Thanks to the son of a Lutheran minister, the traditional Yiddish melodies of “Hava Negillah” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn” will never be the same. They will undergo a gutsy and crisp Afro-Cuban metamorphosis when Ted Kuster’s klezmer-salsa band, Meshuggenismo!, bounds onto the stage at To Life! Street Festival.
“I’ve been a salsa player since college,” said Kuster, a bassist, who grew up as a missionary child in South America. “But I always wanted to get a gig in a klezmer band. I just never got a chance. I had to limit myself to one thing as a musician. I’m a big klezmer fan.”
Kuster’s big klezmer-salsa break, however, came about three or four years ago when he was doing some arrangements for a local Latin jazz band. The rabbi at Congregation Ner Tamid in San Francisco, Moshe Levin, sought to hire the band for a synagogue function.
“I think Rabbi Levin wanted to liven things up,” said Kuster, who has a day job as a technical writer for a software company. “In passing he said to me, ‘Do you do any Jewish music?’ I said, ‘Of course not. But I’ll try some.’ So I did an arrangement of ‘Hava Negillah.’ And it rocked. They wanted to hear some more.”
So Meshuggenismo! was born. The band’s name is a play on Cubanismo, Kuster explained, the name of a popular Cuban band that performs modernized versions of Latin-Cuban classics.
“We do twists on traditional Jewish melodies from an Afro-Cuban perspective,” said Kuster. “Meshugginah, of course, means crazy, controlled chaos, wacky. And we don’t want to be taken too seriously. I’m deadly serious as a musician, but we like to mix the music around and have fun.”
Fun and craftsmanship are the operative words, according to most who have heard the band’s music at the occasional wedding, bar or bat mitzvah reception, or on independent radio.
Most of the glowing reviews garnered by Meshuggenismo!, Kuster said, have come in the last two years since the band hired its first Jewish musician, vocalist Staci Rose.
Rose is a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Portland, Ore., who grew up in an Orthodox-Conservative Jewish home and was the third girl to have a bat mitzvah at her synagogue. She answered Kuster’s ad on craigslist and then wowed the band during her audition.
“Jewish culture has always been a part of my life,” said Rose, a jazz and blues singer with a background in visual arts. “Being with Meshuggenismo! has worked out well and it’s been a lot of fun. They are great people to work with. My first reaction to klezmer-salsa music was technical. The rhythms were a little different at first and it was difficult to get used to it.”
Rose persevered and has easily hit her stride with klezmer-salsa music. But some people have complained that Meshuggenismo! is not authentic or true to any one musical tradition.
“I hate it when purists say ‘You can’t do that,'” Kuster said. “Both musical styles, Jewish and Cuban, are mongrels. That’s what they have in common.”
Another similarity between the musical styles, Kuster said, is that Meshuggenismo!, true to its Yiddish-Latin-Cuban performing roots, is basically a nightclub band. But they are more than willing to abandon their day jobs once they make their headlining appearance on the main stage at To Life!
As the band’s first-ever outdoor concert, (scheduled just after the Jewish American Idol Contest), the To Life! concert could be the start of a new phase for the band.
“The whole experience has been incredible,” said Kuster of his group’s career thus far. “But we don’t play [live shows] very much.”
Once the crowd starts to shake, rattle and roll to the band’s pulsating rhythms, that may change and the band may be very busy musically for a long time to come.