that, we take our cocktails very seriously, in the same vein as us performing acoustically.” Wong and WAITIKI 7 have created several custom cocktails for the album, and recipes are included in the liner notes. “There’s a big tiki revival going on, in places like Boston and New York,” notes Wong, “and exotica is a big part of that.”

Serious tiki fans, as WAITIKI 7 has discovered, turn up in the most unexpected places. Though the band was founded in play at lū‛aus in the Boston area, where many members live, they have played some of the quirkiest gigs imaginable: A bar mitzvah at the New England Aquarium, an Indian wedding held in a New Jersey Greek Orthodox church, an art-deco train chugging through Vermont at the height of mud season.

And last but not least, “We of course do tiki festivals,” Wong chuckles. “Nothing like a field full of New Englanders wearing fezzes and sipping rum barrels to get in the mood. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Sephardic salsa and Southeast Asian-Jewish standup. New music rituals and ancient inscriptions. Parades and jam sessions, world premieres and kid’s music. This is a no-holds-barred party that does what America’s premier Jewish music festival has done for 25 years: break down the walls between past and future, between multifaceted possibilities of Jewish culture and audiences at large.

The Bay Area’s Jewish Music Festival marks its two and a half decades with a day of free outdoor festivities for all ages and background at the Yerba Buena Gardens on July 11, 2010, including instrument building workshops, instant choruses, klezmer jams, and performances running from kid-friendly to hip. “We want these outdoor events to celebrate the local Bay Area scene, where the klezmer revival started and where global music and Jewish music blend in our musically diverse community,” explains Festival Director Ellie Shapiro.

In addition to the fun free-for-all, the Festival is presenting several groundbreaking multi-media, multi-platform performances, the edgy interpretation of Jewish roots that has become part and parcel of its mission. July will see the world premier of a commissioned music and dance piece by composer Dan Plonsey (Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah); a strikingly sensual installation hinting at the secret lives of Babylonian women (The Bowls Project); and the rave-worthy, trans-Mediterranean electro-dance of Watcha Clan, direct from Marseilles, France.

New music composer Dan Plonsey has worked with everyone from avant-jazz legend Anthony Braxton to highly imaginative author Harvey Pekar, and has garnered extensive awards and fellowships for his innovative yet wryly grounded musical projects. Plonsey, who was raised in a secular Jewish family, had never undergone the ritual himself. Instead, he has composed Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah, an exploration with choreographer Eric Kupers and the Dandelion Dancetheater of the meaning of ceremony and the transition to adulthood, commissioned by the Festival and premiering in association with the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Avant garde dance veteran Anna Halprin will also be on hand July 8, 7 pm at the CJM for a special preview performance.

The Bowls Project takes ancient inscriptions from clay incantation bowls, buried to magical ends underneath Babylonian houses and incised with wishes and hopes from the mundane to the erotic. Jewlia Eisenberg, the vocal and conceptual dynamo behind the punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish group Charming Hostess, transforms these ancient inscriptions into a visual and sonic experience that interweaves the past—Babylon was a major center of Jewish culture at the time—with the present, today’s Iraq; the spiritual with the personal. To invoke the bowls, the project unfolds in a dome structure, with the inscriptions projected on its interior thanks to video artist Shezad Dawood. Eisenberg will lead a workshop digging into the project earlier in the day, and then festival goers will be able to interact with the space independently.

The Silver Anniversary Festival season culminates on July 18, in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and with the global electronica phenomenon Watcha Clan performing as part of their summer New Frequencies program. Their sound brings hard-hitting beats to North African, Sephardic, French, and just about every other Mediterranean groove imaginable. The band’s high-energy performances are led by vocalist Sistah K, who celebrates and mutates her Jewish background into addictive and irrepressible calls to dance. Watcha Clan’s multicultural take on roots parallels the Festival’s own mission.

“The Festival’s mission has always been to present music that both celebrates Jewish experience in innovative ways and engages the broader community,” Shapiro reflects. “The outdoor events really explore what it means to be Jewish in the multicultural world and embrace what the Bay Area is about, as a hub of multicultural life.” This hub is home to a rich mix of local artists who will be performing in the park and are shifting the boundaries of what it means to participate in Jewish culture.

Artists like Middle Eastern percussion master Dror Sinai or artists like singer Kat Parra, who was mentored by Patti Cathcart of Tuck and Patti but who dove into the salsa scene, opening for major acts like singer Celia Cruz. At the same time, Parra began uncovering her family’s Sephardic roots, which she discovered worked beautifully with the Afro-Latin rhythms she had come to love. “It feels to me like a natural next step as the Sephardic music can be so vibrant and infectious in its melodies,” Parra explains. “The melodies actually easily fit within an Afro-diasporic rhythmic context, as does the timelessness of the lyrics.”

With another unexpected perspective on Jewish culture, comedian Joe Nguyen draws on his experience as a person of both Vietnamese and Jewish background, finding the funny side of his heritage in his funky hometown of San Francisco. Eprhyme and Joshua Walters add hip-hop to the mix.

The day in the park will also honor the Bay Area’s unmatched contribution to Jewish culture—the 1970s revival of klezmer that jump-started two generations of innovative musicians. The old-school mastery of groups like the Red Hot Chachkas, recently lauded for their holiday performance with the San Francisco Symphony, which will pair perfectly with the younger innovators like KugelPlex, who bring in other global elements from Africa to the Balkans as they take on Jewish tradition.

Yet the party is about more than merely savoring Jewish music; it’s about making it. That’s why the July day in the park kicks off with an interactive, second-line parade led by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars founding member, Glenn Hartman, and with family activities like an instrument petting zoo with “zookeepers” from the Mission- based Community Music Center and an instrument making workshop at CJM that turns found objects into sonorous sensations that will feature in the day’s closing parade. Veteran kid’s music performers Ira Levin, Gerry Tenney and Elana Jagoda will keep the younger crowd in the mood.

Older participants will get a chance to burst into song as part of an instant chorus, designed by Jewish a cappella group Vocolot’s Linda Hirschhorn to get even the rustiest of vocal chords harmonizing, or to polish their old-world licks as part of a klezmer jam session hosted by local klezmorim. “We’ve had a hundred people show up in the past for these jams,” Shapiro laughs. “The sound was amazing.” In addition to the klezmer jam / workshop – there will be workshops on Middle Eastern modes (maqamat) and rhthyms.

“The interaction and the innovation is what the festival is really about,” notes Shapiro. “As much as it’s honoring the roots of Jewish culture, it’s also pushing it forward and articulating whole new ways relating to it. While, of course, having a good time in the bargain.”