The Jews Brothers at Katikati Folk Club
36 Main Road, Katikati, Bay of Plenty
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Katikati Folk Club is promising an evening of high class, toe tapping music at the final concert for 2019. Expect an evening of dazzling fingerpicking, rootsmusic magic and a lifetime’s stories and songs from the world’s musical highways, so be sure to come along. Rounding off a great year of live music at The Arts Junction Theatre, Friday, December 6. Don’t miss this visit by The Jews Brothers and Linn Lorkin.
The Jews Brothers
Twenty-five years ago, inspired by a klezmer tune playing in a Grey Lynn café, Hershal Herscher picked up his accordion and started playing the music his grandfather Harry had brought, along with his violin, to New York from the Ukraine. In no time at all a group of musos keen to play this ‘new-old’ music coalesced around him, adding mandolin, trumpet, tea-chest bass and percussion to the pumping accordion and creating a local sensation.
Thus was The Jews Brothers Band born, one of the most entertaining and original bands on the planet.
Before long they’d taken the genre right out on a limb with jazz-style improvisation and swing rhythms added to the mix and an emphasis on edgy vocal and instrumental harmonies.
The band’s repertoire morphed from traditional klezmer tunes to their own originals with the same vibe, many of these reflective of the fun and comedy schtick characteristic of New York’s Yiddish theatre music-comedy style.
The instrumental line-up changed too: mandolin became guitar, the featured horn became saxophone and the tea-chest bass was replaced by the more versatile double bass.
Their first national New Zealand tour took place in 1997 and since then they've played the world over, from the Faroe Islands to southern Spain, from Nuremberg to Chicago, on various folk, jazz and world-music festival stages.
Feathers in their cap were the prestigious North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands and the 20th anniversary WOMAD in Reading, UK where they caused a riot in a small tent that couldn’t fit all the people who wanted to see them and security had to be called!
Their hard-driving, irresistible rhythms have pulled many a bride and groom and their guests, Jewish or Gentile, on to the dance-floor and they’ve even played a knees-up at a pagan wedding on the English sea-shore.
Most recently the Jews Brothers Band was featured at the 2019 Auckland Folk Festival and at the 2019 Luminate Festival on Takaka Hill as part of a Marlborough tour.
The current line-up is two Jewish New Yorkers (Ashkenaz Hershalon accordion and Sephardic Nigel Gavin on guitar); Aaron Coddel, a New Zealander of Jewish-Maori descent on upright bass; and two Celtic-descended Kiwis: John Ellis (soprano, tenor saxes, percussion), and chanteuse and melodica player Linn Lorkin.
As it’s our Christmas concert, there will be festive treats available at half time. The venue is BYO.
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