Allen Singer, San Diego Troubador, October 2009
This great gift of music is tied to Jewish folk songs and melded with the rhythms of all the places Jews have lived around the world where they have been touched by the local culture and music. The tunes are infused with a sound that I can only describe as Jewish blues/jazz, Roma (Gypsy) music, and all things Middle Eastern and pentatonic. It takes you on the road of the Jewish Diaspora with music local to each country along the route but unique in its heartfelt similarities and sounds. This is an exciting CD as well as an historic one. It introduces and extends the Klezmer themes and music into a European borsht-like mixture of many musical colors and sounds.
The CD iincludes a mélange of different musicians, starting with Yale Strom on violin and Hot Pstromi members Fred Benedetti on guitar, David Licht on percussion, Jeff Pekarek on bass, Sprocket Royer on bass, Elizabeth Schwartz providing soulful vocals, Tripp Sprague on saxophone, Norbert Stachel on saxophone/multi woodwinds, and Peter Stan on accordion.
The CD roams through 12 songs, each unique and each a musical piece of a musical puzzle that takes you through an exciting journey of Eastern European Jewish dance and folk music. Listening to this music filled me with many emotions, both joyous and sorrowful. This type of emotional reaction is something that seems to have disappeared recently as we listen to the music we are force fed by robotic radio and the odes played on American Idol. This CD touches your soul and your heart and never lets up. Yale Strom has created a CD that makes you want more, so you play it again, over and over, always finding new themes, new rhythms, and emotionally laden vocals with notes that shake your soul.
The CD sings to the six million lost, bringing them back to the rest of us still here who are alive and dancing to Bread with Borsht, Brothers. Indeed, Yale Strom has created a CD for everyone. Its melodies will make you move your feet, shed a tear, laugh out loud, and forever remember the songs of a people who wandered through many lands and mixed in the cultures they absorbed along the way. This is truly world music, culturally created in Eastern Europe, but cross-fertilized with sounds from as far away as Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, brought to life again in those long gone, ghost-inhabited Jewish communities that still exist in our DNA.
L'Chaim ("to Life!") to a treasury of culture and music that plays out on this wonderful, intelligent CD.
Scott Stevens of Spin the Globe in Olympia, WA
Yale Strom's brain should be designated a site of international cultural significance. Well, his brain and his violin-playing fingers, and possibly some other parts as well. Working in many media, Strom has worked to learn, preserve, and share Jewish and Rom music and culture from Eastern Europe. His latest works:
The CD Borsht with Bread, Brothers includes songs from Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Germany, Russia, Belarus, and Moldava. Picture yourself in a tavern full of sweaty men dancing to the vigorous "Svalava Kozatshok." Or get rebellious in an old-school sort or way to the anti-Czarist "Vemen Veln Mir Dinen, Brider (Whom Shall We Serve, Brothers)," with its brooding mood and seriously soulful vocals by Elizabeth Schwartz: "Whom shall we serve, brothers? / It's not good to serve the Russian Czar / Because he bathes in our blood." Well, no...that's not good. While the music stands on its own, the rich song notes (and lyrics and translations for those songs with words) give historic and cultural context -- in four languages!
Sing Out! Magazine
Much of the music now associated with the Klezmer revival is based on source recordings made by first generation immigrant musicians who arrived in the Americas in the early decades of the 20th Century and became recording and performing artists. Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras are probably the best known examples of those early Klezmer stars. However, violinist Yale Strom and his band Hot Pstromi have taken a different direction on this intense and riveting CD, playing tunes and songs Strom has collected from the largely unknown Jewish and Roma musicians he’s encountered on collecting trips to Eastern Europe since 1981. Jewish and Roma musicians often interacted with each other in the pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries, exchanging tunes, playing in each other’s bands, etc. and both Jewish and Roma traditions run through much of this CD. So, too, do the various regional musical styles from the different areas of Eastern Europe that these selections came from. And, of course, another factor at play here is the awesome virtuosity and versatility of the various musicians in Hot Pstromi: guitarist Fred Benedetti; David Licht, a former Klezmatic, on percussion; bassists Jeff Pekarek and Sprocket Royer; reed players Tripp Sprague and Norbert Stachel; accordionist Peter Stan; and vocalist Elizabeth Schwartz.
Picking favourite tracks from the dozen here is almost impossible, but I’ll call special attention to “Stole A Kakos Mar,” a Hasidic song from Hungary sung in Hungarian and Hebrew, with a vocal performance from Schwartz and perfect accompaniment from the band, that almost reminds me of Edith Piaf at her best. Another that must be singled out is “Vemen Veln Mir Dinen, Brider,” a Yiddish protest song that laments being forced to serve in the czar’s army.
This is a very special Klezmer album.
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