Pachora
Ast
Knitting Factory

Chava Alberstein
Yiddish Songs
Hemisphere

In the New York area, a loose-knit group of musicians have been exploring Eastern European music as a jumping off point for jazz and avant-garde experimentation. Ground zero for this has been The Knitting Factory, which has served as a venue and record producer for these young musicians, including the group Pachora.

While three of the four members are American-born and all work with other bands, Pachora is their venue for playing with sonorities and rhythms from Eastern Europe and the near East.

Although Pachora obviously has respect for its source material, and can sound like the house band at an opium den, the members are not slavish adherents to tradition. On the other hand, Pachora is not as aggressively 'out' or dissonant as some of the Knitting Factory regulars, though they share a penchant for pyrotechnics-filled jams.

Pachora's mercurial energy is too fleet and cerebral to prompt much dancing. Still, most of the tunes are spry, with Chris Speed's clarinet flying over the racing rhythms of the bass, drums and electrified Turkish lute called the saz.

Chava Alberstein isknown as the 'Joan Baez of Israel,' since the guitar-strumming singer has had a string of folk-like hits since the 1960s. But Alberstein was actually born in Poland and has been an archivist and advocate for Yiddish, the Jewish tongue that mixes Hebrew and Eastern European languages.

These 21 Yiddish Songs come from throughout her career. Alberstein sometimes sings with just her guitar, but most tunes have fuller, cabaret-like arrangements. A few echo klezmer, but the range is often wider. The liner notes do not include translated lyrics, but do explain what each of the songs is about. Some have a wry humor, some are lamentations, but all chronicle life among the shtetl Jews. Alberstein's slightly smoky alto is laden with emotion, and always has an echo of sadness to it, as if mindful of the decline of Yiddish culture of which she is singing.

Alberstein's 1998 collaboration with The Klezmatics, The Well, was a more fully realized work of Yiddish songs, but this collection still shows the richness half-buried in the Yiddish canon. - Marty Lipp