Rhythm guitarist Eliot Kenin and his Simcha Orchestra love to perform standards from the traditional klezmer repertoire. They just don’t always take the traditional approach.
The song “Asher Boro” they set to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” They put “Od Yishama” to the tune of “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Considering Kenin reveres early jazz as much as he does klezmer, mashups like these should come as no surprise.
The Simcha Orchestra will play on Sunday, June 12 at this year’s Berkeley World Music Festival, which takes place over the weekend at various venues along Telegraph Avenue downtown. The free, mostly outdoor festival brings together bands playing everything from Celtic, to bluegrass, to Sufi music from Pakistan. The festival runs from noon to 9 p.m. Saturday, June 11 and Sunday, June 12.
Also in the mix among nearly two dozen groups is Ghost Note Ensemble, playing Balkan and Jewish folk music from noon to 1:30 p.m. June 12 at 2475 Telegraph Ave.
Kenin, along with fiddler Ray Landsberg, clarinetist Joe Sosensky and percussionist Jim Millstead, will play from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., near the corner of Telegraph and Dwight Way.
Just because Kenin enjoys an occasional touch of musical mischief doesn’t mean he takes the music lightly. He remembers seeing old-school klezmer ensembles, called freilach bands in those days, when he was a kid in Philadelphia. He also attended Yiddish language school (then known as kindershules) and sang in a Yiddish youth choir.
He’s got the Yiddish thing down.
“It’s especially through the music that I connect to my Jewish roots,” says Kenin, 77, of Martinez. “Going back to high school, when I first started performing, many of the songs I did were in Yiddish or Hebrew, and I never stopped.”
Other than what he calls “an ill-considered attempt to go straight” by working as a biologist for a time, Kenin has been a professional musician his entire working life.
In addition to Jewish music, Kenin also played jazz, especially the early style jazz of King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke and other New Orleans pioneers. Years ago, he founded two other bands, the Spirit of ’29 and the Reinhardt Swing Band, which specializes in the style of French guitar master Django Reinhardt.
But his klezmer and Jewish roots go deeper.
In the late 1960s, Kenin met the late Shlomo Carlebach, whose blend of traditional Orthodox practice and New Age mysticism ushered in a wave of new Jewish music. Kenin was often an accompanist for Carlebach in the years that followed.
“There are lots of good and bad stories about him,” Kenin says, “but I only know the good ones. As a spiritual leader, he had it. He would play the same damn tune for half an hour until everybody got up and danced. He was everybody’s friend, and I have the highest regard for him.”
Kenin founded the Simcha Orchestra in 1975, a year after moving to the Bay Area from his native East Coast. Among the musicians he befriended in those days were progenitors of the klezmer revival, including Berkeley’s Lev Liberman of Klezmorim, a band Kenin played with as well.
His musical tastes are diverse, but Kenin says a thread runs through the early jazz of New Orleans, the Roma-influenced style of Django Reinhardt, and the locomotive power of klezmer. Beyond any harmonic minor scales or mixolydian modes, the music makes you want to get up and dance.
And that’s what Kenin hopes festivalgoers will do when they see the Simcha Orchestra perform. One thing they should not expect is to see Kenin pull off any fancy Django Reinhardt-like lead guitar licks.
“I play backup guitar,” he says. “I can’t play a lead line to safe my life.”
Simcha Orchestra plays 1:30 p.m. Sunday, June 12 at the Berkeley World Music Festival on Telegraph Ave. in central Berkeley. Free. www.berkeleyworldmusic.org