Veretski Pass & Joel Rubin's Open Secrets
The Peacock and the Sunflower
Here’s the thing: Authenticity is real.
Everyone loves to say the opposite these days- that of course authenticity isn’t real, everyone steals, nothing’s pure, etc.- but no one acts like it. Want to see a bunch of Germans (or anyone for that matter) dressed up as Hasids and jumping around and playing klezmer? Yeah, me neither.
In fact, we’re more committed to authenticity than ever. In my own little cultural holler, the younger generations of klezmer folks are trying soooo hard to get it right, in a way that feels different than previous generations. The same is true for lots of other cultural backwaters and indeed, for society at large.
The reason for this is obvious. Many of us have a nagging suspicion that we aren’t entirely real. And so we get as close as we can- by mastering the signs and symbols of the real.
This is not nothing! Immersing yourself in the sensibilities of another culture is a very valuable exercise in understanding how arbitrary and unreal your own “natural” attitudes and identities really are. It can change your life.
But it doesn’t exactly work. What makes you real is not you- it is others.
Veretski Pass’s latest album is The Peacock and the Sunflower. It’s their “Ukranian” album, as the liner notes explain: an “exploration of the centuries of musical interactions between Jews and Ukrainians.” It is aided greatly by the materials in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project. This is a huge treasure trove of sheet music that has only recently been made widely available.
In addition to this rich archive, the songs also contain original compositions and tunes extrapolated from the member’s own archives, including a field recording of a Skverer Hasid that Josh Horowitz did on a plane. All of the band members have done time in Eastern Europe and/or with old world informants. They all have connections, including familial, to Ukraine too. The music is, more than anything, simply beautiful; a luxurious, procession of rich resonant wood, hair and bones, bubbling in and out of each other, replete with history and complex personalities.
But there’s one aspect of their music that sticks out in particular.
In our music-making, which we view as a kind of “creative adoption” (to quote Beregovsky), we often will change or add new sections to a piece if it makes musical sense to us or if it seems like something is missing, or simply according to whimsy.
This is what separates VP&JR from the other ‘neo-ethnics’ of the last 50 years. They aren’t playing it exactly like it is on the record or the sheet music, nor are they giggling about some far-out klezmer-free jazz mash-up fusion. They represent an entirely different idea of authencity. An older idea. It seems to deliberately resist being codified into a commodity stamped “klezmer” that you can buy to get the real thing (they rarely use the word). And yet, it is the real thing, (as much as Josh might bristle at that), as it is reflected in the community of “others” that it evokes. It’s not a world of cliches or carictatures of 1880s Hasids or fire-breathing 1920s Yiddish anarchos. It’s a world of normal, everyday, sensitive and curious folks, ranging from elders who are no longer here to many of whom that, it just so happens, can also name three out of the four teenage mutant ninja turtles.
Authenticity is real, but it might not be what we thought it was.
Also, buy the album.