Alpen Klezmer: Zum Meer

For the past few years Andrea Pancur has been fusing her expertise in klezmer with her Bavarian roots and in doing so has created a new genre she terms ‘Alpen klezmer.’ It is oddly wonderful: her expressive singing in Yiddish and German is complemented by accordion, dulcimer, clarinet and yodeling from an impressive roster of musicians including Lorin Sklamberg, Alan Bern and Ilya Shneyveys.
Much of the material on this record is intensely moving, yet occasionally grimly unsettling. The ‘Mittelmeergalopp – Danse Macabre’ presents a thin veneer of frivolity to the casual listener while its lyrics reveal the horrific story of the thousands drowned in the sea fleeing conflicts; the grim story is relayed here in terms of a grotesque pleasure cruise where the sights are sinking dinghies. However, listening to the group sing for their lives on ‘A Treyfener Nign’ brought joyous tears to my eyes. The fact that this song was originally collected (as the ‘Dui Dui Yodler’) by the anti-Semitic Austrian politician, Josef Pommer, makes this a powerful, retrospective poke-in-the-eye. As they cross and re-cross the mountains between Munich and the Mediterranean, let's hope Pancur's band of itinerant klezmorim return soon for a third album.