The mad scientist of klezmer music.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

David Krakauer, a classically trained clarinetist with admitted jazz proclivities, took up klezmer music casually, almost as a hobby. Gradually, the lively and soulful Eastern European Jewish music became much more than that.

Today, along with his career as a contemporary classical chamber musician and teacher, he leads David Krakauer's Klezmer Madness!, a six-person, new wave klezmer band that will do two concerts next week in the Hult Center's Soreng Theatre.

Krakauer made two klezmer albums (`Rhythm and Jews" and "Jews With Horns') as a member of the Klezmatics, then two more for John Zorn's Tzadik label. He's now working on his fourth klezmer album for Label Bleu, a French jazz label.

If you want an introduction to what Klezmer Madness! sounds like, and what the music means to Krakauer, the group's third Label Bleu recording is an excellent starting point.

`Welcome to my city'

"David Krakauer Live in Krakow" was recorded over five nights in June 2003. The venue was a small cellar club right in the medieval heart of the Polish city, where Krakauer's family once lived, several generations back.

Along with Krakauer on clarinet and bass clarinet, the album features Socalled (beatbox and samples) Will Hols- houser (accordion), Nicki Parrott (bass and double bass), Sheryl Bailey (guitar) and Michael Sarin (drums).

When Janusz Makuch of Krakow's Indigo Club asked the Klezmer Madness! musicians to introduce themselves, the clarinetist said, "My name is Krakauer, and welcome to my city."

Krakauer's connection to Krakow as a performer goes back to 1992, when he played with the Klezmatics at the Jewish Cultural Festival. The festival is a major event for klezmer bands from the United States, Europe, Argentina and Canada. He's been back many times since, with his own band.

The 2003 Klezmer Madness! performances were not only recorded but also photographed - by French jazz photographer Guy Le Querrec - and filmed for DVD by Antonio Ferrera and Al Maysles.

Le Querrec's moody, black-and-white photographs from those sessions suggest that something really special was going down, and the recording confirms it.

The performance is not only energetic and rhythmically interesting, but also stirring at some deeper level. This is not museum music or cheap klez- ploitation.

Along with dynamite tracks that show what exciting things can happen when klezmer meets other genres (`Turntable Pounding," "Klezmer a la Bechet Remix" and "Alt.Klez- mer') the live album includes Krakauer's arrangements of traditional klezmer tunes and two slow, low, lovely numbers he wrote himself: "Love Song for Lemberg/Lvov" and "Offering Nign," a bass clarinet tribute to Krakow.

The live album, Krakauer says, "is a lot about my relationship to the people in that town," which is one hour from Au- schwitz and was "a nerve center of prewar Eastern European Jewish life." Krakow is an inspiring place to be, he says.

One can feel that inspiration, a sense of respect and identification with the music and the people, and it sets this album apart from some other new wave klezmer efforts.

Old music, modern beat

Krakauer gives much of the credit to Socalled, whose beatbox and deft electronic samples give Klezmer Madness! more rhythmic variety and emotional color.

"This is definitely a direction where the music is headed," Krakauer said in a telephone interview from New York City, where he teaches at the Mannes College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music.

"Klezmer is dance music at its root, so adding elements of hip-hop, house or techno puts it in dialogue with the sounds and rhythms that people are dancing to today."

Socalled is a Canadian musician, based in Montreal, whose own creations include "Hiphop Seder," Passover songs with modern dance beats.

Krakauer says that Socalled, with whom he is working on his fourth Label Bleu album, is "not just an electronics creator" but an accomplished musician who plays accordion, sings in Yiddish and is passionately interested in Jewish music.

Krakauer calls their creative collaboration "crossgenerational." He is 48, Socalled 28.

"His music works, and it's done in good taste," Krakauer says, adding that some new klezmer just does not work. "A lot of it is inane and in really bad taste. The goals are less than sincere, more commercial or silly or mocking the genre.

`I was struck by Socalled's tremendous sincerity. There's humor - he's not stuffy - but he's very sincere. And that's always been very important to me."

Krakauer says that taking any traditional art form and introducing new elements is "always this balancing act." But klezmer poses an unusually challenging problem because the tradition has been interrupted in three ways: by the Holocaust, by assimilation into the general culture and by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's suppression of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.

Since he picked up Jewish music, Krakauer says, he has tried to connect with, respect and protect the tradition, even while adding something new.

"That has always been my path," he says.

A life steeped in music

Krakauer grew up in a musical family. His late mother was a violinist, teacher and chamber musician, and his father is an amateur singer.

There was a lot of music in his family, most of it classical, but when he was 11 his classical teacher also introduced him to jazz through recordings by Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others.

In high school, Krakauer played with Anthony Coleman in a band that covered Jelly Roll Morton, Earl "Fatha" Hines and Thelonius Monk, as well as playing Coleman's own compositions.

"I've always been improvising, playing off the page, so to speak," Krakauer says. But he says overexposure to jazz masters gave him "a crisis of confidence" in himself as a jazz musician.

So he concentrated on classical music in college. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the Paris Conservatory before completing his master's degree at Juilliard.

But all along, he kept experimenting on the side and listening to all kinds of nonclassical music, including Turkish and Greek. Then, in the late '80s, he ran into people who were looking around for a klezmer clarinet player.

"I said I'd like to try," he recalls. After playing with a few klezmer groups, he joined the Klezmatics, with whom he would spend seven years.

"Things sort of took off from there," he says.

Krakauer still maintains a "very active" career as a contemporary classical chamber musician. He performed at the University of Oregon some years back as part of the ensemble Continuum, and he is featured on a recently released recording of Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Tempest" Fantasy.

Krakauer also has a commission in the works from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David del Tredici. He will perform this new piece with the Orion String Quartet.

Despite the crossover, he says has no trouble keeping that track of his performing career separate from his parallel life as an innovative klezmer musician. Sometimes, however, the two lines intersect.

The best example is Krakauer's collaboration with the Kronos Quartet on a 1996 Nonesuch recording of "The Dreams and Isaac the Blind" by Osvaldo Golijov.

"That piece is the most successful meeting of klezmer and contemporary classical," he says. "It's an absolute hands-down masterpiece.

`I'm very, very proud of that recording."

Paul Denison can be reached at 338-2323 or [e-mail].

CONCERT REVIEW

David Krakauer's Klezmer Madness!

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday

Where: Soreng Theatre, Hult Center, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

Tickets: $21 to $25 (students $15) through the Hult Center, 682-5000

Also: Krakauer will demonstrate and discuss klezmer music in a free presentation at 6:30 p.m. Monday at Temple Beth Israel, 2550 Portland St.

CAPTION(S):

David Krakauer is a classically trained clarinetist who divides his time playing chamber music and klezmer music.