From Serbia
to Senegal

>> Frank London on his trans-genre travels

by MARK SLUTSKY

Trumpeter Frank London has done, it seems, just about everything. He’s written film scores and folk operas, collaborated with John Zorn and David Byrne, recorded with the Ben Folds Five, Itzhak Perlman and They Might Be Giants, not to mention his own bands, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, the Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave. Most recently, London’s been engaged in the sort of trans-genre experimentation that is his specialty. There’s the Allstars’ amazing new album, Brotherhood of Brass, a collaboration with the Serbian Boban Markovic Orkestar and the Egyptian Hasaballa Brass Band, which fuses Jewish, Serbian and Middle-Eastern melodies and music. In a similar vein but with a different approach is From the Belly of Abraham, a Hasidic New Wave project with Senegalese percussionists Yakar Rhythms, which he’s bringing to the Jazz Fest. London spoke to the Mirror from Krakow, Poland.

Mirror: I understand you’ll be playing with the Senegalese band, Yakar Rhythms, at the Jazz Fest. What’s going on there?
Frank London: This is a project which we did last year, a recording called From the Belly of Abraham. The Senegalese group is what they call a sabar ensemble, which is a very particular sort of percussion ensemble, in the literal sense of particular. It’s not just your general Senegalese drumming. It’s a certain tradition, with certain rhythms, certain instruments that are used with sabar, certain ways of playing together, a certain vocabulary.

M: Did you choose sabar because you felt it had some sort of affinity with Jewish music? Or did you just like it and want to see if they would fit together?
FL: The extra-curricular answer is that it’s a lot of fun. They’re great guys and it’s wonderful, politically, at this horrible moment, to be doing projects which are clearly Jewish and Islamic together. But the truth is, it’s not that we wanted to see if it would work, because at a certain point you always find a way to make something work. No, there’s not commonalities, it’s not like the Brotherhood of Brass, where you’re sitting there showing each other what’s similar and what’s different.

M: I noticed that a Montreal musician, So Called, did a bonus klezmer remix on the Brotherhood of Brass album.
FL: He’s great. He’s totally coming into his own. What I like is that even for his age--he’s pretty young--he’s got a lot of knowledge. So even when he sits there doing the cutting up, like he did for us, he understands where the rhythms are coming from. I knew I could let him deal with it, because he’s not going to just go [mimics generic beat], you know what I’m saying? He has more of a sophisticated understanding of where he’s coming from. Hopefully it’s more like a harbinger of things to come, where we do more stuff like that.

Ironic or Masonic?
M: I have a question about the liner notes to Brotherhood of Brass, which are very historically dense and complexly written, with references to sultans, trade guilds, the Masons, the IMF, the tower of Babel and the ancient fellowship of brass players everywhere--
FL: (laughing) The references are all real. I won’t go much further than that, but the references are all real.

M: Could you sum up in your own words, for the benefit of our readers who are maybe not as esoterically educated, what the central thesis is?
FL: I guess what the liner notes do is try to make a serious point through a joke. I’m trying to reference a genre that I love, conspiracy-theory kind of stuff. You know, like all the stuff about the Illuminati. Have you read the Illuminatus! trilogy? You know how the Illuminatus! trilogy is insane, yet a lot of the Masonic history that he quotes is true?

M: It’s like a Borges story where you don’t know which references are real or not. There are certain things that seem more real than others.
FL: Well, that’s the point I’m trying to float out. To pull things together that really don’t have a connection. Then you pretend they do have a connection, and then you write it and realize that it’s almost plausible. It almost could be true.

M: One question I have to ask--I saw on your bio that you worked with LL Cool J, and I wanted to know what the story was behind that?
FL: The story is very simple. I’m a trumpeter, I get gigs, and I don’t know if you remember the song “Going Back to Cali”? Well, that’s me doing the trumpet solo. :

At the Carrefour General Motors (President-Kennedy at Jeanne-Mance)
on Sunday, July 7, 9pm, free

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