Klezmer, punk and protest inhabit Grand Hotel project
Prolific musician brings together Jewish tradition and modern issues
Calling Geoff Berner busy doesn’t come close to describing the Vancouver-based klezmer punk musician’s prolific output. Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, his eighth album of radical folk art-rage, arrives this month on COAX Records.
So does the premiere of Phase 1 of a new musical co-created with TJ Dawe, Toby Berner, Tallulah Winkelman and Jack Garten titled the Trombonik Returns to New Chelm. Both events take place on Nov. 1 as part of the 2019 Chutzpah! Festival.
And just to take up what little time was left in the day, the longtime activist is also on the board of a new political party launching into British Columbia politics.
The B.C. Ecosocialists’ slogan is “Far to the left of the NDP, far greener than the Greens.” Given the deep divisions in Canadian society on generating meaningful action on the scientifically verified climate crisis, the new party arrives at an appropriate time. Perhaps Berner will pen its theme song.
Grand Hotel Cosmopolis takes its name from the actual Grandhotel Cosmopolis in Augsburg, Germany. Operating under the tenets of the increasingly shared values of a “Social Scripture,” the hotel accommodates travellers and refugees under the same roof. The former nursing home located in the state of Swabia was scheduled to be reopened as a refugee holding centre. Then the Kunstkon containers artists’ collective suggested the idea of a space where asylum seekers, artists and travellers alike could live in a setting where social interaction and openness replace isolation and barriers.
Berner, who regularly tours in Europe and enjoys a strong following in Germany, was inspired by the place and the strong community around it.
“At a time when Trudeau is building a facility in Quebec to hold people in, complete with a little playground for the kiddies, it’s nice to see people in Germany doing something completely different,” said Berner. “The past is repeating itself and starting to look a lot like the 1930s again in too many ways — things are getting rougher and the rich and powerful are telling us who is to blame; immigrants and, inevitably, the Jews. That’s what the record is about, with songs that take on these times.”
From the raucous countdown into the opening number Not the Jew I Had in Mind (with permission from Thomas King), a direct middle-finger salute to expected cultural stereotypes to the self-explanatory Why Don’t We Just Take the Billionaire’s Money Away?, Berner is on fire on Grand Hotel Cosmopolis. Backed by a crack assembly of backing musicians, he wields his accordion like a weapon of truth on the new material. In a recording of a career that has featured numerous highlights, it’s his most accomplished work. Not only does it pack a punch, its music inhabits both past and future sounds. Berner wanted the album to be both the most researched but also the most eclectic, existing in and out of time.
A case in point of the artist’s recognition of the past repeating itself is the new recording of Hirsh Glick’s 1943 song Zog Nit Keyn Moi (Partisan’s Song). Sung by the Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania during the Second World
War, the song is often performed today as a cultural classic. Glick died fighting the Nazis in the war and is a revered hero. Berner tosses in his own English verse “just to remind you how absurd Hirsh Glick would have found the current debate about the advisability of punching Nazis.”
Grand Hotel Cosmopolis is packed with such historical and contemporary content and Berner’s own heartfelt and philosophical liner notes give each song more life. While it may be heavy, the delivery is never anything but artful and playful.
“It’s meant to be an entertainment, where you put it on and dance and have fun without being forced to be stupid all the time,” he said. “The people who are playing on it are the best people in this genre that I could get and more research went into the songwriting than ever before, with me consulting the great writer and Yiddishist Michael Wex for the translations in Ven Kimsti? and other songs. It’s really the best I could do.”
Klezmer is the term applied to the musical genre and form that had its epicentre in Eastern European Jewish communities. The revival of klezmer is directly tied to the revival of the Yiddish language spoken in those same communities. Berner is among those crafting original new music in Yiddish and Ven Kimsti? is his first effort.
“I came up with this idea of a song where I was the leader of a gang of pickpockets who had to free his love from prison, and Giselle Webber, who fronts the Quebec-based ‘thief song’ band Orkester Kriminal, suggested a melody and chord progression for it,” he said. “Then I ran the lyrics by Michael Wex as I’m still learning Yiddish at a stage where I can use expert advice. It was a great feeling of accomplishment and I plan on doing more.”
Doing more has lately included working with playwright TJ Dawe on the Trombonik Returns to New Chelm. The musical is a take on the
traditional folk tales around the Polish village of Chelm, a place in folklore where the local wisdom is so complicated that it often comes across as the opposite. Re-imagining locations to the 1932 Depression-era rural Saskatchewan setting of New Chelm, the story of a con artist posing as a rabbi getting caught up in the illegal booze biz will feature Berner’s ace backing band as well as his brother, actor Toby Berner, Dawe, Winkelman and others.
“We have a full-length, finished script with all the songs written and demo’ed to present a complete theatre work, but the premiere will be an hour-long sung reading performance for the play,” he said. “It’s a little bit Chekhov, a little bit Blazing Saddles and Threepenny Opera, some Yiddish, some folklore and a lot of klezmer. Obviously, the Netflix series comes next.”
If not that, Berner at least hopes to see the Trombonik Returns to New Chelm get a full stage presentation down the road. In the meantime, he’s heading back on the road to tour Europe and Canada.
“I was over there in the spring, including such highlights as being invited by Billy Bragg to play on his Left Field stage at Glastonbury, which was a great hang,” said Berner. “It was kind of an amazing experience hanging out sharing songs with the artist that had an enormous effect on me wanting to become a songwriter in my teens. “
The father of four admits that his career has been a “grab bag,” where he can go from Glastonbury to some gritty punk club in a Berlin squat and find an audience everywhere because he is “aggressively true to myself.” Given how good Grand Hotel Cosmopolis is, Berner’s audience will keep expanding.