Blender

September 2006

The Klezmatics "Wonder Wheel"

4 Stars (****)

New York six-piece celebrate their 20th year as a band, show that clarinets

can rock.

The Klezmatics have long been the most open-ended of the many bands reviving the clarinet-based Yiddish party music called Klezmer, reaching out to an Israeli pop diva, a gospel singer, Muslim mystics from the Tunisian outback. But here, interpreting a handful of the 3,000 lyrics folk godfather Woody Guthrie left behind when he died in 1967, their catholicity increases their accessibility. The Jewish-Okie connection is less peculiar than it seems-Guthrie spent his happiest years with a Jewish wife in the polyglot Brooklyn neighborhood celebrated in "Mermaid's Avenue" and would have plotzed to hear Lorin Sklamberg and company provide. Sklamberg's true tenor is equally gorgeous whether crooning a lullaby, serenading his Marjorie though beset by tribulations or promising to return home from a war as real now as it was in 1943. And praise Jag, he's singing in English!

- Robert Christgau