photo by Asli Alin
Tattered stamps and postmarks from disparate east European locales. Barely legible scribblings from anonymous correspondents of yesteryear. An old-country wedding band of mustachioed men in bowlers crowding around a long-gone shtetl cottage, their instruments held with pride. A serious little Polish-Jewish boy learning to play the violin… these images on the cover of Beyond the Pale‘s Postcards (Borealis Records; July 14, 2009) capture lost moments of a once vibrant Eastern European musical world, as much a historical memory as a mythical ideal.
But this innovative Toronto-based acoustic group seeks to do more than simply put the pieces back together. They reframe this vanished world on Postcards, re-forging fragments into a distinct Jewish-Balkan twang that flows from virtuoso musicianship, group improvisations, new compositions, and an eclectic palette of North American sounds, from jazz and rock to bluegrass and funk. Live music fans can catch their approach this June in New York, Amherst, Princeton, and Montreal, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on June 15, 2009.
“Our music coalesces around a kind of amorphous and scrambled geography” explains Eric Stein, group founder and mandolin maestro. “Each song is like a snapshot, a postcard from one or another of the far-flung realms in our eclectic musical universe.”
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