NYC Klezmer Band

Back Blip.
I went to an absolutely wonderful wedding celebration last night: a great friend from school ("J.") has just got married (yay!), and I was invited to celebrate at his wife's family's barn. A barn? Well, this is no ordinary barn, but an old threshing barn that has been converted into a venue for small, intimate concerts and events. It is a wonderful location, and the celebrations were special and very personal.

J's new wife ("S.") is a particularly talented pianist, and music was performed non-stop throughout the evening: when we arrived, some of S's musical friends had formed a string octet and were performing (mostly) Mendelssohn, a klezmer band then struck up (a "klezmer band"?! More anon.), and the evening then stretched out with a traditional folk group (violin, harp, guitar, and tambourine/percussion) playing music for a barn dance.

Sigh
It was all such fun, and it was lovely to see the newly betrothed (and everyone else for that matter) so happy, and to see friends from the old-days again.

Well, this picture is of the klezmer band: they're called the NYC Klezmer Band and they were absolutely amazing. Klezmer is a form of Eastern European folk music (mostly upbeat, rhythmic, and dancy); it has its roots in Ashkenazi Jewish and Balkan cultures. The band were very lively and it was incredibly hard not to tap one's feet (which made low-light photography more tricky...). The chap in the middle is sitting on a cajon, which is a percussion instrument which you play by drumming, slapping, or tapping your hands on the front surface. He could make a surprisingly diverse number of sounds, and could produce amazingly complex rhythms.