Two grant awards announced in January by the Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council will support 2008 Isle of Klezbos and Eve Sicular/Metropolitan
Klezmer performance events in NYC, with funds from NYSCA and DCA:
and an original music/theater/FBI files piece by Metropolitan
Klezmer drummer/leader Eve Sicular & bandmates, based on 1940's
surveillance records of Eve's grandma.
The Fund for Creative Communitities, on behalf of LMCC and The New
York State Council on the Arts [NYSCA], is awarding grant support to
Isle of Klezbos' 10th annual KlezBiGay Pride show! This performance
will take place in El Sol Brilliante community garden on East 12th St
between Avenues A & B... on a June weeknight, date TBA. (This project
to be administered by Jews For Racial and Economic Justice.)
LMCC and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs [DCA] have
awarded a Manhattan Community Arts grant for Eve Sicular's project
entitled "J. Edgar Klezmer & Songs from my Grandmother's FBI Files."
This live music/theater/multimedia piece is to be based on documents
secured through a Freedom of Information Act disclosure of covert
intelligence compiled on the late community
activist/musician/psychiatrist Dr. Adele Sicular. It will premiere at
Dixon Place in late 2008.
Metropolitan Klezmer's *TRAVELING SHOW* - Year End Best lists!
Best of 2007 (five stars: top rating) - JEWISH WEEK, NYC
Review by George Robinson, also published in LA's JEWISH JOURNAL
Read review
More "Traveling Show" reviews recently published in:
All About Jazz (with link), Sing Out!, Curve Magazine, & Belgium's MazzMusikas
Click here for full text of these reviews & more!
Debra Kreisberg's original composition, "Baltic Blue" (from Metropolitan Klezmer's latest CD, TRAVELING SHOW) provided music for the Off Broadway debut of Yisrael Campbell's new show, You Can Never Be Too Jewish. The November staging at NYC's Theater at St Luke's was a preview of what is hoped will be a 2008 Off Broadway run:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/events/comedy/30749/you-can-never-be-too-jewish
Metropolitan Klezmer's Jewish Museum Family Day show is shown in the
NYTimes.com "Xmas for the Rest of Us" piece:
Read Article
Sicular culture by: Ben Morris
DAILY JEWS Your Kosher Cultural Fix
"Great Day on Eldridge Street" photo shoot of klezmer players from all over the place. The session was on October 12, 2007. Eve Sicular is in front on the left; on my left are mother and daughter Susan & Elaine Hoffman Watts, of Philly's klezmer dynasty.
For official photo, along with a podcast on the event visit:
www.forward.com/articles/11822/
Jewish Week article
Click image for larger view. Photo credit: Suzanne Schwimmer
Click here for more photos.
Isle of Klezbos at The KlezMORE festival in Vienna, Austria!!
Isle of Klezbos returned to play Vienna, Austria again for the KlezMORE festival, this year for the gala opening night at "Porgy & Bess" nightclub. Here we are after our encore backstage... the concert was a full house, hear our whole show at emap.fm
and see a quick video clip from the national "Hello Austria" broadcast.
KlezMore - Festival Vienna 2007
Click Here: Check out "GATEurope - nher an Europa"
Porgy & Bess nightclub, Vienna Austria, KlezMORE Festival (June 25, 2007 - gala opening night show!)
Isle of Klezbos in NYC's "The Villager" and on The L Word's spin-off "OurChart.com"
The Villager
Ourchart.com
Metropolitan Klezmer on National Radio (This Way Out) in June
In addition to The Style Network's "Whose Wedding is it Anyway," (episode premiering June 12th at 10PM), Metropolitan Klezmer will be featured on the nationally-syndicated radio program "This Way Out," during the music segment hosted by JD Doyle, featuring two tracks from our new "TRAVELING SHOW" and a quick sound-bite from Eve about this CD.
Metropolitan Klezmer quintet on The Style Network!
::: Tuesday 6/12, 10pm (re-airing through the week) :::
Including special guests Iliya Magalnyk on accordion & Oran Etkin on clarinet! MK was filmed at a Tribeca private party this April for the show "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?" - immortalized for reality TV.
We were signed on as special surprise music for the bride's dad, the teevee stuff only emerged later ... It's episode #609, entitled 'Lofty Expectations'
Metropolitan Klezmer has been chosen to perform as a part of the 92nd Street Y's 2007 - 2008 Musical Introduction Series, an acclaimed outreach program for public school students in New York City.
Metropolitan Klezmer's new CD, Traveling Show, has just been released April 4th!
This disc is a live concert recording on Rhythm Media Records (distributed by Stern's Music worldwide). The 19 full-length tunes also include a Klezbonus track, "Comes Love" by Isle of Klezbos.
From early reviews of 'Traveling Show' -- full reviews at CDBaby:
"OUTRAGEOUSLY FANTASTIC!! Metropolitan Klezmer has done it again! A fresh and exciting new klezmer album that needs to be in the collection of every klezmer music lover..." - Barry Reisman, WNWR Philadelphia
Hear it and buy it now 
Metropolitan Klezmer's "Farlangen" and an essay by Eve Sicuar are included in the latest issue of Scholar & Feminist Online from Barnard (volume 5, number 1), 'Jewish Women Changing America: Cross-Generational Conversations:' click here.
Metropolitan Klezmer track included on A Chanukah Feast Volume II
Last year the "hungry for music" folks in DC (they raise money to bring music into local classrooms) released a lovely Chanukah compilation. This year they've released a second volume, A Chanukah Feast Volume II, which includes "East(ern) Village Hanuka" from Metropolitan Klezmer.
More info at www.hungryformusic.org/
Saturday Sept 9, 2006 - Unison Arts & Learning Center
Klezbos played to a packed house at Unison Arts, all the more fun since power was only restored to the building minutes before this show began.
Read the article from Chronogram
Eve Sicular presents the Yiddish Celluloid Closet program for the Seattle Queer Film Festival
Sunday, October 22nd at 2pm, in the Seattle Public Library's Microsoft Auditorium
Central Library branch, 1000 Fourth Avenue, Seattle WA - free!
sponsored by the Three Dollar Bill Cinema
Learn more about Yiddish Celluloid Closet.
Paris Radio Live! Judaiques FM Interview to be broadcast later in 2006
Eve Sicular, Metropolitan Klezmer & Isle of Klezbos drummer/leader, was interviewed for Paris radio "Judaiques FM," Tuesday, May 16th by program host Lise Gutmann. Check back for broadcast and webcast date and times.
Royal Ballet experiments with Metropolitan Klezmer track at Covent Garden
A traditional klezmer piece from Metropolitan Klezmer's "Yiddish For Travelers" CD has been chosen as music to be included for a programme of new dance works at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London, UK:
On 7 & 9 March 2006 two workshops of experimental choreography staged by ROH2 at the Royal Opera House are this year's 'First Drafts' programmes. The sold-out performances included the new work-in-progress Two's Company (II) by Royal Ballet dancer Vanessa Fenton which is choreographed to the Metropolitan Klezmer instrumental entitled "Fifth Floor Khosidl." Ms Fenton, an acclaimed rising choreographer, was recently promoted to 'first artist' at the Royal Ballet.
The 'First Drafts' ballets range from first attempts by new choreographers to first sketches from The Royal Ballet's more established choreographers. These programmes are performed in the Clore Studio (seating capacity circa 160).
Adventures in Yiddishland with Isle of Klezbos
The new book Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacluar Language & Culture (University of California Press, 2005), by maven supreme Jeffrey Shandler, features Klezbos' favorite graphic, our 2001 postcard which later came to grace the band's "Greetings from the Isle of Klezbos" CD. The The author, who is a Rutgers professor of Jewish Studies, was also Eve's editor for her first research article on The Celluloid Closet of Yiddish Film when they both toiled in various aspects of the archives at YIVO Institute in the early/mid-1990s. To quote: "As members of Jewish subcultures, speakers of Yeshivish and those engaged in Queer Yiddishkeit seem poles apart; nevertheless, they have in common an approach to Yiddish that is distinctly postvernacular.... Queer Yiddishkeit contests established notions of what constitutes Yiddish culture and the nature of its transmission among its constituency."
More info: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10346.html
Eve Sicular's Yiddish Celluloid Closet research is also a key topic in Jeffrey Shandler's new article
"Queer Yiddishkeit: Practice and Theory"
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies - Volume 25, Number 1, Fall 2006, pp. 90-113
Purdue University Press
From The New York Jewish Week, Manhattan edition, October 14, 2005:
ISLE OF KLEZBOS --
Of all the pioneers of the recent klezmer revival sweeping the town, drummer and bandleader Eve Sicular is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating artists. Don't let her band's punny name fool you: The Klezbos musicians produce a high octane blend of world music, funk, reggae and zydeco, with an overarching klezemr sensibiility and an approach that makes Old World values hip again. No wonder, then, that Showtime's Lesbian-themed hit "The L Word" was quick to include the band's tunes in the soundtrack to the popular show. Sicular will be joined by trumpeter Pam Fleming, clarinet/sax player Debra Kreisberg, vocalist Debby Karpel, bassist Anna Milat-Meyer, and guest klezbian accordionist Art Bailey in a free evening of feel-good, funky music.
-The Buzz Arts Guide
Isle of Klezbos is featured in The Best of Pakn Treger issue, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the National Yiddish Book Center's astute and aesthetic quarterly magazine. The "Great Ears and Hearts" piece by Catherine Madsen, originally published after Isle of Klezbos' summer 2000 concert at NYBC, is reprinted with the band's latest color photo and an inset update for this Summer 2005/5765 edition. Isle of Klezbos has since returned to the Amherst MA venue twice more, and Metropolitan Klezmer is scheduled to perform there on Sunday afternoon, November 6th.
The solo theater piece SCORE, a portrayal of Leonard Bernstein produced in Spring 2005 at The New York Theatre Workshop, includes several Metropolitan Klezmer tracks from the bandŐs debut CD, "Yiddish For Travelers." The one-man show, starring Tom Nelis, adapts Bernstein's own writings and enacts his passionate glorious relationship to music. Three tracks from YFT have been featured in the show's variegated soundscape since its inception at the Wexner Center in Ohio in 2002, as part of depicting Bernstein's roots and family dynamic. The two-month Off-Broadway run at the renowned downtown NYTW stage (www.nytw.org) was the culmination of the playŐs performance history to date, and further venues are to be announced. For information on the history and future touring of this piece by Anne Bogart's acclaimed SITI Company, see www.siti.org
Isle of Klezbos recorded a special Klezbian version of the new theme song for Showtime's series The L Word, to be heard during two shows airing in early May! Season Two's music producer, Elizabeth Ziff of BETTY and ezgirlmusic, invited Isle of Klezbos to create a klezmer variation on the show's signature music, on the soundtrack during the second season, two versions in episode 11 & episode 12. We had had an extra-interesting and fun time meeting Ilene Chaiken, the show's creator and exec producer, who came to hear our recording studio session after she finished shooting in NYC this September. You will also find the Isle of Klezbos on this season's L Word Sessions soundtrack CD being released in mid-May on tommyboy records. On the Isle of Klezbos session were Debra Kreisberg/clarinet, Pam Fleming/trumpet, Eve Sicular/drums, Metropolitan Klezmer [guest klezbian] bassist Dave Hofstra, and Klezbian emerita Rachelle Garniez/accordion. Click here to get updates on the L word.
Isle of Klezbos was awarded a Fall 2004 grant by the Sparkplug Foundation for ongoing recording and performance projects, including the Yiddish Celluloid Closet joint venture with Metropolitan Klezmer.
From Debra Kreisberg, January 2005:
I have a little feature in an online zine called New Music Box, which comes out of the American Music Center. This month's issue explores klezmer and the ways that it has musically gone beyond its traditions. I was asked to write a statement about my experience, which is printed in the issue. Click here to read the article.
Metropolitan Klezmer's Surprising Finds is a 2004 Outmusic Awardwinner (OMA) for Outstanding New Recording - Instrumental (of course, the disc has plenty of vocals too, but they chose this category for nominating us this time!) Eve Sicular was also nominated for a 2004 OMA as Outstanding Producer for Greetings from the Isle of Klezbos (a category in which she won the 2002 award for Mosaic Persuasion.)
Metropolitan Klezmer tunes recorded live in October 2002 are featured on John Zorn's Tzadik label, in the From The Winery [fall 2004] compilation of performances from the klezmer brunch series at NYC's legendary downtown club, Tonic, curated by David Krakauer.
4 Stars!
So, Nu, You Wanna See a Movie?
UK Jewish Telegraph