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A thing for strings >>
DaZoque! send out musical postcards
“If you’re the kind of person who imagines things, strings can so easily play your imagination,” says violinist Minda Bernstein. “What we like to think is that we’re sending out these musical postcards, and each one is like a place we’ve been to in our minds.” It’s an apt description of the impressionistic, violin-powered music of DaZoque!, the band she shares with fellow stringster Norman Nawrocki (of Rhythm Activism and Bakunin’s Bum) and a shifting cast of players. DaZoque!’s music is familiar, but it eludes categorization. “You might call it neo-klezmer, or fable-esque or experimental klezmer. But you could equally call it neo-classical.” Bernstein and Nawrocki have been playing together in one form or another for a decade now, beginning with the Bagg Street Klezmer Band (which Bernstein still plays with). DaZoque! began, in Bernstein’s words, as a “house project,” and when the two went into the studio to record their recent self-titled debut, they invited a host of local musicians to take part—celllist Hélène Boissinot (Wetfish, Herri Kopter), bassist Alec McElecheran (Jamal’s Cool Head), and percussionists Harle Thomas (Bernstein’s hubby and fellow Bagg Street-er), Michael Boyce and David Sturton. “We just kept adding people. These are musicians we just had instant chemistry with, and we just had so much fun working with them on the record. Every moment was so fantastic, we just said, ‘Why don’t we stick together? Why don’t we keep it up?’” (The line-up has since shifted, with the addition of drummer Liu-Kong Ha.) Another key element of DaZoque!’s singular sound came out of those sessions, in the form of studio engineer Greg Smith. “On the CD he began working a little bit with loops and samples and things,” Bernstein recalls. While Smith’s sampladelic work is a subtle element of the CD, the group has since developed it as a key aspect of their live show. Bernstein describes Smith’s contribution as “sounds you’ve heard, familiar sounds, organic sounds—like weather, thunder and lightning. Or people or trains, or even fantastic music that he’s changed the speed of. So he takes these sounds and on stage he’ll manipulate them, speeding them and slowing them down, interweaving them and introducing all kinds of layers in the music.” Most
of DaZoque!’s compositions are original, but there are some exceptions.
Numbers like “Serb Bird” and “Romanian Raspberry”
are at least based on traditional tunes from the klezmer sphere. “We
then re-arrange them and bump them up and around and throw them and
knead them and toss them. No traditional person would say they’re
traditional. They’d recognize the melody, but we do some uncouth
things with them.” |
