Occasionally you interview a musician, and you leave the club or hang up the phone feeling unquestionably inspired. There's this nagging sense of creativity-jealousy, that perhaps this person has a closer connection to their craft than you ever will. This is what happened to me when I interviewed Daniel Kahn, songleader and musician extraordinaire. The man has played in every type of band imaginable and keeps coming up with new, innovative ways to mush together completely opposite sounds. Gypsy hip-hop? Check. Klezmer-Punk? Check. And the list goes on.
Beside his obvious musical prowess, Kahn was also an extremely interesting interviewee. He's obviously very aware of the message and meaning behind everything he puts into the world, and has a unique take on almost everything. Here are a couple of extra quotes I couldn't quite fit into this week's story "Klezmer punk band Painted Bird flying in from Berlin."
On naming his band after the controversial novel: "[The Painted Bird] is a great book, but I don’t recommend it to everyone. It's extremely brutal. People have misconstrued it as a memoir but it’s an allegorical novel. It blurs the line between man and animal — there’s no spoken dialogue, you never find out the protagonist’s name. People rightfully accused it of pornographic violence, but I think this gesture as a way of narrativising [the Holocaust] is understandable, the book is a fable. In terms of using it as a band name, for people who have read the book it sounds threatening, I was hoping it would function the same way the band name Joy Division does.”
On one of his musical inspirations: "My model for [mixing old and new world music] was the Pogues — the Pogues are so awesome. They have a feeling of being totally now but they carry with them an entire musical language, a culture that feels totally fresh even if it is 100 years old, they just bring this river of culture. This is the way to make world folk music. You realize that there is no such thing as time and you realize how everything these people went through is still going on today."
On the state of Yiddish culture: "Someone once asked me if Yiddish is lost — it's not lost, it is just a little lonely. I read these old poems and they are so lovely. I don’t expect people to think about [Yiddish culture] all the time, but there is definitely something we can all learn from it.
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