THE MULTI-DIMENSIONAL WORLD OF THE CLARINET WITH KRAKAUER

THE CLARINET MEMORY

David Krakauer embarked on his journey through memory chasing the sound of his grandmother’s speech. He grew up within the cosmopolitan New York scene, efficiently skilled in performing classical repertoire and contemporary music. After spending ten years as a freelance musician in New York City he began to seek inspiration and new relevance for his own artistic endeavors through the music of his Eastern European Jewish cultural heritage. His years of playing free jazz as a teenager served him well as he started to make music “off the page” once again. 

From that moment on, the retrieval of the musical roots of the Jewish diaspora started to be one of Krakauer’s main artistic concerns. He began by studying 78 RPM recordings from the 1920s-50s of Eastern European Jewish master musicians to learn the klezmer style. During his numerous tours, he also had the opportunity to travel throughout Central and Eastern Europe, meeting many great folk and traditional musicians, exchanging experiences, listening to tales from the elders, learning phrasing and licks, with the aim of reconstructing again the sound of his talking clarinet that was springing from the bottom of his soul. It was as if he felt the need to speak with another voice able to express the story without words of the many exiles, the sorrow of separation and loss, but even the joy of unexpected family reunions.

In the middle of the Eighties, he joined the cultural movements that were staking the heritage out in a fundamental strive for identity and memory. He joined the Klezmatics in 1988. Then he went on that path, forming his own bands Klezmer Madness! and Ancestral Groove, firmly rooted in traditional klezmer folk tunes, but also determined to hurl that sound into the jazz-rock era.

In 2006, along with the rapper Socalled and the legendary funk trombonist Fred Wesley, Krakauer formed the new ensemble Abraham Inc., and started definitely to merge the klezmer melodic accents with hip hop and funk, while on the other side of the soundscape the powerful tone of his clarinet was joining the musical world of John Zorn’s Tzadik label. 

At the same time, many composers were writing art music thinking at the expressive possibilities of klezmer, in order to introduce, by the means of its sound, the huge load of meaning it brings along. Among many others, Osvaldo Golijov invited Krakauer to make the premiere recording of “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind” with the Kronos Quartet.

Today Krakauer is praised internationally as a key innovator in modern klezmer as well as a major voice in classical music. In the two-parts concert recorded during the Chigiana International Festival and Summer Academy 2018, he performed both with the pianist Lilya Zilberstein and a group of talented students from the strings masterclasses. We feature here the second part of that fruitful meeting on the stage, where he shifts from the modern repertoire (Reich’s New York Counterpoint, Golijov’s K’vakarat, Starer’s Rikudim) to the arrangements of traditional klezmer tunes (The wedding dance, Der Gasn Nign, Der Heyser Bulgar). He moves from the pure acoustic sound of his Synagogue wail to the use of electronic devices, giving his specific touch to each performance. That is how the multidimensional world of the clarinet appears before the listeners who attend Krakauer’s concerts. Each time, he gives to all of them the chance to travel along through imagined lands, tales of ancestors, future visions of freedom and respect, all conveyed through the memory of his clarinet.

Stefano Jacoviello

Download the original program in PDF (in Italian)

David Krakauer’s work has been recognized by major jazz publications around the world. He received a Grammy nomination as soloist with the conductorless chamber orchestra “A Far Cry”, received the Diapason D’Or in France for The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (Osvaldo Golijov and the Kronos Quartet/ Nonesuch) and the album of the year award in the jazz category for the Preis de Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for The Twelve Tribes (Label Bleu)

His wide array of projects, solo appearances, and multi-genre collaboration includes groups, composers and individual artists such Ancestral Groove, the WDR Big Band, Abraham Inc. (co-led with Fred Wesley and Socalled), the Emerson Quartet, Marin Alsop, Wlad Marhulets, Leonard Slatkin (Orchestre de Lyon), Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Quatuor Debussy, Mathew Rosenblum, JoAnn Falletta, the Borderland Foundation, George Tsontakis, Anakronic Electro Orkestra, Quatuor Habanera, and Kathleen Tagg (pianist and co-creator of Breath &Hammer)

As an esteemed educator, Krakauer is on the clarinet and chamber music faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, the Mannes College of Music (New School), The Bard Conservatory and NYU. He directed workshops at Carnegie Hall, and has been Regents Lecturer at UCLA. He has been teaching at the Accademia Chigiana since 2016.