By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood (09/28/2007) published in Chicago Jewish News
Since he founded Kfar Jewish Arts Center five years ago, Adam Davis says he’s been “living like a shul mouse” while he runs the organization on a shoestring.

Those days may soon be over. Donors are starting to recognize and support Kfar (the name means village in Hebrew), which produces musical and performance events designed for young Jewish audiences. Board members are signing up. And Davis is planning to reach out to more audience members in more demographic groups.

All this may come as a surprise to some observers since Kfar also suffered a major blow (as did the whole Chicago music scene) in the past year: the closing of the HotHouse, the Chicago world music club where the organization put on many of its shows. (continues after the jump)
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• Rabbinical School Dropouts
  The California big band known as the RABBINICAL SCHOOL DROPOUTS actually does seem to play at a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs, which is hard to square with their sound. Recalling Zappa at his giddiest and least scatological, the Dropouts seem to have developed a klezmerist form of Sun Ra worship, decked out in kabbalah references and bad Yiddish puns. Vehicles Behind Comets (Ethnic Warrior), released last year, takes their irreverent Semitic space fusion well past the asteroid belt: it’s Exodus as Star Trek, with manna in the form of Guru Guru records. No matter how many metaphors I pile up, though, they won’t capture the band’s exuberant energy, heard clearly in both the dizzy instrumental pivoting of “Yeshiva School Fallout” (at five and a half minutes, it’s the longest song here; they’re jumpy spacey, not epic spacey) and the gusty grace of “Anne Frank’s Ghost.”Opening tonight’s show (presented by KFAR Jewish Arts Center) is LAMAJAMAL, a bunch of locals working a so-called Gypsy-surf style that sometimes feels like they learned it back in the old country—Generistan. But when they’re on, they’re on, arriving at a fuzzy, garagey take on Roma music thanks to a knack for sexy, serpentine grooves and a mean, mean oud player.
  - Monica Kendrick
  7 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, or , $15, $12 in advance.

In case you missed KFAR’s May 16 concert by ESTA, WBEZ 91.5FM rebroadcast a 30 minute excerpt of Israel’s most original instrumental band on the Radio M program this past week. Our thanks to Tony Sarabia at Chicago Public Radio and Eric Butkus of Record the World for making this possible. Click on the logo to stream the broadcast.

The show leads off with a tribute on the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn with appearances by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and others. Those familiar with the Renewal movement’s melody for “Kol Neshama Te’hallelya” will recognize the melody in this broadcast as his “Allahu.” It also features “Dung Gate” by Rabbinical School Dropouts who appear @ Empty Bottle Aug 19 with lamajaml for a musical way forward from last year’s Lebanon War, and a special shoutout to KFAR Jewish Arts Center for its work. The show playlist and segment breakdown is here.

By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood (08/10/2007) published in Chicago Jewish News

As Adam Davis, the director of Kfar Jewish Arts Center, contemplated the fact that it has been almost a year since last summer’s Lebanon War broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, an idea for a concert bringing together the two traditions formed in his mind.

When he heard that members of the Rabbinical School Dropouts, a popular jazz-world music-nouveau klezmer band, were going to be in town for a relative’s wedding, the idea took shape.

That was the genesis of a Kfar event taking place Sunday, Aug. 19 at the Empty Bottle in Chicago featuring two bands, the Dropouts and Lamajamal, a Chicago-based world music group that has Lebanese connections among its influences.

“I was thinking about what I was doing a year ago, watching what was going on (in Israel), and I started thinking about how much in common people have, and that there was suffering on both sides,” Davis said recently. That led him to contemplate the parallels between the two bands. There’re both doing something with traditional music forms from their respective heritage ,” he says. “I was having an inner dialogue: How can we move forward, be more universal? The way forward is with more discussion, real dialogue between real people, and this is a good example. You can hear certain similarities in music. You hear things and think, wow, there’s a lot in common here.”
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As if there weren’t enough going on next weekend, July 15 is the last gig at HotHouse as we know it. The headliner? The audaciously named Zohar, the world-beat, pan-Middle-Eastern, “fusion science” project of Erran Baron Cohen (yes, Borat’s brother—he scored the music for the film).

The Chi-Improv mailing list has had a fascinating ongoing discussion about progressive music venues and the best way to keep them going, and one point that keeps coming up is a culture clash involving low expectations. It’s made me think about how I expect so many of the shows I see as a matter of course to take place in small, dark, dingy rooms with nowhere to sit and minimal, if any, pay for the musicians. The South Loop incarnation of HotHouse had a way of making me feel broke and underdressed—but that’s not the venue’s fault, now is it? Nor is it the fault of other, lower-budget venues so accustomed to making do with very little that they’ve lost a certain level of ambition.

Marguerite Horberg made an interesting point about how unwilling Chicago audiences are to travel to different neighborhoods, especially compared to audiences in New York City. Jason Guthartz pointed out that New York has a much better mass-transit system than Chicago, which of course makes a big difference to the carless. (Location, location, location!) But HotHouse, whether in its Wicker Park or South Loop location, has always been one of the easiest major venues in Chicago to reach by CTA. You can’t fault them for that.

So if you’re not going to Pitchfork next weekend (raise your hand if you’re already sick of hearing about it) or get bored and leave early on Sunday, head over to the HotHouse and dance goodbye.

File this under news that makes Chicagoist sad, the HotHouse at 31 E. Balbo will be no more. According to their press release, this is not good-bye, but a mere hiatus while they look for a permanent location. Yeah, we’ve heard that kind of thing before, but it usually involves a man, not our favorite world music club.

Last year around this time HotHouse founder Marguerite Horberg was kicked to the curb and a business manager came in to help organize the finances. A year later, Marc Harris stated that the HotHouse faces a $70,000 cash shortfall in their annual budget of $1.4 million. Horberg chimed in that she would be open to dialoguing with the newly elected board at the HotHouse on how to move forward with a community-based organization, yet her venture won’t be ready for any constructive action for a year.

A dispute was resolved with the landlord giving the non-profit “an opportunity to move out and move on” and to start the search for a permanent home. HotHouse will continue to sponsor their signature events, such as the Jazz En Clave Festival, but now they will be held at other venues around the Chicago area. A quick look at the calendar shows that there is nothing booked after the 15th of July, so there is only the present to visit this cultural gem in the South Loop.  The final show @ HotHouse appears to be Zohar, which features Sacha Baron Cohen’s brother, Erran. There are links and sound samples up on the presenter’s site, here.

A compilation of all the press from our 7/15/07 presentation of Zohar.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT: MUSIC REVIEW

House simmers right to end

By Howard Reich, Published July 17, 2007

How fitting: Even for the final show in its longtime home, HotHouse made history, albeit in a somewhat peculiar manner.

On stage Sunday night, a genre-defying band called Zohar performed for the first time in Chicago. That the ensemble was led by Erran Baron Cohen — brother of “Borat” film star Sacha Baron Cohen — lent a peculiar tone to the proceedings, if only because of the actor’s famously bizarre screen personalities.

The Baron Cohen brothers bear uncanny facial and physical resemblance, so it was impossible to hear one without thinking of the other. Yet the music-making was top-notch, the house practically was filled and many in the crowd swayed to this irresistibly danceable music. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought the eclectic club on East Balbo Drive would continue to thrive through the ages (or at least for a few more months). But the internal dramas that roiled HotHouse starting last summer, when a newly constituted board forced out founder-executive director Marguerite Horberg, recently reached a climax. Last month, the board announced that the club would vacate the plush setting where HotHouse has thrived since 1998 (after several years in a decidedly less glamorous home on North Milwaukee Avenue).

The move, the board said in a statement, would settle a long-standing dispute with the landlord and provide an opportunity to regroup and address a cash shortfall. The goal would be to resurrect HotHouse elsewhere, at a still-to-be-determined date. “We’re looking for a space,” board President Linda Michaels said Sunday, while Baron Cohen’s ambient, heavily synthesized electronic music pulsed in the background. “But leaving here is bittersweet — it’s a beautiful space.” Not everyone believes it had to come to this. “It all could have been avoided, had these people [on the reconstituted board] resigned when we asked them to,” said Horberg, speaking by phone Sunday afternoon. Horberg had visited the room for the first time in about a year — to attend singer-pianist Yoko Noge’s farewell show — last week. “It was really wonderful in a lot of respects,” said Horberg, of the Noge soiree, “and quite upsetting in other regards.”

That same dichotomy defined the final night at the South Loop venue, for Baron Cohen’s spiritual music ennobled an otherwise funereal occasion. Though Baron Cohen cannot be considered a virtuoso as trumpeter or keyboardist, he’s a visionary in conceiving an innovative band. With ingenious use of samples from his laptop, Baron Cohen wove into the sonic fabric the cantorial chants of Hebraic liturgy, an ancient musical culture suddenly resonating in a jazz syntax.

Though the thick reverb eventually fatigued the ear, there was no denying the sensuousness of this music, which was presented by the Chicago-based KFAR Jewish Arts Center. Its director, Adam Davis, lamented the loss of this room. “Without a place like this,” said Davis, expressing a sentiment echoed by many small Chicago arts groups, “it’s very difficult for an organization like KFAR to present music.” Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Cantorial Remixes: Zohar @ HotHouse

Submitted by Avi Kramer on June 20, 2007 - 11:08am.Zohar is led by composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erran Baron Cohen, whose credits also include the popular Borat movie sountrack which starred his brother, Sacha. In an ironic turn of events, Baron Cohen was recently commissioned for a short symphonic work based on Kazakh folk melodies.

Zohar weaves together the beats and textures of modern club culture with hareem, hip-hop, electronica, dub and future grooves. It is a deconstruction of past, present and future, spanning Jewish Cantors, Arab Muezzins, Byzantine chants, meets today’s modern jazz and experimental musicians. Their approach is resolutely experimental and uncompromising with an instinctive feel for lush cinematic arrangements and intelligent melodies. Their acclaimed debut, One.Three.Seven, was produced by Miles Copeland’s Ark 21 label.

http://www.gapersblock.com/slowdown/archives/2006/10/29/#016631

By PAUL WIEDER

“Stir it up,” sang Bob Marley; the impetus to stir different sounds together affects all music. Ray Charles, as we are reminded in his recent movie, blended gospel and R&B. Bands like the Moody Blues and ELO merged rock and orchestral music. Klezmer is no exception, and it has already been combined with jazz, bluegrass, and reggae.

Two newer acts mingle klezmer with, respectively, techno and rock… and the Kfar Jewish Arts Center is bringing them to the Wild Hare as part of Chicago’s annual World Music Festival on Sept. 18.

Balkan Beat Box is an Israeli duo: Tamir Muskat, a rock drummer, and Ori Kaplan, a klezmer clarinetist. Their band’s music pulls from Israeli, Arabic, Roma (or “Gypsy”), Eastern European, and even Spanish sources. So on Balkan Beat Box’s upcoming debut release, there are lots of reedy horns, tangy strings, insistent and complicated percussion, and vocals both rapped and wailing.

They then overlay this expansive version of klezmer on a techno base. Techo is the rhythm-heavy, dance-party version of electronica, sort of the Internet Age response to disco. The result is a cross between 3 Mustaphas 3 and Moby, a big, happy, messy clangor–the carnival sound of an afterparty in a Ben-Yehuda Street nightclub, when only the musicians and their friends are left.

Meanwhile, Golem combines klezmer and rock. But it is a different kind of klezmer; BBB’s klezmer is that of the open market and cabaret, while Golem’s is a more familiar Yiddish strain, that of the wedding hall and Second Avenue stage. And while BBB adds Middle Eastern and electronic instruments, Golem stays with more traditional klezmer instrumentation.

What makes Golem a rock-and-roll band involves two other elements. One is their material; they find Yiddish songs that are less cheery, and less G-rated, than usual. And then they play their violins and accordions with a righteous fury that would make Keith Moon proud.

While it has the harsh passion of punk, Golem’s music has little of punk’s underlying idealism. Golem is, in fact, a garage band that happens to play klezmer. It revels in its stygian misery like Robert Johnson; it treasures its forlorn angst like Morrissey. If Courtney Love wants to appreciate Jewishness in her own language, she should walk right out of the Kabbalah Center and head to a Golem show.

Music was meant to be played. And as far as these bands are concerned, it was made to be played with. They engage klezmer, challenging it to evolve and grow… and thus pay it as much a tribute as those who keep it under glass.

Balkan Beat Box and Golem are being presented by Kfar Jewish Arts Center as part of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ 2005 Chicago World Music Festival. The concert is at the Wild Hare, 3530 N. Clark, on Sept. 18 at 8 p.m. Admission is $12. For tickets and more information, contact kfarcenter.org.

Posted: 9/9/2005