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Little
Princess: Reviews
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All About Jazz - New
York
June 2010
The Klezmer revival began in earnest in
the ‘80s when the repertoires of
clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave
Tarras were rediscovered by a new
generation of jazz, avant garde and folk
musicians. Instrumentalists, primarily
violinists and clarinetists, tried to
sound like these two giants while also
integrating other more rhythmically
complex musics. At one point the last
thing anyone needed was another version of
Brandwein’s “Firn Di Mekhutonim
Aheym”.
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Trad Magazine, France
Si cet album met à l’honneur
les compositions du célèbre
clarinettiste Naftule Brandwein
(1889-1963) icône de la musique
juive, c’est certainement aussi la
formidable prouesse de Tim Sparks que
d’avoir réussi avec une
guitare, une contrebasse (Greg Cohen) et
des percussions (Cyro Baptista) à
recréer les subtiles ambiances de
la musique klezmzer sans la clarinette.
Entre Pierre Bensusan et Stephan Grossman,
la guitare acoustique façon jazzy
se développe en arabesques
raffinées au sustain
remarqué. Le formidable guitariste
délaisse provisoirement le
fingerpicking pour s’adonner à
une musique métissée qui
glisse, klezmer oblige, en ambiances
grecque, turque, gitane,
brésilienne ou hispanisante aux
contre-chants de percussions hypnotiques
et d’une basse omniprésente,
ample et vindicative. Trio acoustique
avant tout qui défriche sur un
terrain novateur, la formule tourne au
brio quand chacun des musiciens
s’égarent et se retrouvent
magistralement au détour d’une
double-croche ou d’un silence
évocateur qui devient soupir.
Mélodies qui ravivent les
émois et les nostalgies nulles
autres pareilles de la musique juive qui
s’est encanaillée dans les
ghettos new-yorkais du Nouveau Monde.
Alain Hermanstadt
JazzReview
Guitarist extraordinaire Tim Spark
fuses a vibrant spin on traditional
klezmer music set down by the once
heralded “King of the klezmer
clarinet” Naftule Brandwein, who
performed in an Uncle Sam costume, garbed
in electric lights, largely within the
Lower East Side area of Manhattan back in
the early 1900s. Interestingly enough,
Sparks muses that Brandwein might have
been the original downtown artist, which
is a novel proposition due to the
City’s ‘80s and onward, radical
concoctions of jazz, Jewish music, rock
and other genres.
Sparks and the rhythm section design a
seamless blend of jazz, klezmer and even
bossa nova (“The Rebbe’s
Hasid”). The guitarist also injects
Spanish lines into the grand mix via his
fluent phrasings. It’s an airy
endeavor, as the rhythm section maintains
a solid but limber pulse, enabling Sparks
to improvise and invent over the top.
On “Nifty’s Freylekh,”
percussionist Cyro Baptista uses small
woodblock type implements to instill a
buoyant Latin groove, abetted by
Sparks’ breezy developments and brisk
single note runs. Yet it’s partly
about the musicians’ conveyance of
nuance, complemented by ferocious chops
that at times, can be somewhat understated
due to the all-acoustic format.
With keenly enacted dynamics, Sparks also
offsets the program by morphing blues-rock
riffs into the program, evidenced on
“Lebenzol Palestina.” The
guitarist also takes a few solo spots
where he dapples the klezmer element with
classical music stylizations. It’s a
lovely album, indeed. Sparks modernist
approach to the old wine historical
mindset yields bountiful rewards.
- JazzReview
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