Browse by Artist: BLACK OX ORKESTAR

Artist:	BLACK OX ORKESTAR
Title:	Ver Tanzt?
Label:	CONSTELLATION (CANADA)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	CST 029CD

"Black Ox Orkestar is a Montreal based quartet that formed in 1999 to play European Jewish folk music. Filtering traditional klezmer tunes through a sensibility shaped by indie rock and free jazz, Black Ox infuses these pieces with a highly original approach to arrangement, freely borrowing from Turkish, Balkan and Greek folk idioms along the way. The band strikes a perfect balance between faithfulness to sources and extrapolation from contemporary influences, offering a challenge (both musically and lyrically) to modern Jewish political orthodoxies along the way. Evenly split between instrumentals and vocal tunes, this debut album is a hypnotic blend of pieces pulled from various Eastern European songbooks as well as several original compositions. Lyrics are in Yiddish and speak forcefully about the bloody history and intractable contradictions of Jewish diaspora and return. The record is of appeal to anyone who appreciates melancholy, minor key melodics and folk music unburdened by antiseptic production and/or cheap sentimentality."

Artist:	BLACK OX ORKESTAR
Title:	Nisht Azoy
Label:	CONSTELLATION (CANADA)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	CST 038CD

"Picks up where 2004's Ver Tanzt left off -- more percussion, a harsher sound, songs of love and war that stretch out into extended sonic and lyrical explorations. We continue to raid Balkan, Central Asian, Arabic, Czech and other sources to give teeth to old Jewish songs, as well as composing new pieces, both hard-hitting and tender. We also explore the larger ensemble, gathering together everyone we know with a string or wind instrument to raise the folk ballad 'Tsvey Taybelakh' (Two Doves) up to the sky. On 'Golem,' a Black Ox original, we resurrect the medieval legend of an automaton fashioned out of clay whose single-minded mission to defend his community spirals into violence. In these days of separation walls and robotic drones, the Golem issues a stark warning from the past. Nisht Azoy is the melancholy and uncompromising sound of our mongrel music splitting at the seams, the boat creaking as we drag our friends on board for a trip to who knows where."

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