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Artist
Black Ox Orkestar
12+ albums
klezmerfolkjewishexperimentalpost-rock
about
Black Ox Orkestar began in the summer of 2000, the project of four Montreal, Canada musicians exploring their common Jewish heritage for sounds that could speak to them today. Listening to pre-war recordings of Jewish and non-Jewish music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, they wanted to capture the rawness and emotional intensity they heard there. They also threw their own musical histories into the mix, their years of playing out-jazz, punk rock, or weird folk, creating not so much a fusion of old and new as a way to tear the old sounds from the past and make them resonate in the present. The band tried to be true to the strangeness and beauty of these archaic songs, translating them into new forms, and writing new material that continued an imaginary tradition still humming in their ears. They played their final show in 2005. On Yiddish The Yiddish language has always been at the center of the project. A unique mixture of German, Hebrew, and Slavic elements, it was the everyday speech of Eastern European Jews for centuries. The voice of the Jewish political and artistic radicalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries was uttered in Yiddish. Suffragettes, sweatshop activists, anarchists and modernist poets all participated in a global, cosmopolitan culture that followed the exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. This flowering of modern Yiddish was cut short by the Shoah and by the emergence of the state of Israel, which enshrined Hebrew as a national Jewish language. Yidd
