Between Odessa And Havana

The latest twist in David Buchbinder’s crossover career has him exploring the Afro-Cuban/Jewish connection.

David Buchbinder, third from right, with the “Odessa/Havana” band. “The nexus is medieval Spain,” he says. “That’s where you have the crossing of paths leading to Africa, to the New World and the rest of Europe. You even have Sephardic Jews turning up in Eastern Europe.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

You can’t plan a career like David Buchbinder’s. You don’t plan on dropping music when you’re in your teens, then picking it back up in your 20s and making a living as a trumpeter. You don’t plan on founding one of the first “New Klezmer” bands in Canada after hearing the music for the first time at age 25, and you certainly don’t plan on that band surviving for more than two decades. You don’t plan on playing with a salsa band in Germany (who would?), or having that band transform many years later, into an acclaimed album that merges Latin and Jewish rhythms into a seamless blend with bop and post-bop jazz.
That kind of stuff just happens.
Well, maybe not to you or

me, but it has happened to Buchbinder, the 48-year-old founder of the Flying Bulgars, and leader on the Tzadik album “Odessa/Havana.” This Sunday (June 8) at Drom, he celebrates the official release of “Odessa/Havana” with the New York premiere of the band from that recording.
Buchbinder certainly has the jazz pedigree, geographically at the very least. “I was born in Kansas City, but when I was 9 months old, my family moved to St. Louis, then in 1969 we moved to Toronto,” he relates. “Moving here [to Toronto, where he still lives] was a huge dislocation, and my music and participation in team sports ended for a while.”
His post-adolescent search took him to a kibbutz and then to university, but he remained unsatisfied until he realized that it was music that was calling him. At 20, he “put [his] head down and started to practice.”
But music by itself was only part of the artistic equation for Buchbinder.
“My parents were politically active and my brother [filmmaker Amnon Buchbinder] and I were exposed to a lot of cultural things that were going on,” he says. “In St. Louis, that meant the Black Artists Group, people like [pioneering free jazz players] Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill. My parents took us to ‘happenings’ and to concerts, and there was always an element of street theater in those performances. For me it has always been about the combination of music and spectacle in the street, about music as a participatory experience with the audience. I prefer it when there’s a feeling that we’re creating together.”
That vision of music-as-theater carried over when he was asked to serve as artistic director of the Ashkenaz Festival, a celebration of East European Jewish culture in Toronto, a position he held until 2001.
“I didn’t want it to be just another festival in which one band played a set, to be followed by another, and another,” he says. “I wanted it to be a mind-altering experience.”
By that time, he had already begun altering minds about klezmer with the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band (now playing as the Flying Bulgars), only the second “new klez” group in Canada (preceded by Finjan). Like many of the revivalists, Buchbinder had the modalities of Yiddish music in his bloodstream, put there by years of synagogue-going, but klezmer itself was a sort of lost continent that could only be explored through recordings. He listened to the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Kapelye and their contemporaries. And he had an epiphany while playing with a salsa band in Germany, suddenly connecting the Jewish modes to their distant Latino relations.
“The nexus is medieval Spain,” he asserts. “That’s where you have the crossing of paths leading to Africa, to the New World and to the rest of Europe. You even have Sephardic Jews turning up in Eastern Europe, where they must have communicated some of their musical heritage to the Ashkenazim.”
When he was asked to play the Jewish wedding of a friend of his brother, he pulled together a group of like-minded musicians, wrote down what he had heard on the new klezmer records and they let fly.
“We were learning the stuff as we were playing it, the hardest kind of on-the-job training you can imagine,” he says with a laugh. “But we were amazed by the intensity of people’s response to the music.”
In the meantime, Buchbinder was also pursuing a jazz career, studying with ex-Ellington trumpeter Freddie Stone who was another artist experimenting with open forms. In a roundabout way, that led him back to the thought that Afro-Cuban and Jewish music aren’t all that far apart.
“Odessa/Havana came out of that, from exploring new sources of compositional material,” he explains. “The whole Afro-Cuban/Jewish relationship was on my mind. The Bulgars experimented with it a few times in live gigs, but I realized I needed somebody from the other side because it’s such a heavy musical tradition. There’s no point for b.s.ing your way through it. [Cuban pianist-composer-arranger] Hilario Duran and I were both nominated for a JUNO [the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy], and we met and I was amazed by how flexible he was and how open to new things and how much fun he was to play with.”
Out of that budding friendship came “Odessa/Havana.” Duran has continued to advise Buchbinder on the developing project, although his own performance schedule has led him on to other things. Buchbinder happily credits Duran with a key role in making the project work.
“In a project like this, the big pitfall is having something that’s a misshapen combination of things,” he says. “The folk forms have great value in and of themselves. They’re very essential, a particular way of coming at something universal, some sonic truth, and they’re great raw material for something new, if you respect the essence of the tradition while finding something new to do with it.”
In the meantime, Buchbinder and the Bulgars have a new album in the works, featuring their first foray into English-language songs, and Buchbinder himself is stepping up his work with his jazz-cum-movement-arts group, Shurum Burum Jazz Circus. For now, though, “Odessa/Havana” occupies the front of his mind.
He couldn’t have planned it better. n
David Buchbinder will lead his Odessa/Havana band in its New York premiere on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Drom (85 Ave. A, between Fifth and Sixth streets). For information, visit www.dromnyc.com. The band’s CD, “Odessa/Havana,” is available on the Tzadik label.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization